A Visit to the Dog Park

There's a new dog park close to my house.  It's way more convenient than the one Derek and I had taken Thunder and Lightning to when they were about 6 months old... back before things went south.  My next door neighbor had told me about Coleman Camp Park and the dog park that had just been added and after getting some directions from her, me and the boys have made a couple of visits.  Here are some pictures:

Lightning saying it's the best Mommy/doggy date ever!

Inside the fenced Large Dog area looking toward the park's pavilion.

There's a splash fountain for water loving dogs to play in.
My guys act scared out of their minds when it comes on...

And there's tires to climb on and crawl through.
The way Jack and Gizmo go all commando under my bed, you'd
think they'd love this.  But you'd be wrong.  It got a couple of
sniffs and then was completely ignored.

Thunder thought drinking from the doggy drinking fountain was
the greatest thing in the history of ever.

Dog bone shaped bench.  The cutest thing for a dog park
or what?

Mostly they just galloped laps around the park.  We had it all to ourselves...  Lightning kept coming up to me with the silliest happy grin almost like he couldn't remember having so much fun before and then he'd take off again and run hard.  Jack was so worked up over the event that his back leg just shivered everytime he stood still for a moment.  And poor Gizmo whose short legs don't move so fast, wore out first from trying to keep up.  Even at home, I call him Pokey because it almost always takes him longer to get to the door to come in.

After about an hour they were all looking for shady spots to lay down in the grass so I gathered them up to go home and they crashed.  Nothing but snores for a couple of hours...  It was an awesome break!

We'll definitely be going back to this park often!

When Rover Goes Missing

We've all been drilled in this modern day to microchip our pets so it's easier to find them if they should go missing.  Today, with the ulterior motive of finding out how to update the contact information, I asked the vet how they work.  And he was gracious enough to spend 20 minutes or so educating me and checking Lightning, Jack and Gizmo for chips.

Jack doesn't have one.  Or the one that the folks at Banfield inserted in his scruff is faulty and doesn't read.  No... I won't go on another rant about just how much I hate them.  I do hate them!  I'm just sparing you the rant about it.  Lightning and Gizmo, and Thunder I presume though he wasn't with us to check, have chips made and/or maintained by a company called Home Again.  I don't have the other names, but he said they are one of several companies to offer this service.

What got me thinking about this was the bill I got awhile back for Gizmo's chip.

Home Again wants $18.97 each year.  That made me worry that they could somehow 'turn off' the chip so he couldn't be scanned at a vet or shelter were he to be picked up loose somewhere...  That's kind of what the bill led me to believe and it made me a little nervous.  I thought it was outrageous!  Better to look dumb and be sure than end up with a problem down the road, so I asked about it.

The vet explained the yearly fee is for their 'location service.'  In a nutshell, when your pet goes missing you alert them and send them a recent picture so they can prepare fliers for you to print and post in your neighborhood and they fax the information to area vets and shelters.  I have a computer and the minimal skills needed to make a flier and I can place a few phone calls...  He agreed that the yearly fee is pretty much a rip off.  He also said that 5 times more lost pets are reunited with their families because of Facebook postings than those fliers.  Once the chip is there, it's there.  You may, depending on the brand, have to pay to register it and, again depending on the brand, update your contact information.  But unless you move or change phone numbers, the location service is a needless extra charge and not something you have to subscribe to in order for the chip to be active.

If you don't update your information, the chip will point the organization searching for you to claim your lost pet to the vet who originally purchased it and hopefully they will be able to reach you.  The biggest problem with this is if your pet is hurt at night or on a weekend while out on his (or her?) adventure and they can't reach the vet's office.  Most shelters will NOT provide even basic life saving care while you are being sought...

So tonight I'm updating the address and phone number on their microchips.  And 2 years down the road trying to register Thunder's and Lightning's chips because, even though Banfield was paid for that, it wasn't done.  Yay.  And yay, again, Jack will have to be chipped when I scrape up another $40 for it.

In the vets office, he brought out the reader to show me how it worked. It's kind of similar to and used like the 'wand' that TSA probes you with at the airport and when it goes over the microchip it beeps and displays an alphanumeric code in the display window.  That code, much like a barcode, is the identifying information linking you to your pet in their database.  The vet or shelter staff can enter it in to the website and get an owner's contact information and pretty soon witness a happy reunion.

And that, my friends, is what I learned about microchips today.

And no... I'm not happy that I have to come up with $100 to get everyone chipped with the correct information.  It's another place where it feels like I'm needlessly hemorrhaging money that I don't have but they kind of have me over a barrell.  Now that I know that Home Again is so fee oriented I will specifically request that they not be used on any future pet.

Random-nimity

When I was a baby, not even big enough to remember her ever working on it, my Grandma Clarke made me a true patchwork quilt.  Still buried in one of the dozen boxes to be unpacked when I finally get my 'woman cave,' it's made of randomly shaped and sized pieces of silky fabric that came mostly from her dresses or the scraps of material left when she made a new one.  I can sort of remember her in a couple of the dresses and there are old black and white photos where you can match the fabric pattern up for a few more, but most of them totally escape my memory.

I was thinking about that quilt the other day and how the random acts of a life can be a lot like one of those 'crazy patch' quilts.

And that's what today is about...

Random things.

Not so much that they're too insignificant to be the topic of an entire blog post, or even Facebook update, just that the post never came together and materialized in a form I wanted to share.  Mostly it's little things...  Things like how luck works.

It's no secret that we are pretty desperately poor and really scraping to make bills each month.  That's part of what irritated me, though I kept silent about it, when Derek bought the occasional lottery ticket.  Except... last night he got a winning ticket!  One worth more than the $5 he put into it.  A LOT more!!

That's right!  $500, baby!!!

That makes the mortgage for November a whole lot easier!

And I put up the fridge magnets (FINALLY!) that I kept during last year's move.  My friend's son's pictures have been in these magnetic frames for... well, I don't really remember when I put them in the frames but it's been a long time.  Those little boys have long been grown men by now.

Nathan, the older one, used to call me whenever he could sneak it past mom's watchful eye.  It was a long distance call - they lived in Wyoming then and I still lived in Idaho.  He was polite and thoughtful, almost like an old-time suitor.  He never failed to inquire about my mom's health, the weather, work, our small black poodle...  For a little man, Nathan sure could carry on the grown up conversation!  And it just tickled me pink and gave me quite the thrill that out of all the people in the world, he'd choose to call me.

I wonder if he remembers?

For about an hour this afternoon we all made a dog pile on the bed and watched football.  I think it was the Florida/Maryland game... but I'm not enough of a fan to really follow super close so I could be wrong.  For me watching a sports event is more of a social thing than actually being a fan of the team or sport.  I understand what's happening enough to enjoy the game, but not enough to seek it out on my own.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with anything...

Pardon the puppy porn...

In the dog pile, Gizmo kept turning over and skooching around to find the most comfortable spot.  He ended up stretched along my side on his back with my arms around his butt.  (Insert bad joke about him being such a little cuddle butt.)  What I was noticing, though, is the skin of his tummy region where it's less covered by fur.  It's both dark brown and pale pink in blotches much like the Indian Paint Ponies made famous in B-grade western movies.  And so so soft and warm!

And, she says with an evil grin, ticklish!!