Tax reurn=fence=dog? Unicorn taking flight!

When Brian and I were house shopping, my sister was positively insistent that we consider the school district of the house we were buying. Brian and I are not parents, and we don't plan on having kids for a couple of years. So the idea of having to find a house in a good school district didn't seem so important. Say we had a kid in three years from now. Kids don't start kindergarden until they are five, so that would be eight full years from now. Who knew if we'd even be living in the house we chose in eight years?

At first Brian and I resisted - on our first day out we'd seen some lovely houses in New Rochelle that turned out to be zoned for a terrible school, and I mean really terrible. If we had to consider school district, those houses were out along with a bunch of others on our list. The whole idea seemed so bizarre, that we had to consider these non-existent mythical future creatures (which I had now taken to calling unicorns for their mythic status) when house shopping. But the more we thought about it, the more sense it did actually make. After all, it's much harder to sell a house in a bad school district. For that reason alone it was worth it to try.

Another thing that I looked at when we were house shopping was backyards and their dog worthiness. I commented on it so much the first day that our real estate agent asked what kind of dog we had. But our dog too, was just a hypothetical. So we were looking for a house that had a good school for our unicorn children and a good backyard for our unicorn dog. And we found said house, in a school district so good they apparently teach them foreign language in elementary school! And our backyard is the biggest backyard imaginable, like, so big you could build an addition, then put in a pool, and still have room for your unicorn dog and your unicorn children to run around in.

Ok, so moving on. We just found that the government is going to be kind to us this year and we will get a bit of a refund. More than a bit really, enough so that I think we may be able to afford to fence in our beautiful enormous yard. Which is a fabulous thing, because we've really been wanting to get a doggie now for a while, and thought we might have to put up like a zip line thingy for the dog to run on from his leash, since we couldn't afford a fence. But now, if we get a fence, then our unicorn doggie can fully materialize into an actual real life doggie and run free and happy in our wonderful yard.

Needless to say, I am excited. We are going to get a pound doggie, so we're assuming it will be a mutt, but mutts are cool. If it was pure breed, some of our faves are chocolate labs and shiba inus (but how many shiba inus show up at the pound?). Some other mixes that I wouldn't mind getting into a dog are a sheltie, australian cattle dog, and many other lovely combinations of doggie. So I'll keep you updated.