San Diego: Come for the Breweries, Bring Your Dog!

San Diego is well known for its craft breweries - there are well over 100 of them. (141 by this count!) If you like craft beer, this is definitely a mecca you'll want to visit one day.

And the good news is, you can bring your dog! Many of the breweries are dog friendly, and you can find a good list here, and a few additional places on this list here. One brewery we really like that isn't on either of these lists is Duck Foot Brewing.

And I cannot lie!

Feeling Hot Hot Hot

I love the fall. It's my favorite season! ...except in San Diego when we have the worst heat of the year. Like now. Bleh.

Actually, by the time it's really Wordless Wednesday, we're supposed to have cooled off a lot, but the last few days have been miserable. It's bad enough to have the post-vaca blues, but post-vaca blues + a heat wave is really no fun!

Monday Mischief: Dog Days of Summer - in Winter

It's too hot to blog! Siriusly. My office with the computer in it gets the sun beating into it in the afternoons (and trying to blog via an iPad is an exercise in frustration!), so I'm going to try to keep this brief!

The weather in San Diego this afternoon while I type this is 87 degrees.

Less-Wordy Wednesday: Hitting the Beach

I've written before about how we don't go back to the off-leash bay-front dog park anymore. (After The Worst Walk Ever we tried a few other times, but Rita doesn't have a perfect recall and I worried too much that she'd get in trouble with another crazy person.)

But recently we tried one of the many on-leash beaches. There are lots of beaches in San Diego where you can walk your on-leash dog - the only catch is that it has to be before 9am all year, and then after 4pm in the winter/6pm in the summer. 

Wordless Wednesday: On a Walk in Bird Rock

As I mentioned during K9 Kamp, we do a lot of walking. And we don't usually get bored, because we have lots of different, nice routes we can take. One of our favorite walks is to head down to a little neighborhood known as "Bird Rock." It's called this cuz there's a rock. And birds sit (and do other stuff that rhymes with sit) on it. [Sorry this is wordy - you don't have to read it. You can just look at the pics!]

Rita in front of Bird Rock - with no birds on it at the moment

Celebrating the Print Version: Enter the Giveaway!

I briefly mentioned the other day that the paperback version of WHAT THE DOG ATE is now available! Hooray! I can hold my book in my hot little hands. (And now you can too! Links for purchasing are at the end of the post.) So, I'm doing two things to celebrate:

Donating proceeds

I've committed to donating 10% of the proceeds of all print sales for the rest of this year to Best Friends Animal Society. I had a hard time deciding who to choose, but decided on Best Friends because I admire what they do (I'd love to visit them some day!) and love their mission: "To bring about a time when there are no more homeless pets." I can't even imagine that - what would it be like if there were no dogs and cats to rescue?? Wouldn't it be wonderful? 

So, if you buy the book in print, know that part of the money will go to help animals in need. And we're not just talking dogs and cats here! No - you'll be helping chickens, ducks, goats, horses, parrots, pigs, pigeons (adopt a pigeon??), rabbits, sheep, and one burro and one mule. (Someday I would love to have a burro or a donkey! But that's probably not going to happen in my lifetime...). Burros... those are asses right? So, buy my book and save an ass!

A Giveaway

The other thing I'm doing to celebrate is giving away a goodie bag to one lucky winner!

A Couple of Firsts

Today, we took Abby for her first hike since her surgery. Her stamina seems to be pretty good, probably from all the walking in our new neighborhood with its hills! Admittedly, today's hike was pretty easy - nice and flat - but the terrain was very uneven/rocky from all the rain we've had and we walked for almost an hour. We hiked in Rose Canyon, which is pretty much right in the heart of San Diego. This is one of the things I love about San Diego - you can be right in the middle of the city's burbs but feel like you're out in the country somewhere. (Of course, you can sometimes hear the freeway noise, but you just have to tune that out.)

As you can see from some of the pictures, there was still quite a bit of water from all the rain!

In another first, we found out the other day that Abby can still "shake"! After her surgery, I figured she wouldn't be able to do that anymore. Abby knows very few 'commands': Sit, Leave it! (had to use this one about 3000 times when we'd go on walks when she was a little puppy), Down, and Shake. (She also hears "Off!" a lot, but either doesn't know it or chooses to ignore it. I'm thinking it's the latter...) So, with really only knowing four commands, I was bummed that she wouldn't be able to shake anymore--figured that was a 25% drop in her vocabulary! But the other day we had some folks over, and I made her sit to get a treat, and then said, "I guess it was a waste of time teaching her to shake!" and when she heard the word, she sat up and held out her paw. So cute! And it's the "wrong" paw, so she figured out to offer the only front paw she had left. So smart!

We continue to be so impressed with her! 

Coming up on Tuesday is chemo #5 - the penultimate session. I'm hoping to learn more about that damn spot when I talk to Dr. Vancil that day. Will post post her appointment. (At least - I hope I will... We are having a destruction crew here that day. Could be a bit crazy, what with the concrete wall in our living room coming down! Anyway, I'll definitely post again soon!)