I <3 greyhounds

(Like you didn't know that.)

I took Sam and Jacey to a Garden and Patio Trade Show today. The greyhound group was invited for a second year. We take our pets to let people who've never seen a greyhound in the flesh find out what they're like...and we take adoption information to give out.

Jacey was a bit growl-y at the beginning...about the other dogs, not about the people. (The people stopping to pet dogs were hers--and not for sharing.) She doesn't bark, and she doesn't growl loudly, but I kept my hand under her chin so I could feel when she was growling. It took a couple of eyeball-to-eyeball discussions (her eyeballs and mine), but she calmed down. But she pushed out to the front of the pack when people came by, and she loved all the petting, including from the kids.

Poor Sam was nearly driven crazy by the people coming to our booth with bags of nuts in their hands. (The nuts were available at Trader Joe's booth.) Sam didn't know what they had; he just knew it was food and it was in cellophane bags that crackled so invitingly. He sat politely in front of anyone with the cellophane bags, and I'd pop a piece of kibble in his mouth. It was funny to watch him be so hopeful.

We were there about four hours. And we certainly convinced people that greyhounds are not high-strung dogs. At one point, all six dogs present were sacked out on beds (or the bare floor) snoozing...resting up for the next crowd.

A quiet day...

Daniel's blue/black afghan is through row 20; just 152+ to go. Ashley's teal/fuchsia afghan is through row 24. I'll try to get some pictures in the next week.

I'm going to give my wrist a break and go do some genealogy input. Jacey's asleep here on the couch; Sam's asleep on top of Jacey. We're all being rest-on-our-asses lazy. (Or rest-on-someone-else's ass, in one case.) It's nice.

Jacey

I'm trying very hard not to giggle. Jacey is asleep on the couch and doing a Jacey symphony: growls, snorts, hoots, whistles, humming noises. (This is the noisiest I've ever heard her.)

Sam was asleep on the couch, but he's gotten down and backed away like he thinks she's about to come after him. He keeps staring at her as if he thinks she's gone mad. He has no idea that he's just as noisy sometimes.

Sam and the Valentine's Candy

I went grocery shopping. It's awful how needing "just a bit" of stuff turns into such a big bill. The stores have Valentine's candy out already, and I bought a bag of the conversation hearts.

I got home, killed a little time, then went to the greyhound group meeting tonight. I got home to the dogs and found...

Well, remember a few months ago, when Sam covered downstairs with 15-20 pounds of dog kibble? Even though he was wearing a muzzle? With a poop guard?

A bag of conversation hearts doesn't give him quite as much ammunition, but it gives him...enough. Dining room, living room, over and under his bed, and even a few halfway up the stairs. Which prompts two questions:

1--How the hell is he getting them up the stairs? He's muzzled. With a guard. He can't put them in his mouth, and surely he's not wedging them between his toes!

2--What was he doing taking them upstairs? I'm not silly enough to think he was taking them up to Jacey in her crate. He doesn't willingly share with her--especially if he can't have any, himself. Perhaps he planned to put them down just out of her reach, to tease her. But I think he really just wanted to stash a few pieces away where I might not find them when I came home.

I've been home for about half an hour, now, and I've vacuumed up all the candy. Sam's walking around forlornly, hoping to find a piece I missed.

Dream on, boy...

Seventy-plus French knots later...

It's finished--with time to spare!



Now to wrap presents...

Oh, golly...

A picture of a greyhound that is not mine... (Check out the tags on the picture.)

Greyhounds

SEGA continues its efforts in supporting November as Adopt-a-Senior-Pet month. There are two 9-year-olds remaining who need a home, but someone has expressed an interest in adopting them. And we've got a 10-year-old bouncing back to SEGA for readoption; the family has a recently widowed mother-in-law who is moving in with her two cats, and the greyhound is "a cat zapper." SEGA will find him a home. SEGA has placed two 11-year-olds and two 10-year-olds so far this month.

