FRIDAY, April 25, 2008, continued - Page 2

The grass is growing fast

     We wanted to do some weed-eating of the fast-growing grass in and around the kennels, but for some reason we just couldn't get the weed-eater started. We had already brought Blind Mother Freckles and Tallie-girl inside our Hospital II because they really don't like the noise of the weed-eater, but the weed-eating will have to wait.

     Bill came down from his office to mow the big play yard (aka the park) for us, and that was a lot of help because we could hardly see the dog droppings in the fast-growing grass.

New kennel helpers speed up projects

     As we go along removing the front boards and taking the old hay out, we will next be bathing all of our dogs, and then we will Frontline them and spray their kennels, before we put the dogs go back into their kennels. This is taking a lot of time, but having no help was making it even more difficult and time consuming. We really hope that the new crew we have now will stick with us for a long while. Stephie and Michael are new kennel crew members, and both are doing well.

A snake in Purtis and Big Boy's kennel

     Last night (Thursday) was Tina's regular night to cover the overnight shift for Randy, our regular overnight man, and she along with her husband, Jeff (who usually accompanies Tina on this shift), had a big scare. Tina heard the dogs barking and was checking on what was going on, and she could see that Purtis was jumping back and forth at something. At first she thought that it was probably a toad in their kennel, but Little Big Boy stayed hiding inside his dog house rather than try to get the toad as most dogs do. Tina went into their kennel with a flash light trying to see where the "toad" was, and she was going to try to reach for it, but luckily before she did, she saw it was a big snake.

     Tina yelled to Jeff to come outside quick, and he came running to see what was going on. Jeff looked at the snake and said it was some kind of a water snake. He grabbed it behind the head and took it down to the pond, and he said he watched it slither away. Nothing bad happened to our dogs or to Tina or Jeff, thank God. It was just a big scare for them.

No time for vet visits, but $9,000 has been applied to our clinic bill

     No vet visits today, but I do want to make several appointments pretty soon, starting next week again. Right now I'm trying to focus on training new people to get us some help around here. Unless it is an emergency, we really need to wait for a bit on vet visits.

     Good news we just found out concerning our vet bill: a total of $9,000 was recently applied directly to our vet bill at Morton Small Animal Clinic, which we very much thank you contributors for.

Thunder scares some of the dogs at afternoon feeding

     At feeding time we started hearing thunder in the distance, and as usual Misty, Briar and Bobby wouldn't eat for us. We tried again later to feed these three fellas, but they still wouldn't eat. As soon as we finish feeding and most of our crew had left for the day, I heard all the dogs barking their "Escape Alert!" which always tells us that one or more dogs have gotten out of their kennel. Then I remembered that Oso was outside now staying with Patsy in Fancy's kennel, and yes, there he was standing by the park gate wanting to go inside. I went and got him and brought him inside the hospital trailer, put him in a crate, and he was fine. Wayne went over to Oso and Patsy's kennel and found a huge hole where Oso had dug out under the fence, so Wayne filled that in. The funny thing was that Patsy hadn't tried to escape through the hole with Oso. She was a good girl and just stayed in the kennel.