On getting close

I almost included this in the fence post (ha! I pun!), but that was getting too long, so I broke it out to its own entry. I think a lot of this obsessing (five feet? five and a half?) comes from the face that the longer you think about something, the more idealized it becomes. Like little kids and christmas. We've been working slowly towards this dog since before we were married. Now that we're actually getting close, it feels like everything needs to be perfect, since we took so long getting there. It doesn't help that in reading on the internet pretty much falls into two camps: 'I'm lazy and ignorant and have no idea why my outside-only untrained dog smells bad and barks' and 'I run a dog-related business from my home. Anyone worthy of a dog should be at least as perfect as me. Preferably a little more.' (ok, maybe that last part is only implied) So I get these Ideas in my head that maybe we should have a seven foot fence. With wire buried three feet underneath, plus a designated digging area, and probably a pond*. Also, unless one of us can switch to working from home ** the dog needs to go to daycare every weekday so it isn't alone. Except, there aren't any places that are either on the way to work, or have long enough hours that we could reasonably drop off before - pick up after. So I suppose I have to quit my job, which I don't want to do, particularly before we have kids. But if we have a dog, we probably can't have kids anyway, since, if a place says 'won't adopt to homes with small children' it's probably verboten to add small children after the fact as well. So, I guess we really don't deserve a dog after all. Yes, really, this is what it's like inside my head some days. Maybe I'm too crazy to get a dog. * actually, we have a small pond already, and a digging area would be completely reasonable if the dog likes to dig. ** this would be reasonable given our professions, but very bad given our work habits