Emma's gone and I now have my own second dog

Well, it's happened. Little Emma Fie Pie is currently on the long drive to San Diego with Jim Flowers:

He was here in town for a couple days so I got to talk to him about her and I am pretty excited about that home. They've had cattle dogs for twenty years but the last one died tragically while this litter was still little personality-less guinea pigs. They'd wanted an Australian Shepherd for a long time. They kept asking but I said no, no, because I thought all my puppies would be a handful and a pet home couldn't handle it.

Not so. Emma is so calm and polite and respondent and FRIENDLY, that she'll be fine. And the neatest part is that they know how to handle her if anything does go wonky - I mean, they had cattle dogs.

Jim was like, "How could we not get her? We know where she's coming from, we know the mom, and she literally came to us." I guess when Laura went home a few weeks ago to go on vacation with them, they had photos of her printed out on their desks and trotted them out to show her friends. 

Oh, did I mention they're thinking about taking stockdog lessons with regularity (they used to do it with one of their cattle dogs)? Woot. So everybody went to homes that will work them. Goal achieved. I sent him home with some old Aussie Times, too, so maybe we'll see them out there in California.

But before that, they went on a play date with my friends' Aussie, Bailey, who is an adorable, smallish red merle:

Alex makes Emma look HUGE!

Yishai took all these as I handed him a camera while I went back to work. But I had to steal one off of Julie's Facebook profile:

Awwww. So cute.

So officially, Moto is the only puppy in the house at this point, which means that as soon as Jim left with Emma, he got to sleep in bed with me. And we just went on our first "run" with Fury (but he's kinda slow, I think tired from yesterday). 

Here goes with training.

And with that, don't expect too many posts. The litter is all homed now. Still not sure if I should take Moto off of "for sale" listings or not. This year I have done a lot of things my better judgement tells me not to do and it has worked out. Is keeping a puppy from this litter one of them? Moto is a lot more mellow and sensitive than my preference in dogs, but maybe that's a good thing.