If you love coffee and love porters, this is not one to be missed.
I finally got around to writing up instructions for how I crochet many of my dog sweaters. I have it available here for free as a PDF download.
As I noted briefly in it, while trying not to be too preachy, please consider using up extra stash yarn by crocheting up a few to donate to your local shelter or rescue.
I'm sorry, but Ellen has no right to ask the rescue organization to do this. Rescues have reasons for not adopting pets into home with children under 14 because there's no guarantee that young children are capable of behaving responsibly with a pet. This rescue did not adopt the dog out to that family! They adopted the dog out to a supposedly mature, responsible older couple with two cats, not to a family with an 11- and 13-year-old.
I say "supposedly responsible" because no rescue makes light of or makes a secret of the fact that if you're NOT able to care for the pet you've adopted, that the animal goes back to the rescue.
From the Animal Friends Rescue Project: "The adopter will not abandon, give away or surrender the animal to anyone else."
From Great Dane Rescue: "If you cannot keep the dog for some reason, every reputable rescue group (including all of the groups listed on these pages) will agree to take the dog back or help in the placement of the dog into an approved home."
From Equine Rescue: "If for any reason the adoptive family can no longer keep the animal, it is to come back to the Rescue. These animals may not be sold, leased, rented, loaned or given to anyone."
From Raleigh Rodent Rescue: "... we always take our animals back should you become unable to care for the animal."
From Given A Chance Hamster Rescue: "If for whatever reason you find you can not keep your hamster and would like to place them up for adoption, contact us as soon as possible via e-mail. We can usually find a place for the hamster and the hamster will remain with us until he/she finds their forever home."
Rescues often struggle against ridiculous odds to literally save high risk adoptable animals from being put down, pay out of pocket for their costs (food, shelter, vaccinations, medical care, socialization, etc) to rehabilitate them to family life, and the emotional and legal costs involved in running a rescue. It costs maybe something like $80 to adopt a dog from a shelter, with no knowledge of its medical condition, emotional wellbeing, preferences to cats or children, or housebreaking needs. For something like $130, you can get a dog from a rescue that's invested the time and effort into finding out all those details for you.
Now imagine that for all that invested into the animal (often hundreds of dollars), as well as in you for checking out your background and home and lifestyle, you walk down the street one day and give the dog away to a random stranger. They seem nice enough, and say they have experience with dogs, but it turns out they sell breeder dogs to puppy mills, or bully-breed mixes to dog-fighting rings. Forget that, let's take something more innocent... the nice family you give the dog to can't keep it after six months and rather than telling you, they give it away to someone else that ends up turning it back in to a high-risk shelter, when it's put down. Great.
I'm sure Ellen's a nice person at the end of the day, but I scoff at her claim of having worked with so many rescue and animal awareness groups if she was so oblivious to this hard rule. More than likely, she just considered herself exempt. Sad.
Tags: dogs, cats, pets, animals, adoption, rescues, violation
Tags: stuntfighting, acting, ninja, karate
I find something like How to Cook Food on Your Car's Engine :-) If that's not a winner for you, there's How to Cook Lasagna in Your Dishwasher.
Tags: car, cooking, food, dishwasher
The spouse-unit and I had the GOOD fortune to go to the GOOD magazine party @ the Natural History Museum on Friday. Was fantastic! Free admission, free alcohol, Izze drinks, great music and a gorgeous museum to top it all off. What more could you ask for? Honestly, if you're not already subscribed to GOOD, you need to check it out. 100% of your $20 subscription goes to the cause of your choice. :-)
Silly cats. I notice that Irix looked cold yesterday and crammed an old sweater into the third-floor cat house. Today, I happened to see this: two cats that hate each other squashed together inside a tiny space.
Really - it's not THAT cold. :-)
The spouse-unit got tix for the show @ the Staples Center here in L.A.
at the end of November. Gaaah!! :-) It's just sinking in.. wowwowwow.
!!! Love my Ozzy..
I've discovered the joy that is a glass of water + a pack of Emergen-C + one umph tablet. :-)
Tags: caffeine
I love L.A.
I'm fascinated by the looks people give me when I say this. Something like disbelief, sometimes even a little pity, as if they suddenly realize I must not have traveled outside of Southern California in my life. I smile back, sometimes a little vapidly, just for the hell of it. I don't care. I love L.A.
I'm about as L.A. as you can get, which we all know means I'm a hypocrite. I'm against gas-guzzling SUVs, but nothing smells like home more than the smog coming in over LAX. I gaze out through watering eyes at those dreamy purple sunsets knowing exactly where they come from and I still adore them. I try not to be flakey, but I'm sure I am sometimes. Who isn't these days, when the lure of killing an hour on Facebook with a homemade mojito in hand is more appealing than having to dig out something trendy to wear and hit the be-seen eateries on Hollywood.
I like driving in L.A. I love the freeways, the way they wind about, the pace of traffic like a stretched-out heartbeat. It's my river. I slid on in from the edge and float across the lanes to find the right current, the one that's going to send me flying across the cities, little neighborhoods smooshed together like a handful of marshmallows in a toddler's sticky hand. In twenty-eight minutes, I've cruised over hills faded brown and green from summer and through several clustered highrise downtowns of puffed-up cities. Every city in L.A. has it's own downtown.
I had one of those days today. I thought about calling up my best friend that I haven't talked to in a year and tried calling her old number, but she wasn't home. I drove by my father's old house, the house I grew up with, just to see if anything had changed, which it hadn't. I had left a DHL box I'd meant to mail at home and a store I'd wanted to check out was closed. I came home four hours later feeling as if I'd just taken an aimless drive on a Monday afternoon.. oh, wait, that's exactly what I did do.
But at least this was all here. People are so beautiful in L.A. Hell, I don't care if it comes across as shallow, I love beautiful people and to me, they're everywhere here. The most gorgeous latina girl served me up a burrito bol at Chipotle last week and it was all I could do to keep from leaning across the sneezebar, smiling shyly and asking her if she'd take her clothes off for me, her skin was such that perfect creamy porcelain kind. That's the funny thing, though, you can't just get away with being ethnic and beautiful here to stand out. You have to be African and American and you'd better be able to flip between the two in talk, dress, culture and aspirations on the flip of a dime. Flaky, plastic Tinseltown demands nothing less than the most perfect sacrifice for her hellish flames, you know.
Tags: losangeles, freeways, people, beauty, life
