What is on my mind?

Last night was my first dog obedience class with at the Peninsula Humane Society.  It was a requirement that I take it with Nala because of her breed, even though she has taken the class before, it is more for my benefit to be able to better communicate with Nala.  I kind of felt like Billy Madison (Adam Sanler flick), as Nala was a lot older than any of the other dogs (average age was about one year old, and Nala is almost 7 years old).  It was really cool to see her reconnect with the class volunteers- she actually remembered every one of them.  I could tell that she recognized their scent, a very different response to somebody that she doesn’t know.  We worked on responding to her name, the sit command (and hand signal), and praising her for not jumping up on people that they meet.  She did great- she is the role model for the rest of the dogs, as she already knows almost all of her commands (sit, stay, lay down, bark (speak), up (jump)) and knows the drill when it comes to getting treats :) 

Christina has been in Paris all week with her best friends, so it has been a very quiet week without her.  Nala missed her too- A few mornings, Nala would come in the room, and look for Christina, and whined when she didn’t see her.  I was talking to Antonio yesterday, and we both felt the same that "things ain’t just what they used to be".  Back in the day (college), I used to work on Saturdays, and then hang out with Antonio almost every weekend.  Tim and I used to spend a lot of time hanging out in high school.  Now Antonio is living in Davis, and Tim is in San Jose.  We see each other once every couple of months, as it is getting hard to meet with our schedules.  All but one of my college friends are living out of state (Derek and Meg in Boston, Robert Litton in LA, Jason & Kara in Cincinnati, etc.)  The only people that I see regularly are musicians that I play with in bands or gigs, and that is more on a professional level than a personal level.

After taking her for her afternoon walk after getting home from work yesterday, Nala seemed a little blue.  Christina remarked that it was probably the Monday blues, as she gets more attention on the weekend.  I decided to take her to a local dog park in San Bruno.  It is part of Commodore Park- a nice dog exercise area that I have been taking her to for the past few months.  She always has a good time there, playing with the other dogs and running around and marking her territory all over the place.  There were a good number of dogs there when I arrived, so she had a lot of butts to smell.  After about 5 minutes there, another dog started a fight with Nala.  She was drinking water from the fountain with another dog, and this other dog didn’t like that, so all of a sudden I hear a loud commotion, and they are at each other’s throats.  It took a few seconds for me a jump in there and pull Nala back, because I was trying not to get bitten in the melee.  The other dog owners told me after the fight that the other dog (I think her name was Maya) is overly possesive of the dog park, so that’s why she snapped at Nala.  I noticed after the fight that Maya was snapping at other dogs too, so I was angry that the owner brought a dog with aggresive behavior to an otherwise very enjoyable dog park.  Luckily Nala didn’t get seriously hurt.  She got a small scratch on her front left leg, but she held her own in the fight.  She was breathing really hard after the fight.  I was glad that I always keep an eye on her, especially at the dog park.  It’s more because I don’t know when something like that is going to happen, so I want to protect my "baby".  I told Christina what happened after we got home, and she cried because she loves Nala very much, but I assured her that I took care of her.  That’s actually the first thing I told Nala as I was driving home with her from the PHS.  I just got onto 101N, and she put her head on my lap, sighed, and I told her that I was going to take good care of her.

Last weekend I played at a funeral service for a friend of mine- Dave Umemoto.  I met dave over ten years ago when I first started playing with the College of San Mateo Jazz Ensembles.  Dave was such a nice guy.  I remember the last concert of my first year there, he had a party at his house in Hillsborough after the concert.  He showed me his "trombone room" with a plethora of trombones.  He even had an elevator in his house!  I met his daughter, Janelle, who I thought was hot (and I even scored her phone number!), and his wife Emily.  Even after Dave stopped playing at CSM, he and Emily still came to the concerts to support us.  I played with his J-Town Jazz Band a few times too.  The last time I saw him was at the last CSM concert.  He was a huge supporter of big band jazz.  Billy Robinson put together a small group of trombones to play at his service.  It was my first Buddhist funeral service, so it was very interesting to observe.  There were 11 trombonists playing, 8 tenor and 3 bass, including myself.  Sitting on the far left was the "Living Legend", Dick Leland (and his infamous hair), sitting on my left was Mike Suter, former bass trombonist with the Stan Kenton Orchestra.  Billy ended up giving me the low bass trombone part for some of the tunes, so I got to play that part by myself.  I must have made a good impression on Mr. Suter- here is an excerpt of a reply e-mail he sent me:  "<<I’m the tall bald Chinese guy you sat next to in the trombone choir.>>
Oh, you mean that really, Really, REALLY, good bass trombone player who scared the wits out of me? Guys like you are the reason I carry a 2X4 in my case (a very effective way of dealing with the competition).

