Pay it Forward

 After staring at my computer screen from 5 AM until 5 PM yesterday and being visited at 3 AM by my worst enemy, the nasty migraine, I started to ask myself "Why?". My husband has been warning me for years that the computer screen is one of my enemies, in addition to MSG, lack of sleep, not eating enough, tannins, wine, beer, and on and on, all conspiring to attack me in the middle of the night.

I’ve been able to give up the long list when I’m not too lazy to read labels, but the computer screen is part of my life. So I guess I’d better just take breaks. The only problem has been that my idea of a break is to read a book on my Kindle, oops, another screen. Will I ever learn?

So why are we doing this, working feverishly trying to educate, to get the word out about how much service dogs can change lives? Liz, my daughter and partner in crime says she remembers my telling her when she was very little that with a brain like hers, she’d better contribute to society. So she ended up in research, and dragged me along to help her put her very complex ideas into words. Her mind works so fast that sometimes I think I might be one of the few people who can disentangle her thoughts. 

So we’ve been working together for what seems like forever. In fact forever isn’t really an exaggeration. When she wrote a book while in graduate school, we sent the chapters back and forth from the west to the east coasts via FEDEX. Email is really much more affordable and efficient. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the culture of paying it forward. About two years ago we had a flat tire on I-95 in the middle of the night. Someone stopped and changed it for us, wouldn’t accept any help from my husband, who was perfectly capable of changing it himself, and wouldn’t accept anything except a thank you.

Last Saturday we took a ride on our motor scooter and turned down a deserted road leading to Everglades National Park. A few miles off the main road we found a service van that had gotten stuck in the mud while trying to turn around. Some park rangers had stopped, but they didn’t have a clue as to how to free him from the mud. So, remembering the experience we had in Mexico when a bunch of workers came out of the fields and pushed our motor home out of a ditch, we told the useless rangers how to free the van and helped them push it out.

When we returned 20 minutes later, the van and the driver were still on the side of the road. So we helped him change his flat tire and sent him on his way. The entire episode took about three hours out of our afternoon, but, at the end of the day, my husband said to me “We had a great adventure.” 

Money really isn’t everything. If more people paid it forward, perhaps our country wouldn’t be so divided. We won’t make much from our service dog work. We’re trying to cover our expenses and pay for our time (It’s been 2 people, 2 years so far, at no pay.), but we will show people that they can improve their quality of life.

The webcast has been approved for continuing education credits for nurses. We’ve begun to work with the VA and will adapt it for others in the medical community. that we’ve spent the last eight months perfecting has finally been   Together we’ll all be able to help people who really need it.

Let Our Game Begin

This is my 10 year old granddaughter's dog for all of us. The ear is for the autistic community, the eye is the same color as hers, the tongue looks like our Mikey dog, and the rest is just to make us happy. For the past 2 years my daughter Liz (Dr. Elisabeth Gruskin) and I have been working on our service dog project. We’ve been telling Sarah about everything the dogs can do and she’s been our biggest fan. Now she has to decide, will she be a veterinarian, an artist, or a beautician? Isn’t it nice to be 10?

We started this journey when Liz, who had been doing medical research on some very intense topics, met someone with a major facility to train service dogs. She had just started to work on service dogs for MS patients and Liz was fascinated. I was really excited because, after working with Liz on her grant proposals and papers for the past 20 years with very little interest in the content, I finally found a topic I could read for meaning, not just for sentence structure and punctuation.

The more we traveled  the country from service dog provider to meetings with the medical community to Multiple Sclerosis organizations, the more we realized how much these remarkable dogs could change the quality of life for so many. Service dogs can help people with way more than MS, ranging from PTSD to autism, from cancer to diabetes, from visual to physical handicaps, but awareness is sorely lacking.

Rather than pursue our original path, that of structured research, we concluded that we could make a more immediate difference with education. So we’ve been all over the place. Our websites and Facebook pages have opened eyes and started people talking. When someone called me to tell me that because of our website, he was about to get a service dog for his debilitating MS, I realized that we could accomplish something.

We have just completed Service Dogs 101, an Internet seminar to educate the medical community. We’ll go on to focus on spreading the word to the military community and medical insurers.  Hopefully, next time you see a service dog, you’ll understand what went into the training of the dog, how hard the dog and the human have had to work to form a team, and how much the dog has been helping its human partner.

Mangoes over Miami (or Eat Your Heart Out, America)

It’s that time again. You can tell by my nail polish. No French manicure for me. Only dark colors because I’m too lazy to wear gloves when I handle my beloved mangoes.

