The Coming Changes

Well, here I am just wasting time in the Charlotte airport while I wait for my flight to Las Vegas and playing with my new little computer that I got from my mom for Christmas, it is a pretty neat little thing and it is hardly bigger than the average hardback book! It is a nice diversion from the people-watching and reading, I thought I would just write up a quick post and save the reading for the plane.

While I must admit that I was really not looking forward to heading back to the desert today, I am slowly getting more excited to see what has changed since I was last up at the Lodges. There was talk of trying to get Jerry Lee into a new group before I left. I hadn't really gotten to know him since I started at the Lodges, due in large part to the fact that his former run mate Coconut can be a little bit . . . bratty (or something else that starts with a "b") and she would get mad if he was getting attention and she was not.A few weeks ago his eye started looking really bad, it was getting cloudy on one side of the eyeball and really blood shot on the other side and seemed like it was starting to bulge out of the socket a little bit. I took him to the clinic and they asked if we would be able to get eye drops in him, which I was not very optimistic about and then they said he needed them four times a day and I got really doubtful that we would be able to safely do eye drops so many times a day before he got fed up and decided to eat one of us . . . he is a pretty big dog, probably some kind of Shepherd Akita mix and probably in the 70-80 lbs range. When I told Terry and Jorge that we were supposed to get the drops in him four times a day, they both laughed and said we should just ask for the oral medication - Jorge said he would call at the end of the day the next day to find out if I still had all my fingers. So you can imagine everyone's utter surprise when Jerry Lee took the eye drops like a pro . . . sort of. He does take every evasive maneuver he can think of, but he also knows that there are treats involved in these encounters and inevitably the treats win out. This dog, whose assessment says that he is a bit head shy (doesn't like his head to be touched too much) and is especially sensitive about his ears, is letting us man handle his head several times a day to get it into just the right position for the drops. Just before I left, he went back to the clinic and now has two different kinds of drops that he needs twice a day five minutes apart, but not more of the four times a day stuff. I have been just so very impressed by Jerry Lee's patience through all of this - not once, not on a single occasion has he even made any hint of an aggressive move toward any of the caregivers, in spite of all the man handling, not even a little growl over the course of two weeks! A few days after the start of the eye drops, we decided to take Jerry Lee out of the run with Coconut and put him by himself until we could find him some new run mates. We were told that he is not very good with male dogs, but they have since tested him and he has done just fine with males and females, which means that he can probably go into a group run, which would be wonderful for him. The day after I left, I am told they tried him in a run in a different area of Dogtown with another male and a female, but the other male didn't like Jerry Lee and went after him (from what I have heard, Jerry Lee again just took evasive measures and didn't really fight back). I am excited to see what has changed with Jerry Lee since I left and to find out if he has found some new run mates yet. He is a really great dog and I am really hoping that we can find his forever home soon.

I am sure there will be many changes once I get back to the Lodges, two days away always means moved dogs or new dogs, so I can only imagine what may have changed after a week away. I'll keep you posted! I hope you all have a safe and happy New Year!

It is time to board the plane, please excuse any typos or other weird grammar, I didn't have time to reread it before posting.

(All photos copyright Best Friends Animal Society.)

Trash Cans and Traveling

Trash cans have been taking up entirely too much of my brain (and blog) space lately, but I am happy to announce that I finally found small, lidded trash cans that I could afford. Well, I don't know if afford is the right word here, but I am just not going to spend $30 on a fancy pants trash can that would hold three pieces of paper, a juice box, and a banana peel, just because it has a motion sensor that makes it open when you are nearby, so you don't actually have to touch it (which, I have to say, totally defeats the purpose of having a lid on a trash can to keep curious critters from using it as a snack bar in the first place). So, anyway, I found trash cans at Bed, Bath and Beyond that I really like. Not only are they small and simple with a swinging lid, but they are made of biodegradable plastic and they were $10 each - I just love the poetry of biodegradable trash cans. Plus they aren't ugly! Following Barrie's advice, I bought two, one for the bathroom and one for the kitchen. I almost went looking for them at Wal-Mart, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. We hates the Wal-Mart, we hates it! Anyway, that will hopefully be the last post about the state of my trash cans, we will now be leaving all the "Trash Talk" to the Clair the elusive Southern Polar Bear.

