Pet Channel

So, we got a dog. Her name is Lucy (short for Lucille — we have this thing with old-people names for pets), and she’s a chihuahua-terrier mix with floppy ears that we rescued from the pound. She has to get fixed tomorrow, so we don’t bring her home until Monday…but man, are we psyched!

I am in awe of the magical, silent communication between man and beast in situations like this. What draws a normally bitchy goose to a man whose days are slipping so fast? There is no way to know, exactly. Recent studies show that dogs can smell cancer on patients’ breath.

Well, I came home from school today to find the bird house empty. The chicks have all left. We hope we’ll see them around the yard. Time will tell.

With Kaia I need to be peppy… jazzy praise, exaggerated signals, relatively loud cues… Mesa takes quiet, happy cues, and careful, small signals…her response is exaggerated with the strength of my cues. I have problems just switching dog names from class to class on Weds night as it is. Mesa’s class comes first, so Kaia is “Mesa” for the first half of the next class. I guess I’m going to have to train myself to completely switch mental gears… some kind of visualization exercise or something …should be an interesting experience.

This pug, Ch Kendoric’s Riversong Mulroney, won the toy group at the Westminster Dog Show. He has won 65 Best in Shows.

My dogs and the UK postal service. Cooper the short fat bastard decided it would be fun to bark at everything that walks past the house between 0230 and 0630. Nice, thanks bud. It’s not as if I’ve got trouble sleeping right now anyway. I have a chesty cold and every time I move during the night I cough. It’s not very pleasant and it keeps my wife awake too.

Mostly I laugh when I read Heather’s blog ‘Dooce‘, and especially when she writes about the dog, Chuck. Since I have a dog myself (the light of my life) I can easily imagine Chuck’s adventures in my head. I love funny dogs. I laugh with and at my dog every day!

This picture was taken at our bird feeder the other day. The bird feeder is just on the other side of a cat tree we have in our family room. The cats sit on the cat tree and watch the birds. It is like cat TV. Occasionally Pixel will hurl himself at the window trying to get the birds. The birds have figured out the cats cannot get to them. For the most part the cats have too, but sometimes Pixel forgets. When I was home sick I did not read or watch TV much, so you gotta get your entertainment somehow.

I used to be a bit disappointed about the lack of any meaningfull tropical animals roaming the streets in Thailand…tends to be all soi dogs, cats and the occaisional jingjok climbing my walls of an evening.

In less than a week, the nonprofit group sold farm.com for $200,000. The buyer? The online pet supplies business Pets United, which already owned dog.com, fish.com, and horse.com.

Courtland Page Johnson of East Naples FLA clearly thought he was cool beans, tooling around town in his retro-styled PT Cruiser, with his pet snake around his neck... until snakey took a bite out of him, and he crashed the car into some barricades. Witnesses saw the man emerge from the car and wrestle with the serpent before getting back in and driving away. Officers found Johnson at home later and charged him with leaving a crash scene and being a big goof.