I can’t tell a lie, I have been having fun with magnetic polish, the kind that you can turn into stripes with a magnet. It’s not as easy as they say. It belongs in the file labeled “If it were easy, everyone would do it,” but, after about 10 tries, I finally got the hang of it. Today my nails are kind of green with silver stripes. My husband hates them, but, as the little girl with the pacifier said when approached “Does it hurt you?”

I still have a freezer with leftovers from two years ago, still good for chutney and freezes, but this is the year of the ice cream. Back to the mangoes. Marianne, our original tree, the one we bought at Home Depot seven years ago when she was so small that we had to surround her with chairs lest she be run over by a lawnmower, has had a banner year. Last year, not so much, but I guess she needed a rest.

In our family we have the no sugar—no artificial sweetener problem. Artificial sweetener gives me migraines and my husband has had to swear off sugar so it was time to do some experimenting with my old theory about ice milk vs. ice cream. Look at the calorie count of ice milk. It may be lower in fat, but it’s not so low in calories because it contains more sugar. The extra butterfat on your tongue tastes sweet.

So here I was, up to my elbows in mango juice with only skim milk in the house. We don't use anything but skim milk because even 1% doesn’t work for cappuccino. Don’t know why, but it’s true in every cappuccino maker from the high pressure steam one to my current favorite that looks like a French press, but has a stem that reaches the bottom of the container.

Time to enlist my Vita Mix—the $450 blender that's my second favorite machine, after the Cuisinart. No it may sound like it's for making healthy stuff, but I use it for mayonnaise, freezes, and ice cream. I had to add butterfat to the mango ice cream, so I made it with skim milk and a hunk of sweet butter (No, I don’t cook with margarine, only use butter or olive oil or my new favorite, grape seed oil.)

The mango/milk/butter with a pinch of salt made the most amazing ice cream. Too bad I didn’t have my old ice cream maker, so I had to set my timer and take the mixture out of the freezer to stir it every hour until it froze. It would have been less grainy if I had an ice cream maker, but it was fine as long as I let it melt a bit before I served it.

Then came the next trial: what to do with the very large container of very large strawberries that I bought at Costco. No, they’re not from Florida, ours aren’t as good as the ones from California, but we can’t have it all. The strawberry ice cream is more like sherbet, but it’s almost as good as the mango stuff, if you like strawberries.

Where do my pets fit into all this? Mikey loves mangoes. Wesley is still thinking about it, but the parrots start to shriek the minute the fruit comes through the front door. They like to chew on the seeds and remove the last bits of orange flesh from the skin. I know they would all like the ice cream, but milk products are on the “not good for dogs” list, so they’ll have to settle for what comes off the kitchen counter.

Fortunately, the dogs haven’t figured out that they should fight the squirrels for the mangoes on the ground.

Too Much Oatmeal and a Dirty Dog

There I sat with a little fluffy mostly white and very dirty, after only a week, dog. Another bath with flea shampoo was out of the question. Ditto for human shampoo, even baby shampoo.

If shampoo is too harsh for my own curly mane (the no-poo credo of those of us with our love/hate or rather hate/love relationship with our curls), surely must be for Wesley’s, I presumed. But that wasn’t the real reason. The PH of dogs isn’t the same as that of humans so we can’t share shampoo.

Although Wesley and I could have walked to our local Pet Supermarket, 5 AM, when his dirty coat was really annoying me was 4 hours too early, so I decided to search the net. 

Bingo. One recipe called for oatmeal, a way to start to use up the huge tub of quick oats I bought before I discovered the virtues of the 20 minute kind. The recipe called for equal quantities of pulverized oatmeal and baking soda mixed with glycerin and water. No glycerin in my kitchen, but I found aloe listed in another recipe. There’s glycerin in the aloe that I’ve had for ages so I figured I couldn’t go far wrong.

So, Wesley’s shampoo consisted of a cup of ground oatmeal, a cup of baking soda, a cup of aloe vera gel, and a cup of water, all mixed up in my Vita Mix, but it could have been done in any food processor if the oatmeal were first pulverized in a coffee grinder. 

Wesley looks clean, smells clean, isn’t scratching thanks to the oatmeal, and I have a bottle of dog shampoo that I think I’ll store in the refrigerator. Why, I don’t know, but I don’t think I want it to get green, slimy or moldy.

Meet Wesley (Our Newest Bundle of Joy)

Dogs (sorry, cat lovers, I’ve had lots of cats, and bird lovers, I have 3 parrots (you can’t sleep with a parrot), and child lovers, (I have 3 of those),  grandchildren(I have 3 of those and they’re in a separate class), occupy a special place in my heart. I spend 60% of my waking hours on my daughter Liz’s and my work on service dog research and the rest on fun, especially with our family zoo.

