Hello. Goodbye.

On Saturday afternoon my wife and I took home a little 8-week-old puppy from the humane society. As you can tell from the pictures above she is absolutely adorable. Our good friends Martin and Jani came with us to help pick her out. Of course we thought long and hard about a name, but in the end we chose Macy. Our decision on that name was cemented when we learned that it meant "little girl" in Africaans, Martin's and Jani's first language.

But only a few short hours after we took her home Macy became ill. At first we thought she was simply having trouble adjusting to her new environment or that she may not have been properly weaned from her mother. However, we learned the next day that she had all the symptoms for a canine virus known as Parvo. Although it is treatable, it is very expensive, very evasive, and a very painful and traumatic process for the pup to go through.

When we visited the vet today and it was confirmed that she had indeed contracted Parvo sometime before we adopted her we decided that it was definitely in Macy's best interest to go ahead and put her to rest.

While she was just a dog, it is still very hard to let go of something you become attached to. And while there was nothing we could have done to prevent this fate, it is difficult to not feel responsible for what happened to her.

There is a very big reason why Amy and I choose to adopt pets from the humane society, and it's this: Macy's tail wagging back and forth right up to her very end because she knew somebody loved her and cared for her. That is reason enough, and reward enough to go back and try again.