BREAKING: Dog Adoption Complete

We did adopt Sheba. I don't react allergically at all to her saliva, apparently, and only slightly to her dander (which might not be her: it could be something else from the shelter), so I think this should work. Won't be able to say it's definitely worked until some time has gone by, of course, but I think there's reason to be optimistic, based on how things have gone so far.

It was a very long ride back for her, and unfortunately she does get carsick -- though we'd been driving for just over an hour before she actually threw up, and she'd had a pretty intense day already and was perhaps not at her best to begin with. So hopefully this won't be as much of a problem in the future.

I'll add a picture or two to this post as soon as I get them uploaded and sorted and everything.

UPDATE:

This one is pre-vomit, obviously, though she looked just fine post-vomit too, once we got her out of the car.
I'm pretty sure there are better photos possible; this was just the best of what I was able to get today. Perhaps there will be others to go with this week's Nina picture.

Except for the ears, she really does look an awful lot like a scaled-down Fervor.

BREAKING: DogQuest 2010

Informed as of about three hours ago that SHEBA IS GO. Repeat, SHEBA IS GO.

In-person allergy check is expected to be around 1-2 PM CDT tomorrow, and if that goes even remotely well, she'll be home with us by maybe about 4 PM tomorrow.

Pretty pictures: Plectranthus x 'Mona Lavender' flowers

I've had this plant for almost a year now, and it's flowered off and on in that time, but never anything terribly impressive. It wasn't a particularly big plant, either, of course, but I think the main problem was that it wasn't happy with how much light it was getting. Since we got to the new house, and the plant got one of the choice spots in the southwest corner of the plant room, though, it's going nuts with flowers. Unfortunately, I had trouble getting a usable picture of the whole plant (it's a bit gangly: low light will do that), but there are plenty of close-ups of the flowers.


As far as I can tell, the flowers don't have a scent or anything, but they're pretty anyway.


Most pictures of 'Mona Lavender' on-line have darker-purple flowers than this; the degree of purple depends on how much light the plant receives.


Flowering is triggered by short days, though you still have to have reasonably bright light during those short days; mine didn't bloom much during the winter, despite the day length.


The plant is a hybrid developed in the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens; more information about that here.

In DogQuest2010 news, we may get to adopt the "perfect" dog from Fairfield that I talked about in the last post -- I spent most of the hiatus moping about the unfairness of this, but called the Fairfield shelter again yesterday around noon and left them a message saying, basically: we were there last Friday and were looking at Sheba and then somebody else applied for her right after we left and I know this is kind of a long shot and I probably sound crazy for even asking but I noticed that she's still on Petfinder so I thought maybe there was the possibility that she's still available and so could you please just call me and tell me one way or another because I'm kind of obsessing thanks bye. (Sometimes when I'm leaving phone messages, I speak without any punctuation.¹)

And an hour passed, and I didn't hear anything, so I took a nap. And when I got up, there were no messages or anything either, and I was like, oh well, I guess I'll have to accept this, then, damn it all to hell, and! Then! at like 4:50 PM, I got a call from the shelter saying that the person who had applied for her was supposed to pick her up today, and didn't, and when the shelter called to ask WTF, the person said they'd decided they didn't want her after all, so she was available again.

Faxed in an application two hours after that. And we will see. I think they're likely to approve us, at least in a tentative kind of way: I admitted on the application that allergies are an issue (which they already knew, because we'd told them about Fervor when we visited before), and that we would need to check on that again in person before adopting officially. They will take her back and refund the adoption fee if allergies turn out to be a problem, though. I assume there's a time limit of some kind on that, but if there are going to be problems, allergy-wise, then they're going to show up within the first week, so I'm not too worried about that.

I mean, I'm worried. But only for myself. They were taking good care of her there, and they would be again if we had to bring her back. As with Fervor when we took him back, she'd be fine and I'd be a wreck.

And I'm trying not to get too excited about this, but she's the only dog we've looked at that we've both liked, and we agreed on her immediately, she had no obvious qualities that would pose any problems for us, and the odds have seemed so long that we'd find any dogs that worked for our situation that I was starting to despair of ever finding one.²

The evidence so far suggests that I may be allergic to her, but less so than I was to Fervor -- I reacted a lot more to Fervor's play-biting than his licking, and almost not at all to his dander.³ Sheba (we will have to do something about this name) didn't seem at all inclined to bite, though she licked a lot.

I've also heard conflicting stuff about whether or not allergies get worse with continued exposure: some people in the comments on the last post said it was possible to gradually increase exposure and eventually stop reacting entirely, but the Iowa City shelter person said that if you're having animal allergies, they will only get worse over time.⁴ It basically all comes down to me and my stupid immune system.

And I guess my nervous system also: I got itchy spots on my face and right arm just from thinking about my allergic history and potential, while writing this.

So I'm trying not to get too excited about Sheba.

But I'm failing, failing, failing.

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¹ At other times, I leave phone messages that are practically nothing but punctuation. I like to keep people guessing.
² After having looked for a whole week and a half. What can I say, I despair easily.
³ Even though the allergenic protein is the same in all three cases. According to something I read somewhere.
⁴ Which fits better with my prior experiences with animal allergies, though I've been told I have relatives who developed sudden allergies around puberty and then grew out of them in their 30s. Don't know if that's necessarily true, of course.
I do fit at least the first half of that: we had dogs and cats both when I was growing up, and I was never allergic until I was 11 or 12 years old, when I was suddenly really really allergic to cats. Dogs were never a problem until about eight years ago.

