Bill Arnold's Daily Straydog Log

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 10 2004

The pugs came back from the vet clinic after five o'clock last evening

     Jimbo, the male, came through his neuter surgery just fine.

     The female (mother of the male) has a heart condition, which was causing her cough. Dr. Morton prescribed some medicine to help her.

     Susan and Shelly (the two Straydog employees who have been fostering the pugs at their house) took the pugs home last evening, and this morning Shelly reports that the male left his stitches alone and the female's cough is not as bad today.

     These two very cute pugs will be going to Adoption Day Again this coming Saturday.

Rudy has gained two pounds!

     We're now giving Rudy four big meals per day, and we're keeping him confined in one of the small hospital kennels for a good part of each day so that he doesn't run off all the extra calories he is consuming.

Short updates till I get caught up

     I shouldn't say "till I get caught up," because I don't quite see how that will ever happen. But I must get the process of creating the daily PDF file (which is the ready-to-print version) of our daily update in place before we go much further, and this work is very time-consuming.

     The plan is to use these daily printable updates (which will, of course, be ever changing) as inserts with our thank-you letters to contributors. The second phase of this plan is to use the best of the daily updates for a quarterly newsletter to be mailed to everyone in our address book.

     I must again remind you, our Internet readers, that about 85 to 90% of our contributors never see this website. There are 2,400 names in our mailing address book and only about 300 people hit this website every day, and who knows how many of our daily readers hit our site multiple times thus causing the counter to register another hit? The counter is supposed to count only unique hits, but I have noticed that when I reload the page after I make a change, the counter bumps up a number. (This could mean we have only 30 daily viewers, each of whom hits our site 10 times per day.)

     Yesterday I was working on fulfilling the requirements of a matching grant, and one of the items the grantor requires is a recent brochure about Straydog Inc. I usually just send out the most recent newsletter, but this grantor has already seen the December newsletter, and for a long time we've needed a simple, little, one-page (or one-sheet, front and back) "flyer" that can very quickly give new people a general idea about what Straydog Inc. is all about. I'm trying to finalize that "flyer" before I do anything else.