In other news, I am in Ohio for the holiday with my family (aka most of the people who are reading this blog), I arrived in late last night after a very long day of traveling. I left my house at 5:50 am to drive eighty miles to St George where I took a shuttle van to the Las Vegas airport two hours away and then proceeded to wait for three hours for my flight to take off . . . blah blah blah, we all know how these airport stories go. Anyway, I finally got to mom's house at about 11:45 pm, making it about sixteen hours of traveling, all after a long day up at BF and a short night of sleep. You may recall an earlier post talking about Sage, the dog with the head tilt and either a brain tumor or an inner ear infection. Well, I have been remiss in my duties here and I have forgotten to tell you all that our wonderful volunteers, Jeanne and Robin, offered to foster her in their home, she finally has her forever home in her old age. She has been doing amazingly well in their care, her head tilt is gone and she stopped circling (something that often accompanies the head tilt), she made herself at home immediately in their care and they fell in love with her the minute she walked in their door. She knows she is home. So you can imagine how distressing it was to be heading for the door, ready to start my vacation and hear that she was coming in and was not in very good shape, her head tilt was back, she was circling, and she was trying (unsuccessfully) to both vomit and poop. The last two things are classic signs of bloat, which, as it turns out was what was happening. She went through emergency surgery to reposition her twisted stomach and staple it to the abdominal wall so that it won't twist again. She has not been eating well for weeks, she had only had about a cup and a half of food the day she bloated, so the vets think she may have been "trying" to bloat for a while now, and it just wasn't until Monday night that she went into a full twist and bloat. With many dogs, you can actually see the bloat happening as their stomach distends, but Sage has an incredibly bushy, thick coat making it very difficult to see small changes in her shape. My co-worker, Terry, and I decided to stay with Jeanne and Robin while they waited for results from the surgery, which, thankfully, went well. Yesterday, she wasn't up and moving, yet, but she was giving kisses and seemed to be feeling somewhat better. The vets said that if she made it through the first 24 hours after the surgery, we were basically out of the woods. Thank goodness that Sage is such a stubborn, tough old broad; it was difficult to leave knowing that she was in such a precarious position, but there are a great many people that know and love Sage dearly and she does appear to be recovering well (Knock on Wood!), I just keep sending her all the good thoughts and healing energy I can muster.

While it is nice to have a break from work, it is strange to think that I won't be back at the Lodges for a whole week. Coming back from a two-day weekend can often mean new dogs, moved dogs, changed meds, and different routines, I can't imagine what it will be like to come back from a week away. I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season and I will try to get a few more posts up in the coming days. Best wishes!

(All photos copyright Best Friends Animal Society.)

When the poo is covered in snow . . .

Thanks, Barrie, for the wastebasket advice, this has become something of a quest for me of late. There is, apparently, an alarming shortage of small wastebaskets with lids in Kanab, UT, big kitchen size ones are no problem, but I don't want one of those, I want a nice little one with a lid that can serve as a bit of a deterrent for any dogs I might bring home for a night. A little one can be tucked under the sink in my bathroom, not so with a big one, so, the wastebaskets are continuing to occupy too much of my brain space.

In other news, we are getting slapped around something fierce by Mother Nature this week, which has led to much snow-covered fun-filled shenanigans up at the Lodges. For those of you not experienced in golf cart driving in the snow without a windshield, let me tell you, it is both fun and frightening all at the same time. As the snow began to pile up (we are probably currently over a foot of snow right now - in the desert . . .), the golf carts did as well. One could find carts abandoned in several not-necessarily-road areas over the last couple of days, just piling up with snow and waiting for rescue (as a side note, let me just say, none of them were mine).

As for the ones still running, actually moving (especially from a stop) could be problematic, too. As I was coming around a turn, I saw co-worker Keely spinning her wheels and trying to "kick start" the cart (keeping one foot on the gas and pushing at the ground with the other foot). In an attempt to be helpful, I shouted up to her to pick up her feet and I would bump her with my cart to get going. Immediately after I finished yelling, she put her foot back in the cart, leading me to think she had heard me, but that was apparently not the case. When I bumped her, she jumped so far off the seat I thought she might hit her head on the roof and then turned around to see what had just happened. Upon seeing me, she began laughing and announced that I was lucky I didn't make her pee her pants, we couldn't stop laughing as I continued to push her struggling cart down the road.

There is just something about snow that makes it a lot easier to just let it go and laugh. It cushions you when you fall and provides easy ammo when you are annoyed, there is just something fun about snow - of course Clair may beg to differ, if I were surrounded by snow 24/7 as far as the eye could see for six months, I would probably not be so fond of it. But for us desert dwellers, it is kind of fun.

