Rant for the day: mobiles & animal rescues

Let's start with the yummy part of today. Its too damn hot; dinner is Chicken Pasta Salad with a Citrus Dressing.



Moving on to the milder of today's peeves: mobiles. Not the trailer park type, but the cutesy type that hangs over one corner of your baby's crib, that you wind and that spins and plays Rock-a-Bye Baby. Ours is dark brown and lime green, with four elephants. The one that hangs over the pack 'n play has brown bears. My son loves the mobile. He is fascinated, his big blue gray eyes riveted, his mouth slightly slack in awe and turned up in the corners. He can't take his eyes off it. He stops struggling against his swaddle, rapturously held by the slow turning of the elephants.

So riddle me this Batman - why do neither one of these things play/turn for more than a minute?!?! They are clearly designed by childless people. What contraption that soothes your child requires you to return to it every 90 seconds to wind it again? You tiptoe back into the room, only to find your child, eyes half open, still struggling to stare at the mobile, willing it to move again. Your baby is almost to the Land of Nod and you quietly begin to wind the mobile, only to startle him awake with the click-click-clicking as you wind it. Are we not technologically advanced enough to eliminate the clicking?!?! Awake now, you finish winding the damn thing and gently stroke your sons forehead, willing him to drop off so you can take a shower/wash some dishes/brush your teeth/eat something before your pass out/just sit down without something in your arms, and just as his eyes begin to droop.... the f-ing mobile stops. I'd like to know who designs these things and what corporate entity has decided it costs too much to make them parent-friendly.

Today's big peeve however, is pet rescues. Wil had a conversation with another shelter today about a dog we saw on line. This is the THIRD rescue we have contacted and three strikes and we are out.


Last September we lost our beloved Blu. He had been with us, a long time, and it was torturous and heartbreaking to have to let him go, tempered only by the fact that two days after we did, we found out we were pregnant. About 5 months ago, Wil was casually checking out rescue dogs on Petfinder.com. Eric had recently gotten Oscar from the Boxer Rescue and we were really keen on rescuing a dog if we were going to get one (we were still in discussions, considering the pregnancy). We were interested in Wiley and saw that he would be at a pet store on Saturday in Hollywood. Wil filled out the application online and we went to check him out.

While Wil took him for a short-lived walk down the block (as he discovered, Wiley was not the dog for us), the woman running the adoptions sat me down and reviewed our application on her iphone. While she was kind in a back-handed bitch kind of way, she asked how far along I was and when the baby was due. Then she asked how we were going to handle a baby and a dog if my husband was working 15 hours a day as a grip. I explained that I was taking the rest of the year off and that since Wil is a rigger, he doesn't work 15 hour days and our schedules worked out so that he was home by the mid afternoon. And did I mention that I was taking the next 6 months off? Or that we have been responsible dog owners for, oh, I don't know, OUR WHOLE LIVES? Then she told me in a patronizing tone that we shouldn't get a dog now, because I would not be able to handle a baby and a dog, honey, she should know, she did it. I should wait at least two years and then see how I felt about it. Then she blew me off.

We wouldn't have taken the dog just because of her and the way she represented the adoption shelter. This was our second rescue experience. The first was an English Bulldog named Nora we drove to Covina to see. This woman volunteered for the shelter; she actually owned 3 English bulldogs and was fostering two others (I'm glad we didn't smell the inside of her house). We loved Nora, but this woman never called us back after promising to arrange a home visit. She never called us back, even after I called Bulldog Rescue to complain and see what could be done. Then Bulldog Rescue never returned any of my calls after promising to look into the status of our application and find out why the woman had never contacted us again.

Today, when Wil called about Cleo (a pitbull/English bulldog mix) he was told that they had received our online application but that there was "a great deal of interest" around this particular dog, and right now, they were taking appointments to see Cleo starting "on or around August 5th." Are you kidding me? We're not trying to get in to see the governor. I'm not trying to get a donor kidney, or make a reservation at the French Laundry. I need to line up to see a dog two weeks from now, so I can primp and prance for YOU and PROVE how much I DESERVE this dog? Are you f-ing kidding me? Does this animal need rescued right now or not?!?!

So sad to say, but it seems the major obstacle in our rescuing a dog is the rescue itself. There are thousands of dogs in need of good homes, but we don't feel the need to jump through 20 hoops to prove to someone that we deserve to rescue a dog when we could walk into a pet store or call a breeder and purchase the dog of our choosing. We were trying to choose something else. The obnoxious, holier-than-thou attitude we get from these rescues is enough to turn us off to the entire prospect, which is a lose-lose situation all around. But really, I have a roof over my head and food on my table and a lot of love to give. Who loses more here?