Back when Cindy and I first rescued our dog Pom Pom from an animal shelter in San Diego, I never imagined that nearly five years later I’d be the co-creator of a Web site dedicated to dogs and dog owners’ actually, I was thinking to myself: “Holy crap I just got a dog! It’s totally gonna pee all over the house!”

But here I am and here we are: AvenueK9.com has been around for more than a year now, and has completely taken on a life of its own. We’ve gone from having just a handful of readers (mostly friends and family that we bugged constantly to go to the site), to getting visits from people in all 50 states and numerous countries around the world.

Just wait until you see some of the things we’ve got in store for you for the rest of 2009: More contests and giveaways, original dog-related news stories, more guest bloggers… and in the coming months, we’ll have a profile section up and running, which will allow all you K9ners to create a profile and interact with other dog-obsessed folks, post pictures, create groups — yeah, it’s gonna rock.

We hope you enjoy our new look…Mike Kuhlmann, co-creator of AveK9, has worked an unbelievable amount of hours behind the scenes designing every little nook and cranny of what you see and experience on this site. For this, I owe him many, many drinks.

Please give us lots of feedback about anything and everything! This is no self-serving blog site… tell us what you want to read about, what you like and don’t like, and anything else you’d like to see on our site. We’ll do our best to make it happen.

Here’s to the K9s!