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My brother Chris is a fel­low ani­mal lover and res­cue vol­un­teer, recently join­ing forces with Our Pal’s Place here in Mari­etta (I use the phrase “join­ing forces” advis­edly because my brother is a force to be reck­oned with!). Among the many tasks he takes on for them is being K9 coach, trainer, and friend of Lexie, a pit bull mix that many other res­cue groups, even “no-kill” ones, would have deemed “unadopt­able” and had euthanized.

Chris has been chron­i­cling his adven­tures with Lexie both at his own blog and on the Our Pal’s Place web­site and newslet­ter. I have fol­lowed the story with great inter­est, par­tic­u­larly when in chap­ter 2 a small, fear­less orange and white kit­ten intro­duced him­self to Lexie. Lenny, as the kit­ten was soon named, and Lexie have become the best of friends and live together in the Learn­ing Cen­ter at OPP.

On Sat­ur­day, Chris and I finally meshed our sched­ules and Gary and I trav­eled to OPP to meet the pair. I freely admit I am a cat per­son rather than a dog per­son, but both dog and cat won my heart imme­di­ately. In the hour we spent there, I saw exactly what my brother has accom­plished in the months he’s been work­ing with Lexie. It’s a facet I’d not seen before of the man I still think of as my “baby brother.” Her trust in him and love for him is so clear! I also got quite a nice lit­tle intro­duc­tion to the nuances of dog behav­ior, as well as my own share of slob­bery dog kisses (some­thing which I do NOT allow from just any dog). Of course Lenny was not omit­ted — he got as many rubs and ear scritches as he would permit.

Watch­ing the two of them inter­act was so cute! Lexie is a good-sized and rather ram­bunc­tious dog, while Lenny is a small-to-average sized cat; yet Lenny is clearly in charge but lets Lexie THINK she is. I’m used to see­ing very bonded cat pairs, but I’ve never seen a dog/cat pair quite like this.

I also could tell what a chal­lenge Lexie has been, and still is. Given the “hard cases,” med­ical and behav­ioral, we take in at Good Mews (includ­ing this year’s social­iz­ing of three com­pletely feral adult cats), I really applaud groups that don’t just con­cern them­selves with the easy res­cues, but are will­ing to work with the chal­leng­ing ani­mals as well. A dog like Lexie is well worth the effort!

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Protected: Over the Weekend

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Protected: Stress

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I had good inten­tions for this five-day week­end, I truly did. Like so many of my good inten­tions, they didn’t get com­pletely ful­filled. I was going to:

  • catch up on the mas­sive grad­ing back­log. Well, I at least sorted out the papers and graded a lit­tle bit. A very lit­tle bit.
  • get a bunch of items listed at Art­Fire and 1000 Mar­kets for hol­i­day shop­ping. I did get some pho­tos taken and cropped/resized, so I can at least get some bracelets up this week, I hope.
  • do some more cold-connected jew­elry pieces. Nada. I did do another chain­maille bracelet, but that’s it.
  • try out the Pris­ma­color pencils-on-copper tech­nique. Nope, though I did at least get a bot­tle of gray gesso & some Kry­lon spray Sat­ur­day, plus found a cou­ple of sheets of phos­phor bronze mixed in among the cop­per at Dick Blick.
  • tidy up my stu­dio. Let’s not even go there.
  • catch up on some read­ing. I barely man­aged to read the news­pa­per a cou­ple of those days.
  • Sleep. Now, that’s the one true suc­cess this week­end. Most nights I did get plenty of sleep, which I badly needed.

On the plus side, I did a good deed by fill­ing in for the Thurs­day evening meds per­son at Good Mews (and get­ting thor­oughly carved up by Sil­ver and Mickel in the process). I spent time with my entire fam­ily on Thanks­giv­ing day (get­ting rather over­whelmed in the process), and some time today with part of it when we went over to wish my mom a Happy Birthday.

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Friday’s post might have sounded like I try to do every­thing with Art of the Fire­bird all by myself. Well, I don’t — there are two peo­ple on whom I rely!

My hus­band, Gary, tends to stay behind the scenes most of the time, but he’s vital to my suc­cess. Any time there’s a prob­lem that needs solv­ing, he either comes up with the best solu­tion him­self or helps me eval­u­ate pos­si­ble solu­tions. He’s my chief engi­neer and fab­ri­ca­tor — if I need some­thing built, whether it be stu­dio fur­nish­ings or dis­play items, he’s design­ing and con­struct­ing it. He’s also our “roadie,” if you will, for shows, mak­ing our setup and take­down run smoothly and quickly, as well as run­ning errands and usu­ally bring­ing us lunch dur­ing the show (can’t have us sell­ing on empty stom­achs, after all). He will even get behind the table and schmooze with cus­tomers if nec­es­sary, though it’s not his favorite thing to do, and he’s ALWAYS urg­ing me to hand out busi­ness cards every­where we go.

Could I do it with­out him? I don’t want to ever have to find out! Gary is my biggest fan and sup­porter and yep, we’ve still got it :-) !

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