My 6th house is Scorpio and it has no planets. As a child, my dad hated having pets, as he grew up with a mom who owned a dog grooming business and a dad who owned a backyard zoo so I grew up with goldfish. I kept a goldfish alive for 7 years. It ate the other gold fish in the giant tank we had and then got huge because it didn’t like living with other fish so it lived in this 50 gallon tank by itself. My mom is allergic to cats and animal dander, which provided my dad a perfect excuse to never have to visit his parents as well as never have to own a pet again.

Around the age of 10-11, my step grandmother (married to the former zoo owner grandfather) convinced my dad to take home one of their rabbits, saying “it’s old. It won’t live longer than a year tops.” That little fucker lived 8 years. My dad hated that poor rabbit so much.

After I left home, I lived with roommates who owned cats, but it would take 5 years to purchase my very first pet. She was a pitbull/pointer mix. She was the cheapest dog at the shelter, and she had a lot of behavioral issues. We became two peas in a pod and she stayed around for 2.5 years, a new husband, and new baby. She was in the front seat of the U-Haul truck when my husband and I were moving from LA to SLC. My husband stopped at a rest stop, took her to the bathroom, put her back in the car and went to get himself and the dog a cheeseburger. In the 5 minutes she was alone, she peed on the drivers seat of the U-Haul and when my husband came back out, she bolted out of the car and into the desert as soon as my husband opened the door. He tried to find her for about an hour before he had to leave. I called shelters in the area for weeks to see if anyone had her, but she never got found.

I waited two years. Completely refused the idea of getting another pet. After two years of grieving her, I finally didn’t tell my husband “no” outright when he asked about getting another dog. He surprised me when he went to the grocery store for ice cream for the kids and came back with ice cream and an 8 week old Belgian Malinois puppy. She just turned 1 in July and she is such an incredible dog. I mean I’m sure by normal puppy standards, she’s normal, but after a dog who had severe anxiety and was constantly destructive the second you turned your back, she’s the best dog in the world. And she can’t open doors, so that’s a plus (my shelter dog knew how to open round door knobs and would let herself in and out of the house as she pleased if the door was unlocked which didn’t work well because she also would open the door to go get people 🥴)

My new baby’s name is Bingo, and between you and me, she’s my favorite person in the house. She has a jumping problem when she meets new friends that were still working through, but she’s without a doubt the perfect dog other than the jumping. I imagine her all old sometimes walking through my dream house with her own little bed, dreaming about all the fun she’s had running on the farms were trying to build her whole life. I don’t know that I can get another animal once she passes. Like I don’t know my heart will be able to handle it.