a few months ago (actually at the exact time i was bringing carly home) i got an email from an old acquaintance and the subject line was “do you want an irish wolfhound?” if you want me to pay attention to an email that’s a great subject line to use, by the way. oddly, though, dave & i were a bit overwhelmed with the thought of adding carly, which took our number to an all-time high of 15, and actually i didn’t particularly want an irish wolfhound. i mean i’ll always take an irish wolfhound, or any dog for that matter, but in real world time if i was to give an honest answer it would be “no.” the story was that they had a 2-year-old male wolfhound who they felt was not getting what he needed in their household and they wanted to do the right thing and rehome him...the catch was that he was not neutered. that was the point at which i thought we have to take this dog. dave & i went round and round – after all i was leaving to pick carly up in a few days and we already had 14 dogs... but there was an unneutered wolfhound that needed a new home (which in the wrong hands could mean more unwanted wolfhounds in shelters in the future). we settled on telling them we’d take dooley, get him neutered and if he fit in here he could stay, otherwise i’d find him a great home. plans were made for them to drive dooley down from cincinnati a few weeks later.
of course, carly came home and was a complete lunatic, peeing and chewing and whatnot, and now we were completely overwhelmed and dreading a bit the arrival of another dog. circumstances outside of our control solved that and dooley’s arrival was postponed.
jump forward several weeks and carly had settled in and gotten housebroken and we were back to feeling the right amount of whelmed. here are my thoughts on whelmed: if overwhelmed is too much and underwhelmed is too little then shouldn’t whelmed be the perfect amount of , well, whelm? why when i look up whelmed in the dictionary does it say “to overwhelm” – that just doesn’t seem right, does it? but again i digress...it was at this time that dooley’s family contacted us again and we arranged to meet them a few weekends ago.
so all this to say, please welcome dooley (not really a colella name but we’ll work with it) into the colella fold. he’s fitting in great, although he’s a bit overwhelmed (there it is again) and nervous – can you imagine being an only dog in a family and then getting dropped in this loony bin???? he’s clearly getting more comfortable every day and he’s a fantastic guy, all 150 lbs of him. bless his heart (i’m adopting an old southern tradition here) but he doesn’t seem to know he outweighs everyone by at least 50 lbs...he’s too sweet for his own good.
note: the colella household is officially closed at 16...closed! it’s a pretty fun 16 though. i’m hoping to have some much needed time over the break to edit some video and get a little more regular with posting.
happy holidays to everyone!