Our newest, latest, greatest is a little ball of fur that we found at Animal-Aid in Oakland Park, Florida. Yes, everyone I know is aware of my love for Snickers, my friend Judi’s service dog, a very large Labradoodle, and my desire to have one someday, but my husband won this time. We spend weekends in a motor home and another very large dog would just take up whatever aisle space is left after Mikey spreads his stuffed animals and his blankets out.

How did we travel all those years with our 3 children, all born within 4 ½ years of each other, and 3 Dobermans in a trailer or motor home? I never think of myself as a senior citizen until I consider the changes in attitude that must have taken place over the years.

We had some pretty funny experiences, all dog-centered. On one New Year’s Eve trip to see the Nutcracker Suite at the Kennedy Center in DC, after searching for hours for someplace to spend the night, the attendant at the parking garage told us to just stay in their driveway. I’m not sure he really included permission for us to stake out our 3 Dobermans on their very pristine lawn, but when we returned the next night, after a fruitless search for a place to stay, he came running out to ask us where we had been and tell us he was worried about us. During the same trip, when we couldn’t find a place to spend the night near Inner Harbor in Baltimore, the police officer on duty told us to stay right next to his booth so he could keep track of us. I’m not sure he trusted his neighborhood.

On the way home from the Amish country, when we had trouble with our engine, a wonderful samaritan towed us with his quite old pickup truck to a service station from which he called someone he knew who called his friend, the Chrysler distributer, to locate the part we needed and ask him to open the warehouse on Sunday morning to procure it for us. We spent the night in the station with our 3 little children and 3 Dobermans. 
There was a family having breakfast across the street and, with our hearts in our mouths, we watched one of the children approach us, thinking they were going to complain about the dogs. All she wanted to do was offer our dogs their leftover pancakes. Thank you, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The only trouble with that trip was that we missed my father in law’s birthday party, but everything can’t always be perfect, can it? Or maybe it can.

Since our years with 3 Dobermans at a time, only one of which was our very own, the others being boarders sent to our home to acclimate them to life in a people zoo, we have had a very odd assortment of animals. 
There was one six month period without a pet until we heard a baby crying in a bird store. Of course the “baby” turned out to be our yellow-naped Amazon, our first parrot. How could we leave without such a sad bird? All he was doing was imitating the newborn in the family he had lived with. They couldn’t keep him because they just couldn’t sleep with the baby and the bird alternately awakening them every few minutes. The next year we fell in love with a hawkhead, really beautiful, but tough, then my daughter left us with her conure. The two-legged, feathered total is 3 and likely to remain that way for a while. Parrots live a lot longer than dogs.

The newest parade of dogs began when we found our first moppy dog, a Tibetan terrier, who was the love of my life. I still haven’t gotten over losing him. We inherited my mother’s cockerpoo, whom we had adopted for her from Adopt a Pet. We found Mikey wandering the streets at 5 weeks old; he’s the amazing dog whose home we have had the privilege of sharing.

Mikey is the one who doesn’t like to eat—anything. When Mikey likes it, I know it’s good.

Five days ago I talked my husband into a trip to Animal-Aid on our way to the park in Oakland Park where we were scheduled to spend the weekend. I knew he would fall in love with someone, but I didn’t really expect him to react with tears at not being able to adopt them all. Wesley jumped into his lap and the connection was instant. Wesley turned out to be what they thought was a Tibetan spaniel and we fell in love with the breed.

Our first problem was finding a name. We were in the process of going through the alphabet when we stopped at Publix to get some food. Wesley, who, at the time, didn’t have a name, jumped out of the motor home into the parking lot. How do you call a dog that doesn’t have a name? I think I screamed so loud that I scared him and he stopped in his tracks.

We left him in the motor home with Mikey, did our shopping, and, when we saw the name tag on the young man who was manning the register, we knew we had a name. You should have seen his grin when we asked permission to name our new dog after him. Wesley knows his name and the next issue has been training him to come when called.

Yes, I really do believe in training service dogs, but for a house pet, tricks aren’t my bag. My dogs have to do one thing—come when called by name. When a dog likes treats or even likes the food it eats, it’s easy. My dogs, however—both of them—don’t like anything. Wesley doesn’t even like the store-bought treats that Mikey does us a favor and eats.

When I realized he liked my leftover roasted chicken, I decided it was time to put my People Food for Pets wheels in motion. I chopped up the leftover chicken into little pieces (Wesley is really small, weighs only 12 pounds.), spread them on a cookie sheet and dried them in a 300 degree oven for 2 hours. Voila! Training treats. My only problem was that I kept catching my 10 year old granddaughter chewing on Wesley’s treats. Chicken jerky anyone?