Dog Adoption Quest Continues:

So far, the husband and I have looked at about sixty dogs, roughly eighty of which were pit bulls.¹ The one out of the sixty that we both agreed we really really liked and wanted (a German shepherd / black lab mix; very similar to Fervor, but about 1/3 the size, less into play-biting, and female) was adopted out from under us before we could even figure out for sure whether I was allergic.²

We've been to four shelters now (Iowa City,³ Washington, Fairfield, and Tipton), and we've only found two remotely serious contenders: the one above that we didn't have a chance to adopt (Fairfield) and a Grand Pyrenees that we applied for but are probably not going to adopt (from Tipton), even if approved, because . . . I'm not sure. I'm not allergic -- the shelter people even swabbed his mouth and then swabbed the inside of my elbow with the saliva,⁴ and nothing happened at all. So at least we know that I'm not allergic to the entire species. And he's big, but big dogs are not necessarily a problem: Fervor was a large dog, and we didn't worry about that with him.

The problem is more that neither the husband or I particularly clicked with him. This may be because of the breed: everybody says that Grand Pyrenees are slow to warm up to strangers, as well as being kind of headstrong and territorial and a pain in the ass to train. Not that we want or need a dog that's going to be trying to lick our faces 24/7, or even that it has to be a case of love at first sight again, as it was for me with Fervor and (even more so) the one that was adopted out from under us, but there should at least be something. A spark.

Plus, grooming looks Sisyphean. Though that wouldn't bother me so much if he had a better personality. The reason this picture is of him in the cage, rather than outside, is because he's only looking at me in hopes of getting out of the cage: once we took him out, he completely refused to acknowledge me or the camera, so all the pictures are crap. Manipulative bastard.
So we keep looking. There's no lack of shelters nearby, and the shelters, alas, have no shortage of dogs. Sooner or later it will happen. It's just really frustrating to lose one great dog to allergies, and another dog to . . . well, I guess it's allergies there, too, technically, since the possibility of me being allergic was why we didn't fill out the application immediately. Damn my neurotic immune system.

But in any case. Not allergic to the entire species, so we are going to keep trying, even if I didn't think we would as of last Tuesday. And someday, we'll find one. The question then becomes -- do I re-use the name "Fervor," the name I've been sitting on for the last twenty-five to thirty years, or do I have to come up with a new name, since I named one dog that already? I mean, I don't want to give him/r a complex. (Dog psychoanalysis is not cheap.) And does "Fervor" sound right for a female dog, were we to get a female dog? The husband thinks it sounds unisex, but I think it sounds male. Maybe "Zeal" or "Mania" would be better for a girl?⁵

Side-note: the large announcement I said I was going to make when I come back from hiatus is postponed for a while, I think. So forget I brought it up. If/when things are in order, then I'll tell you what's going on.

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¹ (Joke, not typo. There are a lot of pit bulls in shelters. I'm not sure which is more upsetting: that people feel such a need to be strong and manly and shit that they have to get vicarious manliness by borrowing from their dogs, or that they care so little about the dogs they're using that they'll abandon them once the pressure to be manly subsides. I suppose we could adopt one -- despite the reputation, it's my understanding that they're perfectly nice dogs when properly trained and socialized -- but neither the husband or I find them especially appealing. And it's not like there aren't plenty of other dogs to choose from.)
² Seriously. I played with her and held her and got her to lick me and all that, for quite a while, and she was as wonderful as Fervor but without the tendency toward overexcitement and play-biting, i.e., perfect, and then we left to go get something to eat, discuss, and allow the allergies to appear if they were going to. Then when we came back half an hour later, I was told that right after we left, someone else showed up, with an adoption application already filled out for the dog in question, and they were like 99% positive that they wanted her, so they have priority and we're s.o.l. And this, of course, is the only dog we've seen so far, including Fervor, that both husband and I were enthusiastic about. (The husband was kinda ennh about Fervor to begin with.) Which is just not fair.
Though it possibly wouldn't have been fair anyway, because the allergy stuff was inconclusive: I itched, but it wasn't necessarily from her, and there wasn't very much of it. So we would have had to repeat the test. But still. Damn it.
³ Nobody there I was interested in, though Fervor is there again and I at least got to give him a proper goodbye, which made me feel better. I was kind of an emotional wreck on Tuesday when we brought him back -- intellectually the decision made sense, but emotionally I hadn't caught up, and the husband wouldn't let me be in denial about it. Which was kind of mean. So it was nice to see Fervor again. Still wish we could have kept him: I'm appreciating his virtues a lot more, as we look at more and more other dogs. And I appreciated his virtues quite a bit at the time, as the reader will recall.
⁴ Inside of the elbow, underside of the forearm, and back of the hand: if I'm going to react, it's going to show up in one of those three places. The elbow seems to be the most sensitive of the three.
⁵ (We considered "Enthusiasm" briefly, until I realized that "Enthusiasm" best shortens to "Thusie," which sounds nicely feminine. So far so good, but it's hard to say, and I could see it being tempting to lisp the word as "Thuthie." And then if she ran away or something -- I mean, there's no way two gay men can run around a small rural Iowa town calling "Thuthie! Thuthie!" without causing much snickering and the reaching of lethal self-consciousness levels. The husband said having to call "Fervor" was bad enough, the one time Fervor got away for a few minutes.)