Posts from the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

ABANDONED Featured: Animal Writes – on Pet Life Radio

This fall, I had the opportunity to speak with Tim Link, the host of the show, Animal Writes on Pet Life Radio, where she asked thoughtful and insightful questions about my new book: ABANDONED: Chronicling the Journeys of Once-Forsaken Dogs. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcast.

Additionally, I am donating a portion of my royalties, earned from the sales of this book, to the SPCA International, helping dogs in need around the globe. You can read more here and here.

And, if you have not ordered your copy of ABANDONED, I hope you will consider ordering ABANDONED today!

Be Open

I love these sentiments from Lisa Congdon about staying open, shown below, and perhaps you will, too.

When we are open to experiencing and engaging with life fully, and when we think in terms of possibility instead of what won’t work, even in challenging circumstances, our capacity for growth and achievement is boundless. Have you had an intense emotional reaction to music or art? Have you tried something creatively even though you had no idea what you were doing or where it would lead? That was you being open! Even simple things like walking a new route with your dog each day or listening to a different genre of music can wake you up to new ideas, possibilities, and pathways.

And speaking about staying open, our sweet girl, Alex, was in her first musical this past weekend! She worked for the past five months preparing for this day, and it was wonderful to witness! Importantly, she stayed open to the process, even though she was a little nervous to perform!

Alex’s Fourth Birthday Celebration!

This post is very late, as Alex is going to be five in a few months, but I wanted to document her fourth birthday on the blog! For Alex’s forth birthday celebration, she had her little friends over for face painting and a rainbow-themed science show, where they watched a live rainbow-themed science show and made bouncy balls together! The face painting was also a hit, the artist did a wonderful job making her artistic creations. This was Alex’s first party since she turned one, due to COVID.

During this time, my parents came to visit for Alex’s birthday, and we took a trip to Dutch Wonderland, which was a hit, and we had really nice weather, thankfully! Alex loved the amusement park, especially the Frog Hopper, her favorite ride!

Alex and my Mom have the same birthday, so on their actual birthday, a few days later, we took photos, had another special cake made, and went to dinner and opened gifts! Then, Alex did some horse riding! And her orange Pello bike, finally came in August, which she loves, as it was on back order for several months, and it is her favorite color!

Coincidentally, Alex is having an early fifth birthday celebration at school today, with her class, and she is bringing her favorite cupcakes today, since school is not in session during the summer to celebrate! A photo is below.

Alex’s fourth birthday celebration is shown below.

Inspiring Quotes: Big Magic

Have you read Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert, that was released back in 2015? It is one of my favorite books. It is for anyone who wants to live a more creative life. I have referred to this book countless times for inspiration and guidance. Hopefully, these words, shown below, will provide you a little inspiration today, as it is now officially spring!

Below are a few of my favorites quotes from Big Magic:

“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”

“If you’re alive, you’re a creative person.”

“All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life—collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand. It’s a strange line of work, admittedly. I cannot think of a better way to pass my days.”

“Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.”

“I don’t want to be afraid of bright colors, or new sounds, or big love, or risky decisions, or strange experiences, or weird endeavors, or sudden changes, or even failure.”

“It might have been done before, but it hasn’t been done by you!”

“Perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat.”

“You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.”

“My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically) and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely).”

“Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don’t need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.”

“Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it’s a gift. It’s the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe.”

“It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.”

“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner—continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you—is a fine art, in and of itself.”

New Study: Dogs Can Smell When We Are Stressed

Have you heard this interesting news about dogs? In an experiment, dogs were surprisingly accurate in detecting sweat and breath samples from people who were stressed.

It has been widely believed that dogs can detect extreme emotions by smell. Now scientists at Queen’s University Belfast in the U.K. have proven that a dog’s nose knows.

Acute stress changes the compounds found in human sweat and breath, research has shown. For the new experiment, four dogs were presented with sweat and breath samples collected from human volunteers — before and after the people engaged in a difficult math exercise.

The canine participants were able to detect with a greater than 90 percent accuracy which samples came from before and which came from after the 36 human volunteers had spent three minutes trying to count backward, aloud, according to the report published Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS One.

“This study provides further evidence of the extraordinary capabilities of ‘man’s best friend,’” said the study’s first author, animal psychologist Clara Wilson.

“While it is likely that in a real-life context dogs are picking up on our stress from a variety of context cues, we have shown using a laboratory study that there is a confirmed odor component that is likely contributing to dogs’ ability to sense when we are stressed,” Wilson said in an email. 