Hugger at home 11-year-old Hugger's foster parents have flunked fostering. They adopted him. (Taken from the SEGC message board home page.)

But this comes in the face of some bad news for SEGA members. 12-year-old Teresa had to be put to sleep while her owners were out of the country; they're coming home to five dogs instead of six. (It was a case of owner-of-four-dogs marrying owner-of-two-dogs.) Teresa had been ailing for a month or so. Teresa was a champion agility and obedience dog, and will be much missed. (She was the teacher's demo-dog when Oreo took obedience classes. Teresa showed how the dog should respond after training. Oreo was the demo-dog for how you teach the behavior, since an open-mouthed Oreo would follow the treat anywhere the teacher moved it...and ever-after greeted the teacher by sniffing her pockets.) And 11-year-old Walker died this weekend, too, after a long bout with cancer.

Today would have been Oreo's ninth birthday.

Edited to add an update: Another 9-year-old has been adopted today!

A public service announcement...

Today: A friend's two greyhounds got out of her fenced yard and took off in opposite directions. Patti called our "Lost Hound Cooperative," which went into action: messages on the Yahoo Message Board, MapQuest maps posted on the Web site, phone calls to SEGA members in the area. Patti grabbed her cell phone and took off after the escapees.

Fortunately, today's weather here was sunny and only a bit cool, and lots of people were outdoors. Area residents spotted both dogs, knew they didn't belong loose on their own, and grabbed the dogs. (It helps that both dogs are friendly, social dogs who go right up to total strangers to be petted.) The rescuers called the number on the dogs' tags. But that number was ringing in Patti's empty house, and people wound up leaving messages on the machine.

Patti got the messages eventually, but if she'd gotten the news earlier, she could have saved herself a lot of worry. So both dogs are home safely. And Patti's getting them new tags...with her cell phone number on them.

Are your pets tagged?

Adopt-a-Senior-Pet Month

November is Adopt-a-Senior-Pet Month. Our rescue group has placed two 11-year-old greyhounds this month, but we still have three 9-year-olds and one 10-year-old looking for homes.

In an effort to spur adoptions of seniors, one placement worker drafted a list of greyhound owners and asked each of us to make a pro-seniors post one day this month. Today was my day to post.

Why adopt a senior?

The edges are all smoothed off. He's been around. He "gets" glass doors, mirrors, slippery floors, squeaky toys, mom leaving to go to work. And he understands the idea of "going out to potty."

He appreciates comfortable routine. He's had the "new boy" experience and is grateful now to just drop down onto that open, available bed and be the least trouble he knows how to be...

He knows that ear-scritches are vastly to be treasured. Kisses on the head are a prize nearly equal to "cookies." And cuddles on the couch are absolute heaven.

But he hasn't seen EVERYTHING. He's still curious about what's around the next corner on your walk. He's wondering if he's allowed to catch squirrels at your house. He wants to know what games you know and what toys you have. He wants to meet your friends and coworkers.

He wants to be YOUR DOG.

And he'll enrich your life far more than you'll be able to enrich his.


That's for Oreo, who would have been nine years old next Monday.

Jacey

You know how in cartoons there'll be someone sleeping, with their lips pressed together, and every time they exhale their lips flutter and vibrate?

Jacey's doing that right now, and it's all I can do to not laugh out loud at her.

Dogs. Nature's stress-relievers...

This week

I’m home on the sofa, watching King Kong, and I am absolutely beat. (Oh, dear, Kong’s stamping on natives. Would you believe I’ve never seen this movie before? It’s the Fay Wray version.)