I finally got around to buying a new hard drive for Christina’s desktop computer.  It had been making "chirping" sounds for the past few years (probably from her leaving it on all the time heh heh), and most recently it had started to make some worrisome buzzing noises.  I found a 400GB hard drive from Fry’s online for $119.00 ($140.00 after shipping and tax).  The IT guy at work has this nice disk imaging software, where all you have to do is boot from the cd, hook up both hard drives, and it will copy the entire contents of one drive to the other.  It’s a great application.

Nala is doing much better now.  She had a pretty nasty bout of some kind of virus (might have been norovirus aka the stomach flu) or some kind of food allergy (she got some skin lesions on her back).  After spending almost $500 at the vet, we went home with 2 weeks worth of antibiotics, 3 x-rays, and pain medication.  After a few days, she was back to her normal silly self (her dog "shakes" were back to full speed, and overall energy level is back to normal.  The other day, I noticed that part of the drywall next to the door to my dad’s bedroom looked like it had been chipped away or something.  I asked Dad if he bumped into the wall or something.  Turns out it was Nala.  She must have been chewing on the wall.  I think she did it because she had thrown up that morning, so she didn’t have anything to eat.  It might have also been because pitbull terriers are known to get anxious when nobody is home.  I had to put Nala back in her kennel while I am at work now, and try to see we can wean her off of the kennel again.  I don’t like to put her in her crate, but I don’t want her to be destructive either.  Early this morning, she came up on the bed by herself, probably because she was cold.  She usually waits for one of us to pat the bed so she knows that it is okay to come up.  I wouldn’t mind her being on the bed so much if she wasn’t such a bed hog.

My poor dog.  She has the incontinence of a octogenarian.  I played my NYE gig at Cafe Cocomo, a nice spacious salsa club right off the of the Mariposa exit of 280 around 11:30PM.  I called Christina to see where she was, as we had planned to meet up at home after my gig.  She said that she wasn’t feeling very well, Nala had peed on the couch and she wanted me to come home soon.  I pulled up into the driveway around 11:45, and she was feeling horrible.  She started throwing up soon after that, and for the next three hours as well.  The next afternoon we were supposed to host a birthday party for Christina’s friend (also named Christina), but when Christina woke up, she still wasn’t feeling very good, so I sent everybody an evite notification that the event had been cancelled as well as a text message.  Christina Chin called first to see how she was feeling.  My Christina felt bad that we couldn’t host.  We ended up staying home all day yesterday, as she was feeling pretty awful the whole day.  Nala stayed with her for a good part of the morning, doing what she does best- sleep right beside her in bed, keeping her company.  We are bringing Nala to a local vet today to get a skin anomale checked out (it might be a "skin tag", which apparently is a benign lesion).  My New Year’s Resolution: To find balance in my life.

That is my new "nom de plume" for Nala.  It is interesting how much of my life revolves around her in such a short amount of time.  I got home from work and was getting ready to take her to the dog park while I was talking on the phone.  When I opened up the driver’s side door, I saw Nala barfing on the floor of the passenger side floor, and a whole slew of barf on the driver’s side.  She had eaten one of those yellow dandelion plants on the way to the car, and immediately came back up.  Kelly’s old cat Greystoke used to do that all the time.  Christina and I have had Nala for over a month now, and she has had the "reversal of fortune" (Competitive Eating Competition vernacular) three times.  The first and second times were when I gave her the proin for her incontinence.  Her "last name" is derived from a time that she had a little accident on the couch (#5 of 20), and she leaked so much that her butt was all wet from the urine.  Thus, Barfy Pee Butt was born.
My dad wants to append "Alarm" on that as well.  On Monday, I got a call from my dad around 11:00AM.  The home alarm company had called my dad- the door alarm had gone off.  Dad suspected it was Nala trying to get into our room with her usual nudge, and if I didn’t close it correctly, she might have opened it.  I rush home to find just that.  I could tell when I walked in the door that she was a little on edge from the alarm going off.
I played in a poker game with the trombone section from the CSM Jazz Band last night at one of their houses in Foster City.  I made a few mistakes, of course the last one being the big one.  There were four people left in the game, and I had a somewhat below average stack.  The player to my right folded (with me in the small blind), and the person on the button already having called, my pot odds were 5 to 1.  I was holding a K 7 offsuit, so while it wasn’t a premium hand, I felt I was getting the right odds to call.  The big blind checks, and the flop comes, and I don’t recall the first two cards, but the third card of the flop was a K.  I thought it was a J at first, so I checked, as did the big blind.  The person on the button fires out 1/3 of the pot, and when he did that, I realized I had top pair, so I raised to $3.  He calls, and the turn comes another K.  Now what I should have done was remember the sequence of the actions taken, which was the player on the button firing out 1/3 of the pot, and then calling my raise.  Seeing as I had trip K’s with a nicely sized pot, and the other player having me outstacked, I decided to push all of my chips in.  To my dismay, he turns over K A.  To add insult to injury, he hits an A on the river to make a full house.  He was one of those players who calls and bets with no pair no draw all the way to the river, so it was hard to determine what he had.  While he wasn’t the most skilled player at the table, he was definitely the luckiest. 

