The Lion King!

Currently Reading: Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena

Isn't this cute?

How about this?

She's such a cutie pie!

She belongs to one of our clients at the salon. That's my work, right there. She came in along with her sister on Friday. The owners wanted their dogs shaved but poms look horrible shaved all the way so they decided to go with a lion cut. Came out great don't you think? The owner loved it. More importantly, the owner's girlfriend (who's actually the REAL owner) loved it. They'll be coming back regularly for sure now :-)

It's funny, they used to live in our apartment complex. He used to hang out by the pool all the time so I guess it was HIS apartment and she moved in. They got married and moved into a house. How do I know all this? Well, I'm just filling in the blanks really. Never really saw her around while he was living here. The info card they filled out shows them both with the same last name now and a new address, which doesn't have an apartment number.

Anyway, as I was saying, they used to live here, or at least he did. Saw him all the time at the pool. Then he started coming into the store to buy dog things (which was probably about the time they started living together). They would come and ask me for advice on dog grooming products because I work in the salon. Now I'm a groomer so where do they go to get their dog cut? You got it. The same place they got excellent customer service :-)

Speaking of customer service, I had a guy come in on Sunday who went off on a rant about one of our competitors. I won't name names but the store in question isn't as SMART as they think they are ;-) He was really angry about the service there. He'd told me that they've had to cancel appointments for his dog TWICE and they didn't give any advance warning. He'd show up with his dog and they'd tell him it couldn't be done because (insert excuse here). Once in a while that sort of thing will happen of course. We had to do it last year when our groomer had a kidney stone and left for the day. We had no way to call the people who were already on their way to their appointments but we managed to deal with the rest. But with this guy, it's happened TWICE already. Just goes to show you that just because the store has SMART in its name doesn't mean they've got smart employees or give good customer service. Better to GO where the pets GO. Got it? ;-)

I'm still not "officially" a groomer yet though. Oh yes, I am working as a groomer, don't get me wrong. And I pull in the proper groomer's commission too. I had to send in pictures last week though and they still haven't been processed. You have to groom three different dogs to show that you know what you're doing and take before/after pictures to be sent to the district office for approval. That's all I'm waiting on now. I've passed all the other exams and, as I said, I've been working as a groomer. Just this weekend I worked Sunday solo and was the groomer on Monday too. Last week they sent me over to another store to fill in over there too so even though it's not official yet, I'm doing the job.

The best part, so far anyway, is that I haven't had any complaints (knock on wood). Granted I'm not exactly what you'd call speedy but so far everything has come out how the owner wanted it to come out. It's been tricky in a few cases too because the owners sometimes ask for stuff that's not normal. Take yesterday for example. Woman came in with a shihtzu. Apparently she has gotten tired of dealing with the tangling hair and so forth because her dog goes outside a lot. She wanted that dog bald. Ok. We can do bald. Normally we don't do it on that type of dog though because people like them styled. She also wanted the face shaved too. Normally we go with a rounder pattern so the dog looks like a teddy bear. She also wanted the ears shaved. Then sort of blend it all together. So what she got was a short shave, cocker spaniel face, terrier ears, poodle head. The poodle head part was just what I did with the hair on the top that was leftover. Couldn't shave the poor thing BALD. That would look freaky.

In the end, her dog sort of looked like a white, furry Yoda. Well, she had HUGE eyes which were now VERY visible so when she'd flop her ears back, just imagine Yoda, but white and fuzzy :-)

Guess you'd better get used to this, me telling dog stories I mean. That's probably what the blog is going to fill up with for a while. At the end of the month CC and I are going on a short vacation so we may have some adventure stories out of that but otherwise I think the summer will be going to the dogs so to speak. Dog days of summer, come on, you know that joke right? :-)