Today was Greyfest, the big greyhound festival. I did $145 worth of nail trims and ear cleanings to raise money for SEGA. There was only one dog who wanted to bite; he was fine for his nails, but wanted to take my hand off when I tried to clean his ears. His name was Mr Spock. I’m willing to concede that Vulcans might be fussy about their ears, but logic should preclude biting as a solution. (Oh, dear, Kong’s grabbed Ann out the high-rise window and is taking a stroll through New York…and about to disrupt the subway…)

Anyway, the crocheted greyhound brought SEGA $100 in the silent auction. I didn’t spend much money—just bought the new SEGA cookbook (people-food recipes and dog-treat recipes). In the “Blur of Fur” competition they clocked running greyhounds with a radar gun. The fastest dog today was doing 45 mph…and that wasn’t a particularly young dog: just one who loves to run. (It’s Kong against the airplanes, now, and I think we know how that turns out.) Sam and Jacey didn’t go to Greyfest; I can’t look after them, keep Sam out of trouble, and do nail trims at the same time, so the dogs just had a quiet day at home.

On the way home from Greyfest, I stopped at Costco and spent a fortune: two dog throws, one new dog bed, and a ton of vitamins/supplements: Cranberry pills (Jacey), glucosamine (all of us), flax seed oil (Jacey and Sam), calcium (me), fish oil pills (Jacey and Sam).

(Oh, no. It was beauty killed the beast.)

Edited to add: The Blur of Fur winner was Venus, formerly RC Desert Secret. I just looked her up on the greyhound database. She was born 17 November 2001--which was the day I adopted Oreo: Nice coincidence...

Happy Gotcha Day

I ordered a pattern to make sweaters for the dogs. The pattern comes from the same woman who created the crocheted greyhound pattern. I ordered the yarn, too: "Aran" colored yarn for Sam's, "Cherry Red" for Jacey's. (I get free shipping from Joanns through December 31. That made ordering from Joann's cheaper than ordering from anywhere else.) I also ordered a needlepoint kit to make a Christmas stocking. I made stockings for both my nephews when they were little, and my sister Santa still stuffs the stockings with candy every Christmas. Well, elder nephew (he's twenty-three) has a girlfriend who'll be spending her third Christmas with our family. There's no announced engagement, but that could come any time. (She's in vet school at the University of Georgia, and he is living and working there in Athens to be near her.) So I'm going to make Ashley a stocking...hope I can get it done in time.

Sam celebrated Gotcha Day (on 5 October) by clearing off the kitchen counter. Again. The bread was safely on top of the refrigerator. The bag of potatoes was not. Of course, Sam's muzzled, so he couldn't do anything with the potatoes beyond opening the bag and rolling the potatoes around on the kitchen floor. But he did that very well.

The Militant Greyhound

Check out the militant greyhound. (I know, the first sentence of the write-up says Cleopatra was an American. I've resisted my editor's itch and not sent the guy an e-mail about it.) Other breeds are available, but I'm quite sure the greyhound will reign supreme after the revolution.

If he can bother to get off the sofa.

The dogs pretty much are fine. The vet adjusted Sam's thyroid meds two weeks ago and started Jacey on some new stuff for the bladder issues. I'm not happy with the results in either case, although it may just take longer to see the results for Sam. For Jacey, I'm seeing results, and it's not pretty. (You probably don't want to give a dog with separation anxiety something that "might make her a bit excitable.") So I've cut her dose to 25 percent of the original dose, and we'll see what happens now.

Do not overstuff...

It’s done.



I haven’t made very many stuffed animals, and I suppose I broke the cardinal rule. (Repeat after me: Do not overstuff.) The dog isn’t designed to stand on its feet. There’s no way that could happen unless you inserted some sort of rigid support system (at which point it stops being a stuffed animal and becomes a potential hazard to unsuspecting persons throwing themselves on the bed where the dog might be). But I stuffed the back legs so that they were pretty rigid. (Hey, I had the muscular Sam’s legs as a model. He never raced, he’s been a couch potato for four years, and he’s still got a nice, tight butt.) Then, when I sewed the back legs together, they stuck out at right angles. Attaching them to the body didn’t fix the problem. So I cut off the feet, unraveled the legs up to the knees, pulled out a bunch of stuffing (but maybe not enough: Do not overstuff.), recrocheted the legs and feet.