Are all dogs bed hogs?  Last night we invited Nala to sleep on the bed with us, and based on our prior experiences with that, we strategically had Christina place herself in the bed so that Nala had a small part of the bed for herself.  By the time this morning came around, she had half of the bed.  My Dad’s old dog Misty did that too.  Even though she was half our size, she took up half of the bed.  It’s so funny that when she sleeps in her dog bed, she’s a little fussy, getting up, "readjusts" her bed, stretches and yawns about once every two hours.  When she sleeps in our bed, she’s as quiet as a lamb.  Things are slowly simmering down for the winter holidays- my students will be out for break by next week, so there will be no lessons on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays or Saturdays.  Both of the big bands that I play in on Monday and Tuesday nights just had our concert last night and Monday night, and won’t start until late January, so I should have more time to get the remaining shopping done. 
My sisters and I bought my dad a brand new queen sized bed for his 60th birthday, which is today.  It’s hard to imagine my dad being 60.  If he ate at Denny’s he could order from the Senior Menu.  We bought new pillows, sheets, and a comforter.  He was sleeping on an old futon that I don’t think was all that comfortable, so I’m sure this new bed is a heaven send.

Nala’s favorite place to snooze is the couch, so on some nights, we will call her to bed (which is in our room), and she won’t move a muscle.  The other night I decided to try and have her sleep on the couch the whole night, and I put her dogbed near the couch.  I didn’t quite close the door to our room, but I left it open a crack.  About 15 minutes before we were going to go to sleep, I hear a little bump, and Nala pushes the door open.  She gives us the "didn’t-you-know-I-was-in-the-living-room" look and gives Christina doggie kisses while I go fetch her bed. 
I took her to see her doctor at the Peninsula Humane Society because she had developed what her doc termed a "hot spot" on her butt, which caused her to nibble at it and get it infected.  It started as a little mark, no bigger than a few millimeters, and grew to the circumference of a nickel, with a lump to go with it.  Dr. Janowitz told me that most likely it was the result of her stressing about her new living situation, which seems to be the root of most of her health problems thus far.  She also ordered "beef flavored" DES capsules, which are for incontinence problems.  It’s funny that her little accidents seem to happen mostly when she is very happy and relaxed.  My theory is that the neuron for bladder control and emotion are close together on the cerebral cortex, and there is some kind of misfire going on.  Anyways, the DES is really hormone medication.  I was given some medication called Pro-in, but after the first pill, she was definitely doesn’t like taking them as she is able to sniff out the hidden meds in wet food and even cheese.  I was also given some amoxicillin for her hotspot, and some drying powder to "poof" on her spot a few times a day.  She has hypothyroidism, which is an underactive thyroid, which also requires medication.  I believe I have found the right food to hide her meds in- she can’t resist the taste and smell of Italian meatballs
So far, leaving her out of her kennel/crate for a short amount of time has proven that she is well behaved unsupervised.  We only had one mishap- we left the garbage can out with some green tea muffins from Trader Joe’s which we found evidence of later in the living room.  Christina ended up going to Trader Joe’s to check the ingredients, as I have found out that dogs are fatally allergic to xylitol, a sweetener found in mostly diet foods.  Luckily, there was no xylitol in the muffins. 
Nala has so many funny quirks.  Whenever she is happy, she gets into this really silly mood.  She will roll around on the floor and rub up against the couch or our bed, just begging for her belly to be rubbed.  The other night, I invited her up on the papasan, and I was rubbing her underneath her chin, which she definitely liked, as she was grunting her approval.  She also is a voracious eater.  After every meal, which she wolfs down, she lets out a resounding "URRRRP".  Gas is not limited to that end either.  On several occassions she has let some flatulence go that didn’t smell like roses.  The good news is that I can actually blame it on the dog now.

