After much deliberation, conversations, and tears over the past few months, we made the difficult decision yesterday to say goodbye to Pablo, our 17 year-old Chihuahua mix that was as much a child and brother of our family as he was our dog. I was lucky to love him and to be loved by him for so much of my life, but his old age was lending its hand in a rising number of health issues and seeing him in constant discomfort became too hard to witness. We adopted him in 2008 from a rescue center in Berkeley, CA, where his name was Ron — a seemingly unfit name for the small, blonde, sometimes happy and sometimes hostile dog he always was, so we promptly named him Pablo after my favorite major league baseball player Pablo Sandoval. Like Sandoval, our Pablo was always somewhat round. My dad used to call him “a football on legs” and we would just say Pablo was “big-boned” when people commented on his rather heavy weight for being such a small dog. And although he may have looked like a dog destined for laps and cuddles, he most definitely was not. While he did enjoy resting his head on your arm while he slept and getting a good butt scratch, he could be moody and even surly around people he didn’t know (or like lol). Many of you who met Pablo know that he could sense the fear in people when he had that on edge, ready to snap at you look in his eyes. However, I think his surliness was a result of his love for resting and observing the world around him. Over the course of his life with us, he endured countless changes and moves, as well as being traded off between my parents every week as he followed the schedule for Leila and I going between two houses. Perhaps, in his old age, he was recovering from the busy schedule he endured earlier in life, and was setting an example for the rest of us in suggesting we spend more time relaxing than we do. (Rest of caption in comments)