i know she's deaf but shouldn't one of her other senses kick in?  at the very least it seems she should sense a very large object looming behind her...or perhaps she just doesn't give a rat's ass.

this has been a rough month for dave & i in terms of our workload - we've been working a lot of very, very long days. this got the better of me on monday and i pulled a “costanza” in the factory. apparently i was only asleep for a few minutes but i have to tell you it felt like the best sleep of my life.

we did get a chance to experience some top-notch entertainment thursday night when we went to see bruce springsteen at the arena in nashville. i should mention that i was not a fan of bruce’s for the first few decades of my life…the “born in the usa” hype in the eighties was lost on me and i always thought he sang kind of like a frog. dave in contrast was such a crazed fan that upon receiving his driver’s license he hightailed it to the jersey shore for the sheer joy of driving the entire length of e street. oh yeah, i said the entire length. even though we grew up one town away from each other, fortunately, i was not aware of dave in high school as i’m fairly certain i would have thought he was a dork. when discussing this fact dave swears he didn’t tell any girls about his e street journey. so, fast-forward to dave’s college years and imagine his shock and awe when he walked into his statistics class at seton hall university and saw drummer max weinberg sitting in the same room. max, while on hiatus from working with bruce, was returning to his former school to finish his degree, having left many years prior after answering an ad in the new york city’s “village voice” to join a then unknown group called the e street band. if this veteran expected to go unnoticed by another young, eager upstart drummer he had another thing coming and learned as much on their first break from the discussions of means and medians.

anyhoo, my admitted shortsightedness on bruce was altered completely when dave forced me to go to a concert during the rising tour. he and the e street band are an amazing force to be reckoned with. i don’t know how he performs for three hours and then functions the next day. dave & i were just watching and were exhausted (although i bet bruce didn’t have to work a full day, feed a bunch of dogs and rush out of the house to make it to his concert). i highly recommend seeing him if you get the chance. 

i don’t know if any of you frequent dogstar – if you do don’t expect to see earthdog popping up there anytime soon. i received a cold call from michael, a member of their “establishment”, a few months ago followed by a very short but lively email conversation with them. i’ve had the emal in my inbox for a few months and since i chuckle every time i read it i thought i would share it with you. first the backstory…as i said, i received a sales call and since i was busy at the time and was not familiar with the website i asked michael if he could email me information. he said he could email or fax me at which time i said “please don’t fax anything…if you can email it i’ll take a look at it and get back to you.” no less than 1 minute later our fax machine starts ringing and do you know what it was? do you? i think you might be right – it was a fax from dogstar – a word document much less (easily emailable, right). come on michael our environmental footprint is not gonna lessen itself. now i will admit i got pretty incensed and immediately shot off a slightly obnoxious email without really thinking about it – it was not the most businesslike of emails. it went something like this (capitals have been left in to retain the integrity of the email):

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 4:45 PM, earthdog wrote:

Michael,

When I spoke to you on the phone I specifically stated that I did not wish to receive marketing materials via fax and yet you faxed the materials anyway, apparently after finding our fax number on our website. Why in the world would you fax a text document (that could easily be emailed) if you were specifically told NOT to fax the information? When you are cold calling potential customers it would be in your best interest to listen to them, especially if you are trying to form a long-lasting relationship with them. That being said our 2008 marketing/advertising budget is spoken for.

kym

earthdog
good for the earth...even better for your dog
www.earthdog.com

not so much a well thought out email, i’ll give you that. in the future i should probably take some time before shooting emails off. it was all worth it for the gem i received back:

Great kym you will never advertise on our sites. Also learn some respect - welcome to our blacklist -- We do not deal with jerks. CYA!!! Jim Webmaster

to you webmaster jim i say touché…well played.

just a few things that need to be mentioned.  first off i want to profusely thank you for the amazing emails i've received since i started this blog.  i feel like a little too much altruism is being attributed to dave & i but it is definately much appreciated...flattery will definately get you everywhere.  i'm still struggling with the idea of the blog - to think that people would actually be interested in reading about our life seems a bit pompous.  i also struggle with what to write about - you guys can definately help by pointing me in the right direction - is it just the dogs that are interesting, do you enjoy the pictures and videos, do you seriously want to hear about our life????  it makes my head hurt when i think of it.  i do have to say, as much as i struggle with the writing side of it, it is so enjoyable to share these stories and share my dogs and their antics with you.  we're just plugging away at our little life here and the fact that some people see it as worthy of reading and then to email with very kind words is pretty amazing and i thank you from the bottom of my heart.  please let me know what you'd like to see or i might have to succumb to dave's wishes of  "more speck please." 

on another note i have finally gotten the start of our kody’s fund website up.  kody's fund is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that dave & i started to fund spay & neuter programs.  check it out if you feel so inclined - at the very least you should check out the kody pics (they alone are worth the price of admission).

i used to be a baking fool in my less busy days. now i’m a can’t be bothered fool, especially since i stopped eating sugar several years ago. i’ll still bake for dave once in a while when asked but my how things have changed. it used to be that if you were a friend of mine and it was your birthday i showed up with a cake, whether invited or not. i still have an obsession with birthday cake – i find it hard to believe having a cake on the celebration of your birth is not of the utmost importance to every birthday girl or guy. the last two years i’ve baked my own birthday cake because it was a bit too much to expect dave to figure out how to bake a vegan cake plus the cake that i made was a-m-a-z-i-n-g (i have to find new ways of creating emphasis without capital letters - which I hate to admit do come in handy once in a very great while). note: if you eat sugar incredibly sporadically and then single-handedly devour an entire birthday cake you will most likely feel fairly shitty and like you’ve been dunked in molasses…the world moves very fast around you.

