Hello friends!  Welcome to Canine Feline Friday.  Mom says we have to talk about the kitties every once in a while, and that Feline Friday is ususally a good time to do it.  I don’t know about that…I love my kitties and everything, but this is my blog…Peace a BULL, not Peace a Kitty.  That would just be too silly.

Anyhow, ‘member when I told you about my slumber party with Mommy?  And how my bubby, Jae, was telling me in his whiney voice about how he gets to sleep with Mommy every night?  Well, I just found this picture!

That’s him curled right up next to Mommy’s pillow.  I guess he was telling the truth, but that’s ok, ‘cuz look what I can do.

My bubby is always whining at the door to go outside, but he isn’t allowed to.  Well,  sometimes he can go on the patio, but what he really wants to do is eat grass.  Bubby, look at me!  I’m laying in the grass and you aren’t.  (haha)

Everybody says that when they’re giving their acceptance speech, like it’s a requirement.  But when I found out that Pitlandia nominated us for The Beautiful Blogger and One Lovely Blog awards, honestly?  I thought she was kidding.  We read blogs that get awards, we don’t write them.  Seriously, I have been blogging here and there since 2004, people.  Admittedly, I’m a lurker and haven’t made much of an attempt to lure readers and I do have some posts that I am especially proud of, but really I am completely floored and beyond honored to be nominated.

So, here are six things about me and one about Ray.

1.  I love to shop.  I am happy shopping for nearly anything.  I can occupy myself in a hardware store, at the mall, at a kiosk if you sell it, I want to shop it.  I love to shop and I’m pretty darn good at it.  I can find a deal blindfolded.

2.  I like busting stereotypes.  I drive a four door, four wheel drive pickup truck (named Fernando, pronounced Fer-nahn-do) …usually I’m wearing 4″ heels and a dress and I’m the only female in the office who plays fantasy football.  Yeah, I can wield a mean sledgehammer in heels, too.

3.  I know everything there is to know about the shrimping business.  Ok, that’s a lie, but I do like a good movie quote or reference sprinkled in the conversation.

4.  I will give you the shirt off my back or the last dollar in my wallet if I thought you needed it, but I hate asking for help myself and I have little patience for people who seem to not be able to do simple things for themselves.

5.  I once won the Poise and Appearance award in a pageant.

6.  I used to say that even though I love cats, I probably wouldn’t want to live with one.  I now have three.  After our chow chow passed away, I said I didn’t want another dog.  Then I wanted to foster a black elderbull.  I ended up adopting a mostly white puppy.

7.  Ray still squats like a girl when he pees. 

Ok, enough about me, on to those bloggers whom I truly admire.  Here is the hard part:  Most of the bloggers I follow are quite well established and a nomination from me might feel a tad presumptuous, but here goes nothin’.  I would like to add that everyone that Pitlandia nominated would be on my list as well but that would just be too copy catty.

First and foremost would be The One in Heels.  I have followed this chick from blog to blog since her kid was well, a kid.  He is now an adult and I am still an avid follower.  I can’t gush enough about her.  She is real but not raw and incredibly up on the latest…everything.  She would be at the top of my list of bloggers I’d  like to meet because she, like me, seems to be nice but not that nice.  After all, not everyone can be Claree.

Honestly, I don’t know exactly why, but I’m slightly obsessed with Pittieful Love.  I actually started reading them after Knox passed and those posts nearly did me in.  But the whole “ready to take a chance on love again” with Chocko who is just too stinkin’ cute as well as …just a great read and from what I can tell, a great person.  I also am in love with Baltimore, so its just bonus points that they live there.

Which brings me to Peace, Love and Fostering.  This girl woman is basically the same age as my daughter.  She writes with a maturity that comes from an understanding of just where she is in her life and already she has fostered some amazing dogs, including Baxter whom I have LOVED since I first laid eyes on him.

Birdy Flies Home doesn’t update very often, but if you have an afternoon to yourself, start at the beginning…with a box of tissues.  Birdy, if you don’t know was to be a fospice care dog through BAD RAP, but was adopted.  This blog is the story of Birdy.