Last night, my poor dog’s incontinence reared its ugly head.  She will randomly leak urine sometimes during the first week of being in a new environment.  I picked up some supplemental medicine for this, so I gave one to her along with her thyroid (she’s has hypothyroidism) medicine.  Last night around 1:30 AM, I woke up because she was licking her lips a lot, and I could tell that she wasn’t sleeping in her bed.  I got up, and she had vomited near her bed.  I let her out of the room, and she vomited again in the hallway.  I went to the kitchen to grab some water for her (which I later learned I shouldn’t do, as that may cause more vomiting), and she vomited again.  She laid down, and started to audibly shake.  I got worried, so I took her to an emergency veterinarian clinic in San Mateo around 2:00 AM.  They checked her pulse, temperature, gave her some anti-nausea medication, and put some fluid in her neck subcutaneously (I can’t give her any water for 12 hours, or food for 24 hours) just to make sure she’s okay. 

We got back around 3:30 AM, and I had a hard time sleeping because I wanted to make sure she was ok.  I don’t think I slept very much, and the alarm clock went off.  I tried to go back to sleep, but I knew that Nala needed her morning walk, and Christina didn’t have time to walk her.  Funny thing is that Christina slept through the whole thing.  I’m taking the day off of work, as I’ve been fighting a recurring cold the past month, and I want to keep an eye on Nala.

I picked up Nala last night.  I met her foster mom (she volunteers for a bullydog class on Thursday nights) and we went to the adoption office to fill out all of the paperwork.  Nala already has that microchip implanted that if scanned, will be able to track her back to me anywhere in the US.  After all of the fees were paid and paperwork was filled out, I took Nala home.  There was traffic of course going north on 101.  Nala laid down in the passenger seat and put her head on my lap.  One of the cool things about Nala is that she will stay with you while you are sleeping (of course she is sawing logs herself)- but she won’t get up until both "mom and dad" are up.  I rolled out of bed around 6:20, and I could tell she was excited to see me with her tail wagging.  She didn’t get out of her dog bed though until Chrstina got up.  I threw some clothes on, grabbed the "doggie duty" essentials, put her leash on, and we were out the door.  One of the things that I have established early on is that Christina and I, as "pack leaders" (if you don’t know that phrase, then you haven’t seen the Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic Channel) are first out the door.  We keep a short leash so that Nala walks beside us, not in front of us. 

The hard part this morning was getting her in her crate.  Her foster mom, Maureen, put her in a crate when she left her at home (she brought her to work some days as she is very good with people, especially kids).  This is to prevent her from getting into any trouble.  When I tried to get her to go in her crate, she didn’t want to, so I had to basically lift her up and put her there myself.  I felt like the meanest master when I was walking out the door when she started to whimper a little bit.  I’m going to try and gradually get her out of the crate- while I am gone for shorter periods of time, I’ll leave her out, and see how things are when I come back.  I think she would have been fine if I left her out of her crate when I left, as she seems to like curling up on the couch when I’m teaching a lesson or doing something else, but I don’t know about long periods of time.  I read some of her prior history reports, and one of the things that was reported last December was that she was a little destructive when left home alone, so I want to be careful with that.

Christina and I are going to adopt a 6-year old spayed female pitbull from the Peninsula Humane Society.  I have been wanting a dog for a long time now, and I saw her on the PHS website.  I contacted them, and she is in a foster home right now.  We dogsat her this past holiday weekend.  We took her out for at least 5 walks a day.  She slept in her dog bed the first night, and I had a hard time sleeping because I was worried about her waking up and wandering around the house.  She was fine the whole night.  She didn’t get up until both Christina and I got up, and she was excited because she knew it was time for her morning walk.

I think she was adjusting to being in a new environment- as you can see in most of these pictures, she was either sleeping or laying around most of the time she was indoors.  Yet when she was outside, she was in "prey mode"- actively looking for cats and squirrels.  We had a few encounters with a squirrel and a cat, and she really wanted to go after them, but I calmed her down and re-directed her energy into the walk by going the opposite direction and insisting that we keep going. 

I could tell sometimes that she liked Christina and I- she would do some funny things and let us rub her belly.  In order to adopt her, I have to follow through with a few things- because of her breed, I had to have the backyard of the house inspected for escape possibilities (which was somewhat a moot point, as I plan on keeping her inside of the house).  I also have to have a chat with her veterinarian, as she has hypothyroidism, and she has a little bit of incontinence, both of which require her to take medication for the rest of her life.

She’s a very sweet dog, and I have heard nothing but great things about her from her foster mom and even random PHS staff who know her.  She’s my early Christmas (belated birthday gift from Christina) present.