The Dogs of Monday and the PS2

Currently Reading: Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko

I think a lot of people have the wrong idea about what I do for a living. I'm a dog groomer, they know that, but for most people a dog grooming salon is where rich people take their fuzzy little poodles and shih tzus to be pampered and styled. Or maybe it's the kind of place a Paris Hilton wannabe goes to spend 50 bucks on a bath for a chihuahua. I'm sure there are places out there like that but I don't work at one of them.

To be fair, we do get a lot of smaller dogs like Billy Ray. He's part poodle, part bichon. Cute little guy. And we do get our share of shih tzus and yorkies and chihuahuas and any number of other small dogs that come in for a little pampering. That's just a small part of the business though.

This time of year many outside dogs are sleeping inside and their owners are finding that their dogs just don't smell very good. The dogs are also shedding like mad. This is why we get quite a few dogs like Connor here, a border collie mix who came in for a long shave and shaping up. His owner wanted shorter hair so there'd be less to deal with when it sheds but at the same time he didn't want the face and neck clippered so short that you lost the distinctive features of a border collie. Not an easy trick to pull off but I managed pretty well.

Then there are dogs like Jordan who only come in once or twice a year. This is her over on the left. She's a Newfoundland, which is a rather large breed, quite a bit like a black or brown St. Bernard but maybe just a little bit bigger. We've only got one St. Bernard who comes to our salon but I think he's on the small side. All of our Newfoundlands are bigger than him (we've got 4 Newfoundlands that come in now).

Anyway, when you have a dog like Jordan you've got to expect a little bit of shedding of course. With all that thick fur you just KNOW she's going to leave a trail of hair wherever she goes. She, and the others come in, usually in December or January for a REALLY good brushing out and cleaning up. Our goal really is just to get all the dead hair out of her coat and believe me there is a LOT of it. This, for example, is what it looked like shortly after her bath.

Keep in mind, that's just from HER and that's without doing any brushing of any kind. This is just what was left on the floor after the bath and blowdrying.

Keep in mind, the walls in our bathing area are covered in white tile. Yes, I know the picture is a LITTLE dark but not dark enough for the wall to look THAT gray. That's one furry wall!

And these are just the dogs of Monday, which is one of our slower days. Oh we did have a few more come in. Cannon was in early and was waiting for me when I arrived. She's a golden-doodle. That's part golden retriever, part standard poodle. Very popular these days. They're big, friendly, smart, gentle and best of all, they don't shed much. If the owners are able to keep the coat brushed out, they hardly ever get mats and tangles. Unfortunately most of these dogs are from families with children or active teens so they're not spending their days stretched out in the living room. No, the ones WE get are out there running around the yard, rolling around in everything. As a result, they can get pretty nasty with lots of big clumps of matted hair. When that happens we shave them down a bit. Some owners like us to make the dog look like a poodle, which we can do, easily, but most of them prefer something as UN-poodle-like as we can get. Cannon's owner is somewhere in the middle so we do a generic cut for her.

I also had a pair of yorkies come in as well but let's face it, after doing a dog like Jordan and one like Cannon, a tiny little yorkie just doesn't make much of a dramatic picture. They did both turn out very cute though and their owners were very happy :-)

But enough about work. It's my weekend! I should post about something FUN!

This weekend CC and I bought a PS2. For you older folks out there, no, that's not the IBM Personal Computer 2. It's a video game console, the Sony Playstation 2. And for you younger folks out there, yes, I KNOW it's nowhere near the latest tech in game playing but it's a reliable platform, there are still plenty of games available for it and there are still NEW games being written for it.

So why did we do it? Guitar Hero. You've heard us mention that game before. It's the one where you have a guitar-shaped controller and you use that to play notes as the stream down the screen. We have Guitar Hero 3 for the computer and we were pretty much happy with that until we started playing in co-op mode. In that mode, CC plays lead guitar, I play bass. Problem is, it's so graphically intense that it runs rather sluggish. The same problem occurs when CC plays the game on the higher difficulty levels. It's not really the fault of the computer though. I've seen reviewers log the same complaints about systems far more powerful than mine so it must be a design flaw.

Anyway, Saturday afternoon we went over to Best Buy and bought a PS2 and Guitar Hero 3 for the PS2 and Guitar Hero Encore: Rock the 80's and a spare guitar so we can both play at the same time using a guitar controller. And let me tell you, we're having a ball playing this game :-) CC can now practice her more complicated guitar solos without having to worry about freaky jumps in the game due to graphics problems. I like that we can play in co-op mode without the game messing up. Plus when we get tired of this game we can always get more (and since this is an older platform, the games cost less). On top of that, all my old Playstation games work on this new one AND it plays dvds, which will come in handy should one of our dvd players die on us.