Chow chow chow

Currently Reading: Between books. I'll start something new soon.

I haven't been doing very much that would qualify as exciting so instead I'll be writing about more mundane things today.

I had a rather good Monday. I told CC when I got home that you know you've done a good job with a dog's haircut when the owners pick him up and can't stop squealing about how CUTE he looks. Ok, I will grant that the dog in question was picked up by a father and his 3 daughters and the younger ones were probably pre-disposed to squealing in delight but even the older one joined in so they must really have liked him. I can't say that his haircut was anything special really. It's not like I created a work of art. But I can say for certain that he looked MUCH better leaving than he did arriving and, well he sure was a cute little guy.

I also had a chow in Monday. Chows are always an adventure. You never really know what you're going to get with them. Some are absolute angels, like the chow-lab mix we have named Joey (I've mentioned him before). He acts more like a large pomeranian. Other chows, well I'm sure everyone remembers the story about the chow that bit me (sounds like a title of a really bad James Bond ripoff movie doesn't it? The Chow That Bit Me!)

Monday we had a new one in and she falls somewhere between the two. Her name is Zoe and her owners are friends with one of our regulars who suggested they come see ME. Yeah, that feels good when someone recommends you by name. She must really like how I cut HER chow Granny if she's sending me more business. Still, you have to appreciate the irony of me being sent MORE chows seeing as how one bit me. But I digress.

Zoe, as you can see, has a little bit different coloring than you usually see in a chow. She's got blond hair which would suggest she's part something else. Given the texture of her hair, my guess would be she's part golden retriever. Her owners came in wanting a sort of blend cut for her. She goes outside a lot and comes back in just COVERED with nasty stuff. This time of year there are a lot of little seed pods and pine cones and burrs and you name it. Long hair dogs that like to romp through the brush this time of year can really mess up their coat.

Given Zoe's color though, I thought she'd look fabulous as a lion so instead of jumping right to the blend, I first stopped her cut at the usual lion pattern and took a few pictures. Isn't she cute? Since this cut was destined to be a blend though, I had to leave the body a little longer than for your typical lion cut. Her coat in true lion pattern would be about half that long. Still, I got good pictures and showed them to the owners, just in case they feel like having her done lion-style some time in the future.

But to be fair, the blend cut that she ended up with also looked pretty good too. It's more bear-like of course and works well with her chow features. Personally I like the lion look better for chows and poms but they don't pay me to do the cuts I personally would choose. Here's how she came out in the end. Still cute I think.

I've actually been catching up a little bit on the movies lately. Right before CC left we went out and saw the new Jackie Chan/Jet Li movie Forbidden Kingdom. If you haven't seen it and you're a fan of either of them or of Kung Fu movies in general, go check it out. It was very well done I must say and even though you can pretty much predict all the major plot turns (especially if you've seen a lot of movies out of Hong Kong) it's still an enjoyable show.

I also caught Cloverfield on dvd last night. CC has a membership at Blockbuster online and a list of movies she wants them to send, one at a time. When she's out of town, like she is now, I go in and edit that list a little bit so they send movies that I'd like to see that she really isn't interested in.

Cloverfield, in case you forgot, is the monster movie. They had great trailers running of this giant SOMETHING attacking New York City. When you tear it down to the basics, it's really just a different take on the old Godzilla movies (note, the OLD ones not that newer remake). And in many ways it resembles the Korean movie The Host.

What made this one a little different from the others is that it was shot with hand-held cameras and done entirely from the point of view of the people on the ground. The basic story is that a guy is going away to Japan because he's been promoted at his company. During his going away party the giant monster attacks. The rest of the film is them trying to find out what's going on and get out of New York. Again, this is done entirely with hand-held cameras and that's my only real problem with it.

The camera jerks around a LOT obviously and while it does give you a really good first person perspective, it made me pretty dizzy. I'm actually glad I didn't see this in the theater because it would have been MUCH worse. At least at home I could look away or pause for a bit, let my brains settle down a bit and then resume. Thing is, if it weren't for that jerky camera motion, I'd watch this movie a few times to catch all the little things going on in the background. I'd certainly have bought the film instead of renting. And you know, it didn't have to be done that way. The movie was strong enough to stand on its own without the gimmick.

If you get a chance, and if you like monster movies and aren't prone to motion sickness, you may want to check out Cloverfield. It's a pretty good ride.

More Tales from the Grooming Salon

Currently Reading: You Suck by Christopher Moore

Quite a few things to go over this week.

Friday I had "one of those days." Yeah, we all have them once in a while right? At one point Friday was going so bad it could have filled in for a Monday. Then again, since I start my work week on Friday, I suppose it WAS filling in for a Monday.

