Click images for desktop size: "The Long and the Tall" by Unknown The giant dog woke me. Simple method; barked in my face till I got up.
He was only the emissary. The other two dogs were agitated and waiting for me to get up and open the door. There was something in the yard.
I let them out. Typical non-event. And little barking.
They're all asleep now. My friends asleep. The whole house is silent except for me.
Headphones on. Staring at LCD screens and thinking. Always thinking even when the thoughts are just about white noise and guitar strings.
My puppy stayed in the office with me for a while. I was boring. She left.
She did her job. She reminded me that no matter how dark the night I'm not alone, never alone. Free? As free as I can be I guess. Freedom in exchange for never being alone seems a fair deal. Never alone against no responsibility, no love, just me and my pills and my pain.
Maybe the deal is too much in my favour.
Some good news yesterday. Very good news.
It started when the Animal Rescue service called. We're going to get to be foster dog parents.
Very cool.
All that's left is the house visit. Which just means some house cleaning. There's little question this is a home built for dogs.
My friend wants me to find out about us getting a shelter license. Where we could have as many dogs as we saw fit (and could afford). I still have a strong distaste for dealing with governments but the pay off would be kind of astonishingly great.
Both my friend and I are experienced fosters. I love having the dogs come in. Its a positive for everyone. Our dogs get to meet and adapt to another personality, the foster gets out of the shelter.
Click images for desktop size: "Marvel Comics Presents" Even the nice shelters are pretty hellish, at least to me.
My last foster was in an area that still believed in kill shelters. There the fostering had a more poignant edge. The poor dogs had either me or death. This never stopped any of them from making my life pleasantly miserable. One foster ate a wall, I've lost countless frozen pizzas off of kitchen counters. One foster I loved had this incredible ability to dig a three foot hole in under 5 seconds!
My puppy would argue with them, play with them. My puppy used to like to lay out her stuffed toys in the sun light. She would spend an amazing amount of time laying them out and arranging them, then she would just lie down and stare at them. I guess she was feeling wealthy.
All of the fosters respected her little arrangements, until her back was turned. then they'd steal her toys and actually play with them like a dog is intended to.
Here they don't have any kill shelters. It sort of puts the lie to the myth that kill shelters provide any sort of service. Even though the pups aren't facing unjust execution their lives are still sadly miserable.
The shelters here are nice. The shelters in LA are a disgrace. Visiting any of them is tantamount to seeing the undiscussed circle of hell. Here they're clean. Each dog has a room, not a cage, but its still prison. No dog is happy until someone stops to talk at them, and when the person leaves they sink back into their lonely misery.
One thing this agency does that is different from any past
Click images for desktop size: "Marty Robbins" experience; they let you pick which dog to foster.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. My experience is that the coordinator calls me and says that if I don't take this or that puppy they'll die tomorrow.
Its an unfair pressure I don't mind.
Here we had to go through the web site and pick one.
Considering that both my friend and I are prone to the "oh, hell, just give me all of them" syndrome and "we'll figure out how to deal with it as things come up" affliction, this is dangerous.
We picked two dogs for more info on. Both are Belgian mix breeds. In the pictures both dogs look terrified and terribly sad.
The female is a terv mix, about 18 months old. She was picked up on the street. No one ever claimed her. This makes me figure she was abandoned. Driven someplace and kicked out of the car to "wander lost and lonely like a cloud".
The male has a face too much like my puppy's. He's about 6 months. A surrender. That means that some one decided that his black fur didn't coordinate well with the new carpet, or his toes clicking on the linoleum grated on their nerves.
That's harsh. There are probably several good reasons for taking someone into your life and then cruelly dumping them. I can't think of any. At least its better than abandoning them to their own
Click images for desktop size: "I Feel You" by Jose Manchado devices. I don't really think so but it sounds like it should be better.
We'll know this weekend when we get the home inspection. I'll take the cowardly way out and let my friend make the final pick. I figure let both of them stay here, even though I know I could never cope with two new scared dogs, but I guess I'd figure it out.
I also love the idea of meeting the perspective adopting people. Its nothing but a warm experience.
The other nice news is that the football club apparently wants me to coach. They haven't figured out the assignments yet but they want me attend the "fitting" clinic this Saturday.
This is the clinic where they show coaches the right way to wear shoulder pads and the proper sizing and strapping for helmets.
Its been a lot of years since I had to attend something like this. I expect to be pleasantly bored.
I used to keep up with this stuff by listening to the salesman. Eastman, Riddle, Air etc were always making alterations to their equipment, innovations maybe. Th salesman would demonstrate and point out any differences in how the gear should be worn.
I'll be most interested in meeting my fellow coaches. I hope there aren't any militaristic win-at-all-costs types. Most of the time you can't recognize the type until game day. They've learned to disguise it.
If that weren't enough my computer worked all day. Its still going.
My friend is learning to love her MacBook. She using Parallels along with gr to do her job and keep it all on her Mac.
The only slight negative is that yesterday was the last day of her four days off. This is the start of her Quarter End which means I probably not really see her until this weekend.
Its a bearable absence.