Well, here’s another thing I never thought I’d say- WE GOT A PUPPY!! Here’s the story (Sorry, it’s long!):

For a couple of years now Eric and I have been going back and forth about getting a dog. Most of you that know me well know that I have had a long- very long- list of reasons why I don’t like dogs. BUT, practically everyone in Austin has a dog, so lately I’ve been thinking “it must be great if so many people have one.” Now, Eric had pretty much given up on the idea because I was so against it, so last Friday when I brought up the idea again, he was hesitant. After talking to my friend Emily and getting a rundown of the basic costs of a dog and searching the newspapers for puppy ads, I presented the idea to Eric after work. After about a minute of convincing, he agreed! We recruited Nick and Emily to help because they have two labs (the kind we wanted to get) and have experience picking out puppies because they just got one themselves. We went and saw one pup, but she wasn’t THE ONE. Nick called around for a while and finally we found an ad that sounded good. The lady had 19 puppies(!) so we felt that ours would be there for sure. We started out for her house at about 8:00 p.m. and joked that this was how the story always goes: a group of friends start off on an adventure that turns into their worst nightmare! “Guys, that’s not funny,” I said.

The directions were sum what vague: “from the highway turn left at the mobile,” “cross the red cattle guard,” “go through the tunnel,” but we were excited. I was driving (in my tiny honda, of course) and was the first to get nervous. I think it hit me when we turned left at the mobile station. “What are we doing out here in the middle of nowhere, no one knows where we are or where we are going?” I think the others in the car started to catch on that I was actually a little worried, so of course they had to make it worse! Up ahead in the pitch-black road there was something glowing in the sky. It turned out to be crane working at some kind of mill, but my car mates liked hypothesizing that it was a UFO as we got closer.

“At the road where there is a sign for a church but no church” we turned left again onto a dirt road. It was at this time that someone in the car, I think it was Nick, mentioned that they never caught the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy. Great, as if I wasn’t freaked out enough already. Up until this time I was 49% scared and 51% playing the part, but once we turned on the dirt road I think those numbers flipped. When we came to the first cattle grate, we must have made a wrong turn because we went right into someone’s driveway. We called the puppy lady and were told that we were at her mother-in-laws house. The mother-in-law came out of her house at that moment wearing a nightgown and talking into a radio. She came up to the car and told us how to get to where we were going. I think at this moment Emily started to get a little scared too, but didn’t actually say it until we were back on the road, past the red cattle grate, through the tunnel (”there’re no tunnels in Texas,” we thought) and heading down another road where the trees grew over it. Of course, all this time the peanut gallery in the back kept mentioning the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As we finally pulled up to the house, it became really obvious how rural we were. VERY stereotypical hick-Texas. When we saw about 10 trucks broken down in the front yard, Nick and Emily both said that this was exactly like the Massacre, not really joking anymore. We all hesitantly got out of the car when we reached the house and were at ease when we met the puppy lady, because she was actually very nice. She showed us the two older puppies she had, and it sunk in for me that we were getting a dog! I was way too anxious to pay attention to either of them, so I didn’t even notice the garage that the lady took us in so we could view the puppies. Emily swears now that she saw human teeth on the ground, but I was too nauseas about getting a dog to notice. After Eric picked which one he wanted, we went inside to do the paperwork. The house looked like a typical farm/ranch house, especially all the animal heads on the wall in “the room of death,” as we called it. The puppy lady went around to practically every stuffed animal and told us how it was killed, where the bullet went in etc. She had three huge boar’s heads on the wall and warned us that they will run out into the road and get hit all of the time. Every animal on her wall was killed on their property- Boar, Deer and Bobcats.

I think at about that time we were all ready to get back to Austin, so we picked up our pup and got back in the car. As we drove away from the farm, I thought “what just happened?! Did we just step into some kind of time warp?” The fact that the lady said words like “hither” made it only weirder. The drive home was smooth, although in addition to deer I had to look out for boar. The puppy slept most of the way, and the four of us laughed about the experience and itched all the way home (the farm and the animals were covered in ticks! Ewww)

Even now thinking about it I can’t believe what we saw. Just an hour outside of the city is a completely different world. Emily and Nick are born-and-raised Texans, and they had never experienced anything like it either!

Luckily, the ticks are all gone and so is my anxiousness about having a dog. She is the cutest thing and it is amazing having something depend on you so much. All Eric and I need to do now is watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre to see how close we actually got. :)