Finally, there is another blogger whom I follow that I would nominate but not link to out of respect to his privacy.  You know who you are.

I imagine to the passerby outside the fence, the sound that ensues would be pretty intimidating.  What’s your pooches favorite game?

Back in the Spring at the Mega Match I purchased the Wisdom Panel DNA kit for Ray because even though he is and always will be my “Pit Bow” as I call him, I was curious as to what kind of Pit Bull type dog he really is.  On one hand, it might really seem like a “no brainer” since fetus Ray was rescued with his pregnant mama and her brother. I was afforded a luxury not every adopter gets but even Sparkles and Kane who are litter mates look like totally different kinds of dogs.



Kane

 (By the way, I loved Kane’s sweet big-head face the moment I saw it.)  Even Sparkles who Ray looks so much like, is waaaay smaller than he is.  At her adoption day, she weighed just under 40 lbs and the picture below shows a comparison of Sparkles and Ray but he was only about 6 months old in this picture.



Sparkles on top, baby Ray on the bottom.

 So, what the heck makes up a  Ray-Ray?  Sugar and spice and everything nice?  Snips and snails and puppy dog tails? 

These are bad pictures because I am too inept to do this correctly, but one side is 100% American Bulldog and the other side is Boxer mixed with mystery meat.  I’m guessing that the mystery portion has APBT in there since Wisdom Panel doesn’t screen for it, but I found it interesting that the next closest matches are no more than 9% and look!  There’s the terrier…looks just like him, doesn’t it? 

So when is your Pit Bull not a Pit Bull?  It doesn’t matter, we see what we see and we feel what we feel and Ray is my Pit Bull.

Pssst!  Have you followed us on Facebook yet?

From Kindergarten through at least the 8th grade, I was the only Asian (half-Asian) in my entire school.  Not just in my class but in the entire school since my sister is younger and we never were in the same school at the same time.  I’m from a small town of only about ten thousand or so and to use a term I learned much later in life, “there wasn’t much color” there.  Not to say it was all one color save for me, but the other minority was represented with at least more than one which makes for some interesting school days.  I acquired a nice little nickname, Chinatown, which morphed into the even more wonderful, Chineetown.  Like probably every child, I hated being “different” and of course blamed my mother for not being white and for not speaking English clearly enough, never mind all that she went through to get where she was.  Once I got older I blamed her for not making me Korean enough, since we can’t speak Korean at all other than possibly counting to ten.  People see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear, though.

When I was in college and working at the front desk in my dorm my senior year, a lady who was visiting someone stopped and asked me if I was Korean and did I know so-and-so who was also Korean…at a university of nearly twenty thousand…and wasn’t I just so cute, because I still had an accent!

Later in life, I’ve not dealt with being too Korean or not Korean enough because there is always something else out there.  I recall my first husband and myself being followed through a department store as we wheeled our daughter in her stroller.  We were clean, well dressed, educated (ok you can’t see that), why were we being followed?  Oh yes, he was black and unfortunately he was used to it, although at first I didn’t even know what was going on. 

Being different or being not of the mainstream, I don’t mean to compare life experiences of racial prejudice with dog ownership but I do find similarities.  People ask me if Ray is a fighter.  “When is your dog’s next fight?”  People have asked me, upon entering my yard if he will eat them. People think its a joke, that it is ok to say things like that because they’re just kidding. Why are you being so sensitive?

Then there are those who go out of their way to be accepting that they really are unwittingly adding fuel to the fire.  I’m constantly asked what kind of dog Ray is and try to always respond with “Pit bull type” though sometimes it is just “Pit Bull” that comes out of my mouth.  Naturally we get a variety of reactions and comments and one was, ” Oh, we just prefer to call them Terriers.”

