Oh Canada

SO. Eventful weekend.

On Friday, Greg and I got ourselves all excited and worked up to go visit Animal Friends. Animal Friends is a Pittsburgh Shelter that's been around for a long time and was originally started to help the pet's of soldier's who'd gone to war. We adopted our Third cat:


Ella, at Animal Friends. I'm a LEEETLE bit prejudiced against animal friends. Allow me to explain.

I respect all animal shelters and I'm so glad they're all around helping animals in need. Before we'd ever visited Animal Friends we became accustomed to another local shelter that is sort of a classic shelter... old linoleum floors, the smell of pets, a little dirty, definitely older building, cat crates stacked on cat crates, lots of barking in the background... etc. When we first visited Animal friends we were unprepared. They're sort of off in their own little world, you cross a bridge to get to their facility parking. You go inside and everything is bright, colorful, well-laid out, and tidy. There is no smell, and the building is brand new. It was exciting to see such a high-quality facility. Additionally, their cat area is pretty cool in the way it's set up. I'm bad at explaining, so take my word for it. We met Ella in a cat colony, and Greg wanted to take her home - and that was that. Since then, we haven't returned. I became a little less entranced with Animal friends when we took our cat to the vet for the Second time (yea, they didn't bother to tell us in our first visit) when our Veterinarian told me, while laughing, that she would "Eat her Hat" if Ella was 4 years old like the shelter told us - a more accurate estimate would probably be about 12 or 14 years old. She pointed out 8 million things that supported her estimate. SO... we have a crotchety old-woman cat. Fine.

But - they had a nice facility right? What better place to look at a dog right?

So, we went to Animal Friends RIGHT after we shoved all our stuff in our car because oh- did I mention we took a trip to Canada this weekend? Yea. We took a trip to Toronto.

Anyway. We stopped at Animal Friends. They were open till 7:00 and we got there at about 6:15 or so.

We walked around all their kennels - most of which were poopy - and disappointingly, most of their dogs were seniors.

When we decided that we'd actually like to meet one of their collies, we walked to the main desk and waited patiently - that was at about 6:30.

At about 6:40, someone finally offered to help us. Greg said "We just wanted to meet one of the dogs..." The woman interrupted to say "No. Sorry. It's too late. We close in 20 minutes and there's not enough time to fill out all the adoption paperwork. We open at 10 a.m. tomorrow." And then she ignored us.

I wanted to yell "WE'RE GOING TO CANADA" but somehow I restrained myself.

I think they should get the big old stick out of their butts. I mean, yes, they're doing a WONDERFUL thing - the thankless job of rescuing animals from deplorable situations and placing them in new homes. And yes - SOME people suck. Some people who want to adopt just want puppies cause they're cute or really haven't thought at all about what they want out of a dog... but for serious? You're open for another 20 minutes and you're telling me to go away? What's that all about. I'm a serious candidate. I think the relationship between shelters and potential adopters should be more like partners - I'll thank you for rescuing and holding this dog, till I could come rescue it and it would make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside if you were a little grateful to me for taking this dog out of your shelter to make room for another needy little fuzzball.

Maybe I'm just a big old grump.

THEN Greg realized that he hadn't brought his Cesar Millan book with him from work, so he wanted to go pick it up, so I acceded. We stopped by his office and picked up the book and on the way out of the building... he realized we didn't have our passports. To go to Canada you need your Passports. He'd asked me about mine plenty of times and he'd even gotten them out to check their experation dates... but he hadn't packed them.

So THEN we drove an hour to get HOME. And THEN we finally started our journey to Canada.

It was 8:00 by then.

We had meant to start out by 6:00.

Were we headed to a nearby part of Canada you ask? No. We were not. We were headed to Toronto. Far. Far. Away.

We crossed the border and it immediately started snowing. Greg was fairly confused and fascinated by the Kilometer signs and for some reason he found the center painted road lines extra challenging. But eventually we made it to our Hotel at 1:00 a.m.

We were both exhausted and we had spent the last hour in the car pretending to be enthused and energetic just so that we wouldn't fall asleep. We must have listened to Jason Mraz's "Lucky" about 50 times.

The Hotel was nice. This is the bed that awaited us.
With every fiber of my being, I crave a king sized bed.

Anyway. We slept in and ordered room service for breakfast... we ventured out to meet some Canadian dogs and to visit the Lawrence market. We gobbled up some fresh fish fry and crabcake sandwich and decided that rather than walking around in 17 degree weather, we'd just... drive.



