March musings

Phew – feels like I haven’t much been in touch. A little over a month ago our dear friend and dog handler Andrew suffered a head injury and died – bang, like that. On the day it happened I hurried out to dover PA to be with his close associate and apprentice, Katie (who is from Kansas city – small world). Her mom and his mom arrived and somehow we all got through the week and a memorial service. Katie is a gifted handler and a delightful person, so John and I opened our house to her, and she and the dogs moved here the following week.

Katie arrived with lots of helpers and lots of stuff and we got it all either here or into the public storage garage we rented. Of course, being a dog handler, she brought dogs and all their paraphernalia. So the numbers of dogs here doubled overnight. The beauty of it is that her dogs pretty much knew our dogs and the merger went well, with several groups adjusting to let her dogs in. In the spirit of setting up our little wireless network to accommodate her machines, somehow my computer took a hissy fit and stopped working on the net. Imagine me without e-mail!!!! Luckily the desktop machine worked so I was able to look for jobs, but my links and address book weren’t there – so tonight I did finally succeed in getting it working again and I’m able to sit and COMMUNICATE while I watch TV – I’m so happy! Anyhow, apologies for being out of touch somewhat.

On the job market, I had a phone interview for a position in PA – a bit too far to commute, so we’d have to pack up the dogs, the fish and our stuff and relocate. I have been contacted by a hospital that is in the same health system that recently laid me off, to work at another hospital – I’ll meet with them Friday. That would be a bad commute but wouldn’t require relocation. Another possibility is in Northwest Baltimore, but while they were hot-to-trot back when Andrew was in the hospital, now they’ve slowed down and nothing more has come of it. Frustrating. There are at least 15 Radiology Director positions open in California, but we don’t want to move that far!!!

On the dog market, we have had 2 litters of pups this year and I’m really ready to go back to work!!! LOL. Anyway, one of the girls from the litter born in December has a bad heart valve. They do a cool procedure where they open that with a balloon (versus open heart surgery) so she’ll have that on April fools day, which I think is apropos, considering the lack of income as compared to the cost. The newer litter is just 4 weeks old, which is my favorite age – they are discovering people and are so dear, but not yet biting.

We did go to Jamaica which was planned & paid for last year – sadly, only had one truly sunny day. We swam with the dolphins which was just spectacular – more interactive than the one we’d done in the Bahamas many years ago. Very cool. Our friends bought the video, which he claims he can copy. I hope he can copy it – I’m being pulled by the dolphin and am screaming “this is SOOOOO cool!”