I really did NOT want a puppy. I studiously avoided the puppy room at the county shelter, hoping to find a senior doggie I could give a few good final years to. My husband and I had been to a few shelters and adoption events at PetSmart, but no one really connected with us, or vice versa. So,one afternoon in Jan 2010 we were at our county’s kill shelter and I had almost settled on an older Golden. Until my husband saw HER. I had missed her, she was huddled into the darkest corner of a kennel for a big dog in the adult dog section. I had unknowingly walked by her several times, at first glance the kennel looked empty. Hubby said,”honey,come and see this”, and there she was. Scared and trembling, covered in her own poo and mangy, kennel full of diarrhea. God she stunk so bad I nearly gagged. She was so afraid that I had to go into the kennel to get her, and when I picked her up she peed everywhere. But that face, OMG, there was just no way I couldn’t give her a chance. She was nothing but legs and ears(and that hasn’t changed either, lol). The vet would later estimate her age at around 3 months, she was almost 40 percent underweight.
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I could not adopt her right away, she had been dumped at the shelter that day and there’s a 10 day wait for new arrivals. I held her in the shelter’s quiet room until they made me leave. She was skinny, you could see all her bones, on closer inspection she also had fleas. I didn’t care, I had fallen in love. When I first picked her up, once she stopped trembling, she laid her head on my shoulder let out a sigh and fell asleep. Seriously. This dog was mine. By the time I walked out the door of the shelter that first day, I had named her Abby.
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Another Open Thread
Not quite sure what to do with myself.
They’ve enlisted all their family, they’ve enlisted all their friends…
I don’t usually pimp old threads, but I’ll make an exception. If you happen to be a rich tycoon looking to hire dozens of talented but out-of-work Balloon Juicers (or even if you’re just a talented but out-of-work Balloon Juicer), this morning’s jobs thread may be worth a read…
They’ve enlisted all their family, they’ve enlisted all their friends…Post + Comments (61)
My Open Thread Is Better
Since my delicious dinner was last night described as “someone’s scalp next to a pile of barf, with a sad green garnish on top,” I’ll be damned if I share what I am having tonight with you all. In fairness, if I were an independent judge, I would have probably given myself negative points for plating.
Still fighting an internal struggle as to whether I should get a Breville or KitchenAid mixer.
Open Thread
In this episode, Max tells me to stop blathering about great light and get back to the park already.
Chat.
Dylan Ratigan Is Shrill
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Open Thread – Delusions of Grandeur
One of my favorite bloggers, Lance Mannion, has up a lovely post about Andrew Sullivan.
I haven’t had a credit card for years, because I actually live like a fiscal conservative.
We’re sure you do, Andrew. But you know what else you live like?
A man with a six-figure income and no children.
Getting a little tired of being told by the well-to-do strolling down Park Avenue that the rest of us hoi polloi need to share in some more sacrifice and tighten our belts another notch.
Sullivan also thinks we need to raise the age of retirement. Again not advice we want to hear from someone who can go on vacation for weeks at a time seemingly whenever he wants and who has a job he can do and do well until he’s 90, if his health allows.
One of the things that drives us nuts about Sullivan is that it’s all so personal with him. I don’t mean he thinks it’s all about him. I mean that sometimes—a lot of times—he doesn’t seem able to imagine that not everybody in the United States is a gay ex-pat Brit living in Washington, D.C. whose big disappointment in life recently was being turned down for a mortgage on a second home.
Yeah. Sullivan didn’t get to buy a summer house in Provincetown. The heart heart bleeds.
Because Lance is a much nicer person than I am, his post doesn’t end there and it has some interesting ideas about why many of us keep reading Sullivan (despite Sullivan’s frequent wrongheadedness, weird man-crushes on people who would set him on fire if they could (Paul Ryan, anyone?), inexplicable belief that Margaret Thatcher was anything but a vile and termagant harridan who should have been murdered in a ditch with “Section 28” engraved on her forehead with a stanley knife, and the fact that when he goes on holiday he apparently turns his entire blog over to the tender mercies of a room full of particularly flatulent monkeys).
ETA: H/t to commenter Arundel