Two separate thoughts, but I wanted to share and I thought I’d save a little bandwidth by starting just one thread.
Monday I got a new pooch. She’s a 4 year old cocker spaniel named Peaches. She’s cream colored and she’s the tiniest little cocker I’ve ever seen; I didn’t know they came that small! I’d guesstimate that she’s about 12-15 lbs.; I thought cockers were like 30 lbs! But she’s adorable 
So far she and Jimmy seem to be getting along. We’re trying to show Jimmy that he doesn’t have to be jealous; reassure him he’s still top dog. We’d appreciate any tips Dopers might have to make this as smooth as possible.
Peaches seems like a sad little girl. I know, cockers naturally look kind of sad with those big puppy dog eyes and everything, but I mean she seems really down. Without anthropomorphizing too much (I hope), I imagine she would be because she just lost her home of 4 years. Her owner just decided she couldn’t be bothered to take care of her anymore. Peaches does dance around and wag her tail and wiggle her whole little body when she sees us or when she gets a treat, so I think she likes us, but she must miss her original owner. She doesn’t eat her dinner, even though we try to feed her the food her previous owner left with her. She’s only interested in doggy biscuits. And she keeps messing in the house. I don’t know if she’s messing because she’s upset and she’s acting out or if her owner just didn’t do a good job of housetraining her in the first place. The little girl just seems so sad, I hope we can make her feel better and work through these rough spots.
Then Tuesday we bought ourselves a little parcel of land (that our house just happens to already sit on) and got us a new mortgage We’re very happy about this When we got married 3 long years ago, we were but naive babes in the woods. Mr. Gr8Kat had a spot of financial trouble before we were married and I didn’t make enough money to get a mortgage without him, so we got stuck with a wicked interest rate (12.5%) on our little manufactured home. We got calls from telemarketers all the time asking if we wanted to refinance the house, but when they found out we were renting the lot, they said they couldn’t help us. But just a couple weeks ago the landlord offered to sell the land and we jumped on it. We refinanced the house, too, and now we’ll be paying less for the house, land, insurance, and property taxes than we were for the house and space rent alone. We’re property owners! Yay us