Snow does lead to a lot more maintenance work and throws the normal schedule at the Lodges into a blender. When we knew the first storm was coming in, we got all the normal first thing in the morning stuff done and then went out to start poop scooping - frozen poop has a lot of good qualities, less stinky, not mushy, etc, but I was told to keep my mouth shut when trying to whack frozen poo loose from the frozen ground (I haven't made the mistake of learning this lesson from personal experience, yet). We also get to go around and beat the ever-loving crap out of the shade tarps to knock the snow off before they collapse under the weight of the white stuff. It really is quite fun beating on them with broom sticks and throwing your whole body weight into the sagging tarps and jumping around to get the higher up parts, but boy do your legs hurt in the morning. And you do tend to accumulate other casualties during the process, we managed to punch a small hole in one tarp - turns out wooden broomsticks are better suited for not damaging the tarps - though, we did lose a wooden broomstick to a frozen tarp, snapped it like a toothpick which also led to nearly peed pants at the hilarity of it all and an wonderfully puzzled look on Theresa the dogs face at the two spastic nut jobs in her yard.

Sort of like this, but more puzzled.

Finally, I thought I would include a few more of the Favorite Photos of the Week from the BF Web site.

A view of the canyon in the snow.
A co-worker's dogs, patiently waiting in the snow for mom to go home.
How can you not smile at a face like that? His name fits him well - Charmer!

(All photos copyright Best Friends Animal Society.)

Tough Question

Well, I should have known that when I tell folks to ask questions, Ben would ask the one question that I really can't answer - who is my favorite dog, aside from Shelby, of course? There are some really great dogs up at the Lodges and I don't think I could pick just one favorite. I do have some favorites though, Tasha, Marge, and Batman come to mind immediately. Then there's Archie and Ogy and Pinky Bear (aka Pinkerton), we can't forget Astronomy (aka Tronnie or Stinky Face - he eats poop) and Paris (Par Par) and Ophelia (the little Black Bean) and Ursa and Diego (the Crazy Kids), Buddah, Annie, Tex, Savannah, Rex (Sexy Rexy), Sophie, Twyla, Niblet (Nibbly Nibs or Nibnib), Rueben and more that I just can't think of right at the moment.

It was a good week up at the Lodges for the most part. One down side to the week is that Sage has been in the clinic all week with a very pronounced head tilt which generally indicates one of two things, an inner ear infection or a brain tumor . . . big difference. So we are still waiting on diagnostics to find out which it is, being that Sage has one ear canal that is completely closed up and another that is partially closed and she is deaf and has been subject to chronic ear infections in the past, we are really hoping that logic and history will win out over a brain tumor. In addition to our worries about Sage, Old Friends sadly lost a sweet dog named BJ a couple of days ago to bloat. Bloat is a very strange condition and vets really haven't been able to figure out what makes it happen, though there are a lot of theories. We always check on the dogs first thing in the morning and last thing at night to make sure (among other things) they aren't showing signs of bloat. When a dog bloats, the sphincter between the stomach and esophagus malfunctions and/or their stomach rotates either partially or fully (this is called torsion) closing off either end of the stomach causing fluids and gases to build up in the stomach causing it to bloat. If it is not caught soon enough, the stomach can become necrotic and the dog can die.

On the more positive side of things, Synergy continues to do well with Mowgli. They had a bit of a spat yesterday afternoon, so we decided to hold off on leaving them together for the night for a bit longer (when a new dog is introduced to a run, they are pulled out for the first seven nights in an effort to prevent any fights when there aren't staff around to break it up). The day of the disagreement was supposed to be the first night they spent together. We are also putting Tex and Savannah together and so far (fingers crossed!!) all seems to be going well. Tex is a Bloodhound mix, probably has some Shepherd in him, too and they think Savannah is an Aussie, Shar Pei mix, in person, she has got a face you just won't believe.

Savannah has been tried with several dogs, but always seems to get herself into trouble after a few days. Today will be day five of their living together and I really hope it continues to go well. Tex lived with Valentine for quite a while and has been solo for about a month since she got adopted and so we are really hoping that Savannah can be his new buddy.