The theme of Friday was smelly dogs. Everything that came through the salon and landed on my table smelled and I mean BAD. The worst one was a yorkie who tangled with a skunk. This is something I've encountered before but never with a dog so small. Usually it's the bigger dogs that go poking around after the skunk and they tend to smell bad starting at the nose and then it fades out as you get to the tail. But with the yorkie, I think it's fair to say he had a pretty even covering of skunk smell. Very consistent from heat to tail.

Coming in second from Friday would be the Bouvier. This dog was in for a full shave which usually means it hasn't been bathed in quite a while and it's all nasty and matted. That wasn't really too big of a deal. We get those all the time. This one though, well, right in the middle of the shave, she just decided she had to GO and go NOW and she squatted down a little and WHOOSH! I actually HEARD the pee before I saw it, it went so fast. She got the table, my left leg, my left shoe and the floor all around the table. Really, it's the kind of thing that's DAMN funny later that day or the next day when you're telling someone about it but at that particular moment what goes through your mind is, "yeah, it really is better to be pissed off than pissed on."

Saturday was doggie adoption day and boy did we ever have a lot of dogs in the store. We had our usual group from one of the local dog rescue places plus we had the cat lady (same thing but with cats) plus we had greyhounds. Then about mid-morning someone came in with PUPPIES! Everybody loves puppies right?

These cute little guys are chow-lab mix. Very friendly and very adorable as you can see. I took lots of pictures but only a few of them came out. Puppies don't stand still very much unless they're asleep. After several near-perfect shots that were almost always ruined by one puppy up front turning at the last minute, I finally decided I'd gotten all the good pictures I was going to get. That's when I remembered that my new digital camera also takes VIDEO. Well now, it's MUCH easier to take video of puppies than still pictures so I shot a little video of them too. The original is MUCH clearer and larger for that matter but it would have taken forever for people to download. I decided to put it on You Tube instead.

By the end of my shift all the little brown ones were gone. I guess most people found them the cutest. They were certainly the ones who were the most out-going. You can see them in the little video crawling all over each other trying to get as much attention as possible. They just weren't going to take NO for an answer.

We have no idea how big they'll eventually get. Both the parents were probably pretty big but when you mix the breeds like that, they don't always come out the same size. We've got several chow mixes that come through and only a couple are actually as big as a chow.



Sunday was a mixed bag really. One of my regulars came in for a shave. Her name is Taj Kamra and she's a Jack Russell terrier. I know what you're thinking, shave a JRT? Yeah, we do that sometimes, especially if they're a mix between a short hair and long hair. What happens is you get a sort of weird coat that's MOSTLY short but with occasional long hairs sticking out and it just looks WEIRD. In Taj's case, she has a medium length coat and the owner likes it short so that's what we do. Now, I bring all this up because it reminded me that there's a sort of unwritten rule in the universe that says if you want to earn tips, you have to spend the tips you already have. No, no it's true, really. See, just Saturday afternoon I spent the last of my accumulated tip money from a few weeks ago by tipping my hairdresser. Then I turn right around and start earning tips again. See how it works? There's some sort of hidden tip cap and when you reach that cap, no more tips will flow in until you spend what you have. I don't know who writes these rules, I just follow them :-)

We've got a new promotion coming out. Party collars! These are for Mardi Gras. They're free if you buy a certain type of bath for your dog. So far I haven't had any luck with them but mostly that's because we're tied up in selling all the Valentine's Day stuff. Yes, I know Mardi Gras comes a week BEFORE Valentine's Day but this is what they tell me to do so I do it. Anyway, I found two eager models for the party collars in Erin and Elle. They're regulars and are just SUPER cute so I thought I'd include their shots here.

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There was a great little blurb in the alumni magazine from my university this month. The main article talks about what various students are doing over in Europe. Then in a little side-bar they talk about the program that allows the students to do the traveling. Here's what it says:

J. David Bowen's generosity is benefiting studends at The University of Texas at San Antonio.

When he died Jan 23, 1998, he left the bulk of his estate to create an endowment to fund European study and travel opportunities for undergraduates in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts. According to his will, his desire was "to expose the students to cultures where history is ever present and commercialism does not have the last word."

The grandson of Jewish immigrants from Germany, Bowen was born in New York City in 1930 and grew up in New York and Chicago. After graduating from Harvard in 1951, he earned a master's degree in Latin American history at the City College of New York while also making a name for himself as an off-Broadway actor and Latin American travel writer.

Bowen arrived in San Antonio in 1966 as part of the planning staff for HemisFair '68 and never left the city he had grown to love. In the ensuing years, he came to be known locally as the "dean of San Antonio actors" as well as the consummate "bookman" through his rare book shop and Corona Publishing Company, which he started in 1977 to feature the works of Texas writers.