For their study, Wilson and her colleagues first set out to train a variety of 20 pet dogs to point with their noses at samples from a person who was stressed. (By the end of the training period, 16 dogs had been withdrawn for a variety of reasons, including attention issues and boredom.)

The researchers tested the trained dogs with a machine that offered three choices: an unused piece of gauze, a sample from a stressed person and one from the same person when unstressed.

The researchers also collected before and after measurements of heart rate and blood pressure and responses to the questionnaires that asked about the volunteers’ stress levels before and after the math task.

The dogs’ accuracy at detecting the stress samples — from 90 percent to 96.88 percent — was even better than the researchers anticipated.

Knowing that chemical changes in sweat and breath can result from stress, it was expected the dogs might be able to smell the difference, Wilson said. “However we were still surprised the first time the dogs were shown the pre-and post-math task samples and confidently discriminated between them.”

One thing the research doesn’t reveal is whether dogs feel empathy when a person is stressed.

“Because the dogs were trained with positive reinforcement to find their target, they were visibly excited when they found it in the line-up, rather than showing any kind of stress themselves,” Wilson said.

She compared it to dogs who can smell cancer by picking out breath samples in a line-up. Future studies can investigate whether smell is an important part of a dog’s perception of human emotions, Wilson said.

For further information, please see this article and this article.  

Photo Credit: Queens University Belfast.

Elisabeth Eagan: Life Advice for My College-Bound Daughter

 

Elisabeth Egan is a novelist and essayist, and she writes about parenting.  Below is a brilliant letter she wrote to her daughter, when she headed off to college…

The time is fleeting with our little people, and I am sure many women have felt similarly, as described below.

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I was 14 when my family moved my sister into her freshman dorm at the school where our parents met.  I don’t remember the official goodbye, but I do remember what happened when we got back into our mauve Mercury Sable with its suddenly huge backseat and opera blaring from the speakers.  My mom turned to my dad and said, “If she doesn’t wave one more time, I think I’m going to die.”

Despite her passion for ear-splitting arias, my mom doesn’t do emotional outbursts in real life.  Her response to any injury, from a paper cut to a fractured pelvis, is “You’ll live”; she tosses heartfelt cards in the garbage without a second thought (“What? I read it already”); and, on the morning of my dad’s funeral, she actually said, “No blubbering, girls.  We’re channeling our inner Jackie Kennedy.”

The day we dropped my sister off at college was the one time I’ve ever witnessed the faltering of my mom’s stiff upper lip.  I can still see her profile — hand clasped over mouth, eyes filled with tears — as she watched her firstborn walk across a courtyard to the high rise she’d call home for the next nine months.  Thankfully, at the last possible moment, my sister turned and shot us a dazzling smile.  Then she lifted both arms overhead, gave us a double wave and stepped through a door held open by someone else’s sweaty dad.

She was gone.  We drove away.

My mom cried for the next four hours, then sporadically for about a week.  I didn’t have much sympathy.  I was deep in the sneer and loathing phase of adolescence, and my sister had been so ready to go, she’d taken her shower caddy for a summer-long test run, leaving me without shampoo or saline solution in the bathroom we shared.  Plus, there were the clothing leftovers for me to feast on in her closet!  And the cassette tapes to steal!

Now that my oldest kid is graduating from high school and getting ready to leave for college, I see my sister’s leave-taking in a new light — the light of parenthood, which is one of the brightest bulbs there is.  In a funny, happy twist, our daughter is going to the school where my husband and I met 25 years ago.  She is as ready for the next phase as her aunt was, and as likely to make a beeline into it with arms open wide.  She may toss us a bonus wave at the last minute, but will not permit a love- and advice-fest in the parking lot.  And, unlike my mom, I’ll definitely want to host one.  So here, in no particular order, are the important things I’d say to my daughter if only she’d hang around long enough to listen.  The most important one is at the very end.