And on a non-work related note, in the final days of my 26th year (no that is not a hint -seriously, not a hint!) I have taken a very big step. I will, in the next few days, be taking up residence in a house that I will have all to myself. That's right, for the first time in my life, I will live without any roommates; I have never lived on my own before, so I am both very excited and a little bit nervous about the whole thing. It is a one bedroom, one bathroom house and it is very nice and clean with a nice little yard and I can't stop obsessing about all the stuff I have to get. There is all the obvious stuff - bed, couch, table, etc., but then there's all the little stuff, too. One night, I lay away for an hour mostly debating with myself about whether I needed one waste basket or two, I may have driven myself completely insane before I have the chance to enjoy the house. As always, I hope you all had a great week and I will do my best to get back to the library tomorrow for another post (though, much of the day may be occupied by preparation for the new house and moving). If I don't get another post on here, have a wonderful week! (All photos copyright Best Friends Animal Society.)

The Not Macy's Holiday Parade

Nothing too exciting to report today. We had a holiday parade in Kanab last night, let me tell you, what a show, we are giving Macy's a run for their money! The streets were closed at about 6:55 pm so the parade could commence at 7:00; local businesses made "floats" (decorated cars for the most part) and of course there were the fire trucks and a mildly frightening Smokey the Bear tossing candy to hoards of onlookers. A bunch of Dogtown staff walked dogs (mostly their personal dogs) that were sporting a variety of holiday decor - flashing collars and twinkling lights - and Trixie the miniature horse pulled her pint-sized cart, all aglow with holiday cheer. It was pretty fun, Echo, one of the dogs I was pet sitting a couple of weeks ago was there and I think she licked the face of every kid in the crowd, twice. We walked down Main Street for a couple of blocks, then turned around and went back in the direction from which we had just come. It was quite a show, the streets were opened back up by 7:35 pm.
Elsewhere in life, I am working on finding a more permanent living situation. I am trying to find a good balance between being rational and too picky, which is a surprisingly difficult feat here in Kanab. I have been avoiding the task since I have been here, mostly because I knew that I had some pet sitting jobs lined up and I would be leaving to go back to Ohio for a week around Christmas and it seemed silly to rent a place that I wasn't going to be utilizing for all that time. But I am getting impatient and ready to find somewhere that I can make my own space and worry less about roommates - which is not to say that I don't like my roommate anymore, we are good - I am just ready to be more on my own . . . and get the rest of my suitcases unpacked, I have forgotten what most of my wardrobe even looks like.
That is about all I can think of at the moment, sorry for the shortness and the boringness of the post - it is kind of like Kanab in that regard. Hopefully I will have more exciting stories to tell next week (good/happy exciting, not the other kind, a book I am reading is talking about being careful what you wish for). Again I say, if you have questions, I would be more than pleased to address them and have something more to write about than just random thoughts.
Take care and have a great week!

Good News

Another week has come and gone and it is very hard to believe that it is already December. We've had some great news this week up at the Lodges and there are some exciting things happening. We found out yesterday that Ann Allums, one of the trainers, has chosen our lovable Mason to be her project dog in an upcoming season of National Geographic's "DogTown" TV series.The film crew arrived yesterday and spent the day getting acquainted with Dogtown and discussing which dogs will be filmed for the next batch of shows. I believe the next season of "DogTown" is already finished being filmed and is somewhere in the post-production process now, the filming that will be happening now will continue for several months, (in my completely unofficial, simply speculating opinion) I would guess that these episodes won't be airing until sometime late next year at the earliest. Mason has been without a home for quite sometime, I was told that he arrived at Best Friends when he was about a year old and he is now about eight. He is really great with people and CGC certified, but he is not so great with dogs or cats which is a stumbling block for many of our dogs. For those of you wondering, CGC stands for "Canine Good Citizen", it is a nationally standardized training and evaluation program to promote responsible dog ownership and well behaved dogs.

Elsewhere at the Lodges, one of our solo girls, Synergy, has made a new friend!All week she has been going on play dates with Mowgli, and after several years of living the single life, she may have found herself a run mate. After several days of short play dates, she spent the entire day with him yesterday and from all accounts, so far, things are going quite well. She has been solo for so long, because she is a very dominant female that has a tendency to hump other dogs (an expression of dominance) and get very overbearing. I don't know Mowgli personally, but I have been told that they have somewhat similar personalities, in other words, he won't take her nonsense, and it seems to be working out well. So if everything continues to go smoothly, Synergy will be moving up to Conrad's and Leopold's, a pair of octagons near the Lodges, and we will be getting one of their dogs.

Well, that is about all I can think of for today. If anyone has any questions about BF or Dogtown or what I do everyday or the nature of the universe, feel free to post them here or email them to me and I will do my best to answer them. Questions are good, they help me find things to talk about when I am trying to come up with ideas for posts. More tomorrow . . . (All photos copyright Best Friends Animal Society.)