Is that cool or what? This just has good karma written all over it. Here he left the bulk of his estate to the university so they could do something like this even though he never went there. Because of him, kids who would otherwise never make it out of the US or perhaps never make it out of Texas get to see Europe, Latin America, wherever. At the same time, it was awfully nice of the alumni magazine to remind everyone who made all this possible in the first place. Usually when you see articles like this they only mention the donor in passing, if at all. So I think it's fantastic that they went out of their way to print a little mini-bio like that.

I will admit, I am a bit biased in this matter though. I did a few shows with David Bowen when I was working with Offstage. It's funny how Offstage was a sort of great equalizer among the people. We had David Bowen in a few of our shows and he was a Harvard graduate, had his own publishing company, etc. We had doctors, we had lawyers, we had TV personalities. We had waiters, we had store clerks, we had computer artists. Didn't make a difference. What you did outside the theater doors didn't matter. Once you came inside, you were an actor, or set builder, or stage manager or light board operator. That's how a guy like me, B.A. English from UTSA ends up working with someone like David Bowen :-)

The Story of Tuesday

Currently Reading: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Now, in all fairness, Tuesday wasn't the worst day I've ever had. In fact, it doesn't even rank in the top 10 of worst days. But I'm pretty sure it qualifies as a bad day though.

It started out with ominous foreboding. I got called into the break room to sit through another in-house video. Everyone has to go through this once in a while. The company you work for has a series of video productions designed to train you to do certain things or point out better ways to handle certain situations. You have to watch them. It's sort of a necessary evil really. The people in the video are always exaggerating everything. If you work in a store and you're supposed to be smiling all the time to greet customers, you can bet that the person in the video is wearing a grin as big as Batman's The Joker.

20 minutes long, this video. That's much longer than the previous ones we've sat through. I kept thinking that there were much better ways I could be spending my time. Worse, I got called in Monday afternoon so I closed the store Monday night and had to open again Tuesday morning. Lost a little bit of sleep along the way so I was already dragging.

Fast-forward to about noon. Things are busy but not hectic. I'm scheduled to go home at 1 when the bather comes in. I'm packing things up because an hour isn't enough time for me to have a dog finished so anything that comes in at that point is shifted to the bather. We get a phone call from said bather who wants to talk to someone about calling in sick for a second day. The groomer on duty takes the call and then calls the salon manager to ask how she should handle things. She turns to me and asks if I could go check on a chow that's been drying and if it's ready, bring it out. Sure, no problem.

I go back to the kennels, open up the cage. I reach in and check the chest, nice and dry. I check the belly, nice and dry. Check the dog's left side, nice and dry, then I reach across to check the right and, well something just didn't add up right. Couldn't quite figure out what that was at first but then it hit me: my arm is in this dog's mouth . . . and it HURTS!

It's one of those situations where, looking back, everything seems like it's in slow motion. I'm reaching over to check the dog, its mouth moves down, opens up and clamps down on my arm. Teeth sink in. Just like that. No growls, no shrinking back. No warning. Just the bite.

Now, I'd LIKE to say I handled this calmly, like in the movies where the hero takes a bullet to the shoulder and shrugs it off. That would be lying of course, but I'd LIKE to say that's how I handled it. Instead I let out a yell that had me sounding a lot like Eric Cartman from South Park. Then I pulled back, the dog let go and I slammed the cage shut with my foot and latched it.

I didn't go nuts after that. I was pretty calm. Got a paper towel to cover it up, told the groomer to call the manager on duty so we could write up the paperwork. Oddly enough, it didn't hurt nearly as much as it should have, which worried me a little bit.

I called CC and had her come over to take me to the emergency room. Did a little paperwork, showed a few people how nasty it looked. Then over to the ER where they pretty much took me right away. Not that I looked all freaky with blood pouring out of me or anything like that. In fact, very little blood at all. Just two big punctures and teeth marks (CC has pictures that she'll post to her blog).

The whole time I kept thinking that it didn't hurt nearly as much as it should. I've had less serious bites by smaller dogs that hurt WAY more than that. Then I figured out what it was. The bottom jaw of the chow hit my elbow. Made it all tingly, like when you smack your elbow on the desk or the corner of a wall. So that's really all I felt, that sort of tingly, almost numb feeling.

It didn't take long to get it cleaned up. We made it home a little early in fact. My arm's sore now, but more like muscle pain than anything else. Nothing some Tylenol can't take care of. And I've got to clean the wound twice a day and take antibiotics. Otherwise, that's about it.

My boss told me this morning I've officially been Christened in the world of dog grooming. I'm now "one of them."

All this drama gives me an excuse to post this music video CC showed me once. I like how it ends and it didn't really go with any of my previous entries . . .