A day in the race

Today was a slow day at the "doggy heaven pet salon" where I work (said with no sarcasm what-so-ever). It would have almost been a great day, if it weren't for the pervading odor of cigarettes (Marlboro regulars, to be exact). My boss and one of the employees who's been there forever both spend half their time there smoking and it's driving me insane. I'm going to have to quit soon because of it. If I were making more money I might consider putting up with it, but $6.50/hr (roughly translating to about $26.00 a day) just isn't worth smelling as though I worked at some sort of bar or club.

*Sigh*

After work ( I get off at noon), I came home and changed into some less smelly cloths so that I could go get my blood drawn for a drug study that I'm doing and after which, I went to work at an Animal Hospital where I volunteer in their Wildlife Rescue drop-off room (for pictures go here).

Sometimes when the wildlife room is slow I help one of the girls, Tina, with the dogs that are boarding at the hospital. The dogs are kept in kennels upstairs away from everyone else and it's nice to escape from all the loud noise and confusion that takes place downstairs and exchange it for the solitude of the noise and confusion gong on upstairs.

Today Tina and I were both starving. I'd eaten lunch at about 12:30 PM, but since it was about 5PM at the time, all memory of food had deserted my stomach and Tina hadn't even eaten lunch. We talked about me running out and getting us something to eat, but all of a sudden the clinic got really busy and then there was no time. So about 15 minutes later when we went upstairs all we could thinking about was food. We made a few jokes about eating dog food and I even tried some of the chicken and rice canned food (it was gross) that we use to lure the dogs back into their kennels when they are done taking their potty break outside. Then we both tried a milk bone. Hmm, not bad. Tina told me that when she was little she used to eat the "beggin' strips" that her parents bought for their family dogs. I told her that I sometimes used to eat the little corners off of milk bones before I gave them to my dogs. We laughed about how silly it was for us to be sitting there sharing a milk bone and how starving we were and nobody would let us take the time to eat proper food. "Oh look," Tina started laughing harder "there's a little hair in mine". We stepped outside to let a dog out and discovered, upon further examination, that each of our halves of the biscuit contained several little hairs. I had a black ones in mine and Tina had several blacks interspersed with whites (Yum yum). This made us laugh even harder, hoping that they were horse or some other variety of animal hair and not an unsanitary cook's hairs. Hahaha!

Anyways, enough about how silly we were.

When we came back downstairs, we discovered that Wildlife Rescue had come and gone (they pick up all the animals promptly at 6PM -unless we are waiting and wanting them to come early, then they are always late- to take them out to their facilities for treatment and rehabilitation) and that we'd missed getting to see a yellow bat (very rare) that had been dropped off at the last minute and left.

What we didn't miss was the injured adult squirrel that came in 45 minutes after WR had left. Since no one (including me) wanted to take it home, Tina and I made it comfortable in a roomy box w/ food and water. Before we put it away we gave it a shot of Dex as a kinda "pick-me-up" to help it deal with the stress of being caught and we cleaned its mouth out because it was all impacted with what looked like rotten acorn. Odd. That's all.

After leaving the clinic, I came home, ate, checked my email and now I am going to bed.

goodnight.

PS