I left the front legs alone. The body has a flap that fits between the front legs, so they weren’t going to assume any flaky angles. But they’re undoubtedly fatter than they ought to be. Do not overstuff. For the body, I concentrated on getting enough stuffing in the neck area to make the head stay upright. It, at least, is not overstuffed. And I got the tail right: you put just a bit of stuffing in the top end so it’s not totally limp.



I love the ears, though. The designer cleverly has you crochet over a length of yarn that later works like a drawstring to give the ears their characteristic “curl.”

Sam was wonderful for the photographs. The first one you see here actually was the last one I took. Sam first came over and laid himself down on the throw and put his chin flat on the ground: his usual bored-with-photography pose. The pictures looked okay because I posed the crocheted greyhound around him, and Sam tolerated the head on his, etc.



But then I moved the greyhound away from Sam for some solo pictures of it. I laid it on its side and draped its tail up over its back leg. Sam looked at the greyhound, looked at me, and perfectly copied the pose.

(And in the background, Jacey moped: “No one wants to take my picture.”)



The greyhound will go with me to the SEGC meeting Wednesday night. I’ll hand it over to the people organizing Greyfest, and they can place him up for auction at the silent auction. Sam and Jacey will be happy to see him leave. As I was assembling him last night, they spent much of the evening dodging flailing legs. (It didn’t help that I had to redo parts of two already-attached legs.)

I’m moving on to a knitting project—one that doesn’t involve polyester fiberfill, shaped pieces, and a monster assembly operation. If I ever propose making another crocheted greyhound, I hope my LiveJournal friends will try to stop me by reminding me what a pain this has been.

And if you can’t make me stop, at least make me remember: Do not overstuff.

The pattern is available here. Greyfest info here.

Saturday

Got up early today to take the dogs to a Meet and Greet. Sam hasn't been to one in years, and Jacey has never been. But Sam dropped right back into pet-me-pet-me mode, and Jacey got it figured out pretty quickly. Today's M&G was at the Marietta Farmers Market. One of the dogs there was the charming--and very tempting--Billie Holliday, the tiny little Oreo look-alike. Billie has been in a foster home for two weeks and is doing well, but she desperately wants her own home and her own person to love. (She's in a foster home where the two live-in dogs don't like her. They don't fight with her; they just totally ignore her attempts to make friends and her invitations to play.) If my condo complex didn't have a two-pet limit, I'd take her in a heartbeat. As it is, I find myself very tempted to see just how serious the complex is about enforcing the limit. (I know at least one condo here with three dogs in it--but they're all small dogs.) I keep telling myself that A--I can't afford a third dog, and B--It would not be fair to take her in and then have to return her because the condo complex did insist on enforcing the limit. I know she'll find a good home if I just leave her in the adoption program and let the system take its course. But oh, what a sweetie...

We got home from the M&G and all three of us collapsed and slept for hours, exhausted by the heat as much as anything. I've been up a while, working on the crocheted greyhound. (About 20 more rows on the last leg to do; then assembly--which probably will be difficult. It often is.) I'll probably stay up late tonight. I can sleep late tomorrow; the Yappy Hour brunch (in downtown Atlanta with the dogs) doesn't start until 1 pm.

Jacey at the vet's (again)

Poor Jacey had to have the needle-in-the-bladder experience Tuesday. Three times.

The urine sample I took to the vet's showed signs of a lingering infection, despite two weeks on antibiotics. And it is important to determine whether the infection is in the bladder or not before treatment, so the vet needed a sterile sample from the bladder. Hence, the needle.

He poked once. Oops, that was the colon. He poked again. Still not right. She needed to have a super-full bladder to make it easier to hit the target. (Bless her heart, she just stood there through the whole thing--not a whimper, not a twitch.) So the vet said to take her home, fill 'er up, bring her back in four hours. I could have left her there, but since she has separation anxiety issues, I didn't want to do that. And I didn't want her to associate the vet's office with "the place where Mom takes her and abandons her."