1. I love you.  I’ll miss you.  Thank you.
2. Ignore the New Jersey jokes.  Not everyone can be from a state as great as ours.
3. I hope you’ll consider a hiatus from social media for the first ten days.  Scrolling through other people’s pictures may give you the false impression that your friends have settled effortlessly into their new schools.  This is just a filter.  If things are so great, why are they on Snapchat?
4. Give orientation activities a chance even if they’re weird, boring, too early, too late or too far away.  I met one of my best friends on the bus back to campus after a canoe-jousting competition.  Have you ever known me to canoe-joust? No.  But I gave it a whirl that day, and we all love the wise, sparkly woman I met as a result.
5. Along those lines: you’ve grown up among my college friends, but that doesn’t mean it was love at first sight with all of them.  Some are people I discovered after graduation; others I never would have stuck with if I hadn’t peeled away a few layers.  My point is, give people a chance.  Give them five chances.  However:
6. Trust your instincts.  If someone seems like a creep, they probably are.
7. Take your work to the library even if you have everything you need to get it done in your room.  There’s no place cozier than a college library at night.
8. If you’re lucky, you will have long, late-night, soul-searching conversations with new friends.  You’ll trade stories about your high school, your town and your family.  Please go easy on us; we did our best!  And I’m definitely not the only mom who gossips, uses foul language, gets tons of parking tickets, drinks Diet Coke and steals her kids’ Halloween candy.
9. Do not, under any circumstances, drink from a cup you haven’t filled yourself.  You never know what someone has slipped in there.  And definitely avoid punch, which is a recipe for trouble.
10. I’m sorry I complained so much about picking you up from swim practice.  I’ll miss your red cheeks, your chlorine perfume and the gravity-defying bun on top of your head.
11. I’ll miss your half-finished friendship bracelets taped to the dining room table.
12. I’ll miss your trail of Cheez-Its on the kitchen counter.
13. I’ll miss the thud of your backpack in the hallway and the particular rhythm of your feet on the stairs.
14. Thank you for loving the books I love, with the glaring exception of Anne of Green Gables.
15. Thank you for being the best big sister.  I can’t say anymore on this topic without crying so, moving on…
16. Your room is an appalling disaster.  Still, I understand why the pets flock to your bed.
17. When someone invites you to do something you don’t want to do, you don’t owe an explanation for why you’re declining.  You might say, “Sorry, I’m not going to be able to make it,” or “I have other plans, but thank you for thinking of me!”  Or just plain, “No, thanks.”  Don’t wait until your forties to learn how to say these words.
18. You’ve already had the experience of not being invited to do something you wanted to do.  Watching you make other plans reminds me why I picked Grace for your middle name.
19. Complicated relationships aren’t more meaningful than easy ones, they’re just more work.  The best people are the ones who make you laugh.  This applies to friends and lovers. (Yes, I said lovers. I couldn’t think of a better word!)
20. Have fun!  Ride a cafeteria tray down a snowy hill, jump in a pile of leaves, make mug cakes at midnight.  You’re there to learn, but your brain needs a break.  And I’m not talking about back-to-back Grey’s episodes on your laptop.
21. Listen carefully — to classmates, professors and the sound of the wind.
22. Ask questions, ask for directions, ask for help.  Even if you think you can find what you need on Google, ask a human being.  We still know more than our phones.
23. You’ve come to me with problems I didn’t have solutions for.  This is a strange feeling for a parent, like being upside down on a rollercoaster.  The upside is, I’ve watched you make good decisions on your own — which is not to say all your decisions will be good, or have to be good.  Just that you have the tools to make a smart call.  I admire that.
24. You don’t need an earth-shattering reason to go to your professors’ office hours.  Just show up; they’re waiting for you and sometimes they have snacks.
25. There are free condoms in the health center.
26. Get a job, and please don’t waste all your money on chai lattes.
27. I’d aim to do laundry once a week, which is roughly three times more than you do it at home.
28. Be brave.  Go rock-climbing (on actual rocks); take an engineering class; join a singing group; be the hallmate who organizes a trip to see a lecture you saw advertised on a flier in the student center.  (Do they still have fliers?)
29. Failure is an option, although I prefer to call it redirection.  You are the daughter of a writer, so you know what it means to start a story that doesn’t go anywhere.  The point is to start something, have the guts to admit when it isn’t working, and the gumption to begin again.  The world has an infinite supply of stories, but courage is a diminishing resource as you get older.  Dive in now.
30. Try to resist the urge to “brand” yourself, which is so much less rewarding than establishing a meaningful, nuanced identity.  For instance, Daddy went for Deep Philosopher during our first semester of college; I went for Cheerful Girl (I’m sure this is hard for you to imagine).  Twenty years into our marriage, we still bump up against these boxes, which are empty and take up more room than they deserve.  Worth noting: we didn’t find each other until we’d stepped out of them.
31. You know how I told you I’m your mother, not your friend? I lied.  I’m both.
32. When you were in fourth grade, going through normal friend gymnastics — high bar, low bar, balance beam, backbend — I gave you a locket that my mom gave me for my tenth birthday.  Inside, I slipped a little piece of paper that said, “Be you.”  The locket is long lost to the sands of Maine, but the message remains the same.  Be yourself, no contortions required.  And know, with each step you take away from our house, that you are the living, breathing, blue-eyed, big-hearted embodiment of the word engraved inside your parents’ wedding rings: Beloved.