I understand the good intentions behind that, but really it doesn’t help.  I hate that there is the feeling or sentiment that Pit Bull is something dirty that should be swept under the rug like a secret.  I feel badly that people are forced to list their dog as something it’s not at the Vet’s office for fear of BSL.  I’m proud of my boy, not because he is a symbol but because he is my loving “little” puppy.  I’m proud of myself because I’ve learned to be comfortable in my own skin (usually) and surround myself with great people. 

Just for kicks, I had Ray’s DNA done so when you look at Ray, what do you see?  A Pit Bull?  A Pit Mix?  A Terrier? A monster? 

What do you think the results were?

We are ready to be done with the week and are happy to welcome the weekend.  What big plans do you have in the works?

I, as you might expect, follow several dog-blogs as well as even more dog and dog related pages on Facebook and I absolutely love looking at everyone’s pictures. The great poses that the humans capture as well as the clever captions are a true source of enjoyment for me.  I know I am not by any means very talented behind the camera.  I’m more of a point, shoot, cross your fingers and delete kind of gal, so I seem to have a long running internal debate.  Should I buy a better camera?  As you can tell from the low quality of the majority of my pictures, I rely heavily on my crappy Droid for capturing moments and the few times I get a better quality it is because I’m borrowing my daughter’s Kodak.  Should I invest in a camera?  How high of a quality should I choose?  At what point would my limited knowledge of photography make a new camera….wait.  I’m not wording this well.  What I mean is I don’t want to get too much camera for my limited skills because that would just be a waste of money.

Well.  That paragraph went in a direction that I wasn’t planning. My original point was that I’m always curious as to the acutal size of the dogs I’m seeing online.  How is that for the stream of consiousness to take a wild turn!  My first experience with a Pit Bull type dog in person was my sister’s dog who was gigantic.  Tai Chi weighed nearly 100 pounds and he was tall, so for the longest time, I thought that is what  Pit Bull looked like. 

Then I started reading about how much variation there is and about the whole lumping of several breeds into the general term “Pit Bull”  and I’m fascinated by all of the differences I see.  I love it. 
I’m wondering though, about Ray of course.  I wonder how long he will continue in his physical growth.  Because he has excellent manners out in public, people forget or just don’t realize that he is still a puppy.  I take him with me each month to the Veterinarian’s office to get his heartworm “cookie” so that I can weigh him and give him more exposure to people and that office in general.  Not surprisingly he keeps growing at exponential rates and every time they read a new weight from the machine I have to remind them he is a baby.  “He weighs 73.5 pounds today but a month ago he was 66 pounds?”  Yes, but don’t forget he is not quite ten months old.  Oh. Yeah.

Big baby with his binky

So here is what I believe I remember:  Miss M. is 85 pounds, Wallace was under 55 pounds, Audie is 45 pounds and of course baby Ray is 73 pounds at 10 months.  The point?  None, I guess.  All of the above are “Pit Bull-type” dogs though none of them look at all alike.  True, they all have blocky heads and muscular chests and short hair but even that varies.  Miss M has a very different kind of head that Audie’s whose is very different from Ray’s whose is very different from Wallace’s. So while they are so different-looking from each other, why do so many people want to attribute blanket generalizations to them?

*Excuse the rambly-ness today, although I have no excuse…oh wait, let’s just call it Friday-itis.

As I was meandering around meeting vendors and greeting adoptable dogs at the Adopt-a-thon, my attention was grabbed by a sign, “Holistic Kibble.”  I was drawn to the booth like it was magnetized!  What I found were two of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, Greg and Heather, the owners of Holistic Kibble to Go.  This is a “locally owned family business that delivers manufacturer’s premium pet food directly to your door.”  They carry very high quality brand names for both dogs and cats and as advertised, deliver it locally to you.  We had such a nice chat, and I learned that Greg and Heather are fur parents to English bulldogs as well as a cat and like myself, do a lot of their research on Dog Food Advisor. 

Just a few more images from the great weeked at H.O.P.E. Adopt-a-ton.  Don’t forget to enter the contest to win some tasty home made treats for your special pooch. Details here.