So I took her home. To encourage her to drink, we got nice salty french fries on our way home. She liked that part. But she turned up her nose at water--at first. So the diabolical mom squirted some maple syrup onto the bottom of an empty dish and let her sniff. And start licking. That's when I added water. She lapped faster and faster trying to get the syrup out before the water diluted it too much. (Then Sam came over and drank the rest of the water.) And we did it again. (Sam's part, too.)

Consider: How do you get the dog's bladder full--but not too full--at exactly the right time and the right place?

Answer: You don't.

Before we started back to the vet's, she was whining to go out. Instead, I took Sam out so he'd be okay to leave at home. Jacey, left in the house, decided to relieve that aching bladder. Hmmm. Back to the drawing board.

I took her early to the vet's. And I took more maple syrup...and her dish, and a bottle of water. She obediently drank more water. Then she started pacing, started to whine, started to squat... "No-no-no-no-no!" She jumped up. I hollered to the staff, "I know we're early for our appointment, but you'd better move fast or she'll flood the waiting room." They moved.

Bingo! Success with the needle. And while they spun the sample to get the proper sediment to test, Jacey got to go outside. Three times. The poor, water-logged dog was positively perky by the time she finished.

The test showed that the infection in the bladder has been cleared up. This means it's safe to put her on hormones to tighten the muscles to stop the "slow leak" she developed from taking the Clomicalm (for her anxiety). (You don't want to tighten the muscles and trap an infection inside the bladder, which is why the vet needed to be sure where the problem was. But the minor leak has meant an almost constant presence of urine in areas that shouldn't have that presence; hence, the remaining infection, which won't respond to antibiotics, but will clear up once the leaking stops.)

These hormones are not something humans take, so you can't fill this prescription in a general pharmacy. And the vet can't do it. He knows of one pharmacy in the metro area that can compound the formula. I looked up their address on MapQuest yesterday, so I could go there after work today. MapQuest conveniently neglected to warn me about a critical one-way street. I detoured, I wandered, I circled, I finally found the KenMar Medical Building and pulled in the parking lot...to be greeted by a banner that read "The KenMar Pharmacy temporarily has relocated to 55 Whichert Street." I hauled out the map book, re-detoured and re-circled, and found the building. (Free parking for 20 minutes and under. $3 for 21 minutes to two hours.) I found the pharmacy. They filled the prescription ($28). I was back in my car and in line for the parking lot exit--in 25 minutes. The pharmacist said that if I need refills I should call ahead and they'll have them waiting. I'm hoping not to need a refill. This 30-pill prescription should last through Christmas, by which time I'm really hoping she'll be all well. (One pill a day for five days; two pills a week for two weeks; one to two pills a week thereafter.)

Today I took the dogs down to a neighbor's to try to get some nice flower-enhanced pictures of them for the 2007 SEGA calendar. I just timed it right since the neighbor is planning to pick flowers Thursday morning. Between Sam's butt-sniffing and Jacey's "Can I play dead?" pose, you've never seen two dogs less interested in having their pictures taken.





But I did get some nice shots. And I have another week or two before the photos are due.

No longer an e-bay virgin...

I won my first auction on eBay.

"Won," of course, is a complete misnomer since I'm paying for the privilege. And I was the only bidder.

Believe it or not, I didn't order it for the dog sweater pattern. (I wanted the teddy bear pattern.) I found a dog sweater pattern on another site. The largest size--"X Large," they called it--is supposed to fit a dog with a girth (i.e., chest measurement) of 24 inches. Well, Jacey's chest measures 26+ inches; Sam's, 30+. I don't hold out much hope of this book having a sweater that will fit either of my dogs. And my dogs have polar-fleece coats that I made years ago. Jacey will inherit Oreo's Winnie-the-Pooh coat.