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Elisabeth Egan is the author of A Window Opens and the author of @100postcards.

Happy Heart Day!

Happy Heart Day!

“Love recognizes no barriers.  It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”  — Maya Angelou

 

Information: Adopting a Rescue Dog

This blog would never have existed if it has not been for our sweet dear Biscuit.  He changed our lives and he brought us our beloved Victory, who we absolutely adore, as well.  Doug and I cannot imagine our lives without a furry family member, and we will always choose to rescue a dog in honor of Biscuit and Victory.  However and importantly, we hope to not be in the position to rescue another dog for quite some time — we absolutely love our sweet Victory and we cannot ever imagine life without her.  Alex and Victory love each other, too, and I am so grateful that Alex gets to grow up with Victory!  Below are some ideas and considerations for those of you looking to possibly adopt a dog who truly needs a home.  I am also excited to share my long-term photography project, inspired by Biscuit, on the topic of dog rescue, hopefully in the near future.  The revisions are finally close to completion!

Start looking on Instagram or online: There are thousands of stray and abandoned dogs all over the country that need homes.  Looking at rescue organizations on Instagram or online will help provide a sense of the landscape of the rescue dogs available for adoption.  If you see some dogs you are interested in, you can usually meet them in person at regular adoption events.

Go straight to a shelter:  There are shelters all over the country where many dogs are available for adoption.  Shelters are usually the only open-admission facility, so space can be at a premium for these dogs.  As a result, some of these dogs are facing being euthanized, so remember that time is of the essence for these dogs.

Go straight to a rescue: There are also many dog rescue organizations all over the country.  There are breed specific dog rescues as well all over the country, especially if you have your heart set on a particular breed of dog.

Do not be swayed by the “cutest” dogs: Many times some of the more “sad” looking dogs just need to get cleaned up with a good bath and grooming along with receiving some much needed love.  Also, a lot of these dogs are in cages for the first time in their lives.  Thus, it is important to keep this in mind.  It also takes a while for these dogs to really come out of their shells.  This was the case for both Biscuit and Victory.  Once they knew they were in a safe environment, they both blossomed physically and emotionally.  Now, Victory and Alex literally run our household!  Doug and I are constantly providing ‘cherub care and support!’

Ask Questions:  When you are contemplating adopting a rescue dog, ask the shelter/rescue many questions.  For example, Are they good on a leash?  How do they respond to children?  How do they respond to strangers?  Do they enjoy being petted?  How do they react to other dogs?  Do they like to play?  Do they show any aggressive behavior(s)?  Do they respond differently to men versus women?  Ask anything that you believe is important for you to know.  Of course, after asking your questions, if you are interested, it is best to meet the potential rescue dog in person to see how you feel and connect with the dog.  Many times, people have told me that they just felt a connection with a particular rescue dog and knew that the particular rescue dog was meant to be adopted by them.  Or, alternatively, others have told me that a particular rescue dog  reminded them of another dog they lost.  It is all very interesting how animals come into our lives.

Consider a senior dog: Puppies, like babies, are a lot of work!  Older dogs have benefits because they are calmer and usually potty trained and socialized, depending upon the dog.  Many older dogs need homes and need people to take a chance on them.  Our beloved Biscuit was an older rescue dog, likely older than what we were told, but we had the best two-and-a-half years with him, and we would never trade our time with Biscuit for anything.

Prepare to sell yourself: Rescue organizations, in particular, will want to know your living situation: Who lives with you, and how old are they?  They will want to know your dog history, and if you have one, they may want to speak to your vet.  They will call references and ask if you have a plan to walk the dog while you work.  They are looking to see that you are not a fair-weather dog parent.  A good way to convey that you are not is to ask a lot questions.  Later there will likely be a home visit, at which point the rescue group will want to know how you will treat your new dog by asking you questions and providing possible scenarios to gauge your responses.

Prepare for your new rescue dog: It is important that you find a good vet that you like and trust; purchase a leash and the requisite dog gear for your new furry family member; consider pet insurance; register your new rescue dog with your local health department/government agency; and most of all, get ready for your life to change in a wonderful way!  You will save a dog’s life and in turn, your life will be equally enriched.

Most of all, I hope, that if you are interested in getting a dog, that you consider dog rescue!  Our sweet Victory and Alex are pictured together below!