Pretty!

We chilled at the hotel in the afternoon, eating beef jerky and reading our Cesar Millan book (classy... I know). We headed out at about 5:00 to make our dinner reservations here:




Yep. Alllllll the way up there.

Let me just say that on the walk from the parking lot to this building, my nostrils froze.


Getting ready to order dinner!

The nice waiter seated us right by the sunset so that we wouldn't miss it.
The restaurant turns little by little, so that you get a complete view over the course of your meal. My family had stayed in Niagara once, and we had eaten in their spinning restaurant. Our meal was cut short because my brother got nauseous....

And Greg had eaten at a spinning restaurant in Brussels... or something...

This was pretty neat to share.

I'm not going to include the 25 photos Greg took of the side of my face, trying to also photograph the monstrous

Just to prove to you how very cold it was, on our way out Greg threw his scarf around my face and by the time we reached the car... my glasses had frozen.

Then we got to be boring again, and we went back to our hotel room and broke out some crafts and snuggled into our king sized bed and watched us some HGTV wherein some poor couple had a large window installed in their house and the company did a spectacularly awful job.

Too bad there was no animal planet.

The next morning we got up, got packed and got on the road.


We tried to stop at a couple of animal shelters to no avail. We ended up stopping for breakfast at:

aka Timmy Ho's according to my husband, where I bought this:


It was the most perfect rainbowy donut I've ever seen. I had to have it.


However, I could only eat half of it, because I found it downright unnerving that my donut was crunchy.

I braved my motion-sickness and attempted to work on some baby booties on the way home:
And it actually worked out fine... Except that I forgot to use some ribbon in their creation.

Eventually we reached Niagara Falls where we stopped for a very short period of time. This is what it looked like right next to the parking lot area:

That is NOT (LET ME REPEAT NOT) snow, my friends. That is ice.

Very thick ice that covered EVERYTHING within a certain radius of the huge mist cloud at the falls.

Greg thought this was just hilarious. My husband. Very mature.


A very pretty girl with a very cute accent and very curly hair that I was very jealous of, with the exact same camera as us offered to snap a photo of us, if we would snap a photo of her and her friend. :)


Very soon after, we headed home. I was mostly frozen and couldn't feel my ears.


We headed across the Rainbow Bridge and straight to customs.

The check point was uneventful, and we were soon on our way.

Once again, we attempted to stop at a few shelters on the way to absolutely no avail. Okay - so it is at this time that I shall share something with you.... We are going to get a dog. We have resolved to get a dog. It is decided. It will not be easy, but we will be good calm-assertive pack leaders to a calm-submissive dog that will get along spectacularly with our cats and children.

YAY!

Except.... The right dog for us seems to be incredibly evasive. Greg has fallen in love with a particular breed: The Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. This dog originates from Canada and is not recognized by the AKC. Purebred puppies are over $1000. We are not getting a dog from a breeder... so we've been constantly checking shelters and we seem to be constantly rebuffed.

The original perfect dog - peekaboo, the one I was worried about - got adopted 3 days after we met her, the day we resolved we wanted her, 2.5 days before we could have adopted her, 5 minutes before we called to place a "Hold" on her.

So yea. NOW I'm constantly ribbing Greg because she was pretty much perfect for us and WHERE THE HECK are we going to find a Medium sized dog who is sweet like that and reacts that submissively to cats!?!?!?!

I'M FREAKING OUT.

So now we're visiting shelters every day, and I'm combing petfinder with a fine-toothed comb. But nobody adopts over statelines, and nobody UPDATES their freaking websites!!! So it doesn't matter!

And, even though it wasn't the right dog for us, we got rejected on our adoption approval application for this one little tiny rescue because we work full time- and I feel offended and guilty for that... does this mean we shouldn't adopt ANY dog?

Tonight we're going to go to one or two shelters and then take it easy... try to get our hands on some pet gates and maybe a large crate.

*sigh* anyway. On our way home, Greg started to get sick. I ended up driving the last hour, and he ended up sick all night long, and weak/dizzy in the morning.

He rested all day Monday and started to be able to keep liquids down by mid-afternoon, and seemed downright (annoyingly) rested by about 11:00 p.m.

I, on the other hand, have sore arms from supporting him walking to and from the bathroom all night long on Sunday.

I'm glad he's feeling better... and I think I would be feeling better too if someone could guarantee that I'll find the exact right dog sometime in the next century, but that's probably just my ever attractive impatience talking.