Oreo in her jammies:




I'm taking it easy on the crocheted greyhound. Work on it is proving to be hard on my hands (I wind up with aching hands the next day), so I'm only working on it a bit at a time. But I have a couple more pictures of a sulking Sam with bits of his "rival":

A flashback

I've been cleaning up e-mails and old stuff on my old computer. I came across a copy of a message board post I made in April of 2004, when SEGA was looking for stories about adopting "bounces"--dogs that get turned in to the kennel after a brief time in an adopter's home:

I never had dogs growing up. I thought long and hard about adopting a dog and was trying to figure out what breed would fit in well with my lifestyle. My neighbor has an Australian shepherd so one thing I knew for certain was that I didn't want a dog that "needed a job."

Then I saw the Animal Planet episode about the greyhound named "Go." (It's the episode with Maggie McCurry.) I started reading up about greyhounds and decided that was the breed for me.

I didn't know of any adoption groups in the Atlanta area, but I got one of those "Clipper" flyers in the mail. At the top of one page was an ad for electric fences. The bottom half of the page was an ad for Adopt-A-Greyhound Atlanta. So I called Carl and made an appointment.

When I got there, there were two females I was looking at. (Too many of the others were barking--a no-no for a condo-dwelling dog!) One was a light fawn named Calypso Pretty, the other was a black 4-year-old named Oreo--a bounce. Oreo's coat was still in good shape, and the idea of a dog that already was used to a home appealed to me as a first-time dog-owner. So Oreo won me mostly on her looks, and partly because I figured the behavioral kinks were already worked out. (It doesn't seem to have occurred to me that she might have been returned because of a problem that I should be worried about. The story was that she was owned by an older couple whose son looked after her, then the son moved out of state and the couple couldn't cope.)

Oreo has turned out to be a prima donna. And a mama's girl. And a delight, with smiles and helicopter-tail-wags for her favorite people.

In looking for a group that had activities I could take Oreo to, I found SEGA. And because Oreo was so well-behaved at home from the beginning, she gave me the confidence to take on fosters who hadn't lived in a home. And because Oreo was so easy to handle--and most of the fosters were, too--I didn't hesitate to adopt a second dog. (See, Oreo? It's your own fault that you've got to share with Sam.)

These days, Oreo is too often in diva-mode, and isn't well-behaved around other females; this means she's missing some outings that Sam gets to go on. But she still meets us eagerly (even frantically) at the door ("Where have you been? Do you know how worried I was, relying on *him* to protect you?"). She wakes me in the morning with kisses if she thinks I'm sleeping too late. When she wakes up from a nap, she comes over and lays her head in my lap for kisses and cuddles (which she just did while I was typing this message).

The people that let Oreo get away don't know what a gem they lost. But I do. And finders, keepers...

...losers, weepers.

Jacey at the vet's

Jacey went to the vet today. She's got either a bladder or a vaginal infection, and my money is on the bladder thing (she's always peed "funny"). So she's on antibiotics for two weeks. If there's not an improvement, she goes in for them to take a urine sample with a needle to determine what the problem is. (Jacey, trust me, you really want to get over this now--without another vet visit.)

The very minor incontinence issue might be from the infection. But it might be a "known minor side effect" of the Clomicalm she had to take. If the incontinence continues once the infection is cleared up, the vet might put her on some hormones that would have the effect of tightening things up "down there."

Meanwhile, she was a good girl at the vet's. And she's four pounds lighter than she was on her first visit, when she was still overweight from her stay at the greyhound kennel.

Greyhound update

The crocheted greyhound has a body (not stuffed as yet; pictures later) and about a third of one rear leg. My hands were very sore after last weekend's marathon crochet session, and since I need flexible hands to earn my living, I've left the crochet hook alone until today. I've adjusted my grip on the hook and yarn--partly to alleviate the sore hands and partly to eliminate the unfortunate corkscrewing tendency produced by too-tight stitches. (I'm planning to redo the front leg I did last weekend because it corkscrews too much.)