because dave’s brother, sister-in-law and their three children are coming for a visit this weekend i decided to dust off my baking shoes. this is my first foray into vegan cupcakes…because i’m pretty durn smart i decided to take a trial run. thankfully, because while these cupcakes are pretty tasty, there is a little tweaking that needs to happen. they’re totally organic and vegan and quite yummy. check out vegan cupcakes take over the world if you feel compelled. i will tell you that when they say you can substitute up to half of the white flour with whole wheat pastry flour and no one will know the difference they’re lying…you’ll know.

i’m in awe of flanagan and all the progress he’s made in the 3 months we’ve had him. he’s overcome a lot and made enormous changes. speck has greatly helped (she’s got to earn her keep somehow) and my obsessive hug therapy (patent pending) seems to be cracking him. speck and he spend a good half hour every morning after breakfast chasing each other around the house like lunatics. that’s enormous progress and very dog-like. this morning i turned around and they were both on the couch fighting – that’s enormous progress and very dog-like. i may be one of the few people that gets totally tickled when a dog starts getting on the couch – to me it’s like the sign they’re comfortable in their new surroundings. we have had very, very few dogs come into this house and immediately get on a couch – it generally takes a few weeks of me constantly patting the couch and trying to drag them on it before they do it on their own. i’m clear this is an odd scene as most people are working to keep their animals off the furniture…to each his own i say.

anyhoo, back to flanagan. he now lets me drape myself over him and hug the crap out of him for seconds at a time – that’s really enormous progress. previously if he saw me starting to bend over he ran away – forget about getting an arm in the mix. the “separation anxiety” that was so bad his previous owners felt the need to keep him in a cage heavily sedated 24-7 is non-existent. when we first got him he exhibited a little in that when we went out and came back home he would go crazy jumping around for maybe 5 minutes (completely tolerable) – now he’s down to about 30 seconds of craziness. quite honestly i’d rather have a dog be excited to see me when i come home than not give a crap. his main problem had been that his only form of expression seemed to be grabbing your wrists – he would never bite down but he did slobber ya up pretty good (which dave cannot stomach – no slobber, no licks, no kisses). he’s doing that less and less and is finding other means of successful communication. this guy who 3 months ago was a complete shell of a dog, not accepting of love and with no idea how to be a dog at all is really surprisingly a pretty fantabulous example of the canine race. i absolutely adore him and fully expect that in another 3 months he will be completely unrecognizable from the “dakota” i brought home.

this is a picture of flanagan trying to get the best of speck while dave was doing a photo shoot.  this is typical of what's constantly going on behind the scenes here...kind of like having a dozen or so drunk midgets around at all times.

 mr. dyson you are a genius and a lifesaver. as you can probably imagine with 14 dogs there is a lot to suck up, much of it requiring a vacuum. historically we would need to replace our carpet vacs at least every 6 months and that was with using a shop-vac to do our hardwood floors. these were not bargain bin vacuums either – these were several hundred dollar models touting extreme sucking power. i always believed them at first and they seemed to be vacuums of their word and then time passed and they got tired, so very tired until they got so tired they died. the last few weeks of life were only possible by providing constant maintenance trying to eek out whatever suction we could get. on a brisk day in november 2006 (i remember it like it was yesterday) we broke down and bought a dyson just waiting to be disappointed. we have never been more wrong. no more shop-vac, no more maintenance, no more broken back, no more replacing vacuums every six months, no more dirt deep down in our carpets that we didn’t even know was there. this baby does it all and then some. the dyson gets everything…and i mean eeeeeverything! i’m constantly appalled by the sack of dirt we pull out of this house on a weekly basis – dave gleefully weighed a bag one week and if i’m remembering correctly it hovered around 5 lbs. that’s absolutely disgusting on one hand and yet oddly satisfying on another – heck i don’t want to be vacuuming for nothing. that’s my 2-cents on the dyson – i give it as many stars as it can get and not a single complaint. if you don’t have a dyson stop what you’re doing right now (finish reading first) and go get one – 14 dogs or not!

check out this picture of watson – see all those spots on him. those are tiny, prickly, annoying burrs and our field is lousy with them from july to i can’t remember when (hopefully august, but it could be september or october or, good golly please not november). what this means is that each time the dogs that frequent said field (namely phineus, simon, watson, fletcher & indi) go outside and come back in they have a new batch of burrs. for some of them, specifically phineus & simon, the burrs actually act like dippity-do and allow for some amazing hair-don’ts. petting them is like petting 80-grit sandpaper (it might actually be more like 60-grit). fortunately for them, these guys are somehow self-cleaning, which means whatever burrs they come in with are generally gone by the time they go out again. this is fabulous because it means they can put on a whole new burr suit each and every time they go out. the burrs seem to be using the dogs only as a conduit to reach their nirvana – nirvana in this case apparently being our furniture and on a slightly smaller scale my clothes. once those burrs cross the threshold they are here, they’ve made it. i sit down on the couch and wonder what is sticking me in the thigh or the back or the butt and oh, what’s this, oh now i remember, the burrs, while watson is pretty burr-free for the moment. he’s the harriet tubman of the foliage community providing safe passage to all things organic and prickly.

because reilley is kitchen counter height he has the opportunity to take whatever he wants, fortunately he rarely exploits this gift. about 98.7% of the time he is very respectful of food on the counter - the only caveat being when there is watermelon in his presence. he doesn’t try to steal the watermelon (that might anger me) – he just rests his head hoping that i’ll be moved enough by his display of restraint and desire to reward him with said watermelon. let it be said that i love watermelon and i seem to have tainted reilley with my enthusiasm. watermelon rocks people…it’s the earth’s candy.