Yangkyu is back home + what our days currently look like + a little Noah update

Yahoo! Yangkyu is back home after being away for two weeks and we're pretty happy to have him back. He flew in on Saturday morning and was home by early afternoon. Everyone - all the dogs - were incredibly excited to see him which means that now that their favorite person is here I am basically chopped liver.

While caring for nine dogs has been doable it does come with challenges and so it is certainly nice to have an extra hand to help with bathroom breaks, treat times and giving everyone their own individualized attention.

We normally don't take so many dogs at once but many of our regulars were going away at the same time and so we decided to make room to accommodate as many guests as we could.

With this many dogs though it is a constant something - somewhere, someone is bound to throw up or have diarrhea or need to go pee at 3 am. There is the constant feeding every two hours for a couple of dogs who are all on their own schedules, treat times for everyone else, wiping down floors, vacuuming, doing the laundry, treating ear infections, administering medicine, eye drops, squeezing in walks when we can, diluting the yard from dog urine so that we don't end up with grass burn everywhere, spraying the yard to free it from unpleasant odors and more. I do get breaks every so often - so I can drink coffee, shower (yay), close my eyes for a few minutes, maybe read the paper and there are the golden moments when I actually get to sit down and write a blog post. Currently all the dogs are napping but I am inching closer and closer to when one of the dogs is going to get up wanting to eat again, but before that it's a quick bathroom break. There is also a load in the washer that needs to go in the dryer and once 11:30 am rolls around, it's bathroom break and treat times for everyone else.

Then there are the photos and the videos - I am constantly looking for a moment, a candid moment if possible, to capture to send over to clients. I try to edit the pictures and resize them in the afternoon but if I miss out on the chance then I do them around 6 pm once everyone has eaten and gone out to pee and potty and are taking their evening naps. Photos are edited as quickly as possible, uploaded on Google drive then resized on Photoshop. Videos too are edited and uploaded on Instagram and I sit and write individualized reports to all clients. I have to remember times when everyone ate, took their medicine, how they are sleeping, playing and enjoying their time. I note any concerns or issues or any funny moments they had.

Once that is done then it's feeding time again for a couple of the dogs, maybe a sit down dinner for me (Yangkyu usually waits around to eat with me - lately we have been just eating standing up in the kitchen though as our eating area is shared with the dogs and I also don't want to risk waking them up) and then a little TV before we start to get everyone ready for their night time routine around 9:30 am - bathroom breaks, brushing teeth and getting everyone situated for a good night's sleep. When we have multiple dogs I sleep downstairs with everyone. It's just gives me a peace of mind that I am close to them in case something happens or if they need me in the middle of the night. Sometimes this is just a few nights or sometimes as long as three weeks.

Because I've been doing this for several years, I am able to set a routine and stick with it to keep the day flowing as fluid as possible. It's almost as if my body gets programmed to work a certain way, which helps a great deal especially if we have a pretty full house of dogs who have their own needs. 

I am looking forward to our next break though. That'll happen in a couple more weeks. We will be celebrating a wedding anniversary, a doggy birthday and also deal with a few things like Noah's dental. We were planning on just taking him to his regular vet to get the procedure done but I decided to get another consultation with a specialist since Noah is older, has a few medical issues and just is a nervous, fearful dog who tries to escape whenever he can (he is more like this lately and our latest sub-q fluid session was a complete nightmare with Noah being incredibly resistant - I told Yangkyu that it felt like we were doing an exorcism session with Noah). The drive is an hour out which Noah isn't going to like but we went to them with Piri and they were (and still are) pretty great. At his regular vet we would need to drop him off at 7 am and pick him up around. 6 pm. He has to stay inside a cage for a few hours before the surgery actually begins at 12 pm and he may not even be the first to go. The procedure at the specialists goes much quicker which will lessen his time waiting inside the cage, which I know he is going to absolutely hate and work himself to death trying to get out.

Our consult is on August 21 (on his birthday - oops) and hopefully he can be a candidate to undergo procedure to clean and extract teeth as well as maybe close up the hole in his gum. I imagine that his teeth are bothering him (I have my own issues with my teeth and sometimes they are sensitive or hurt and I don't want Noah to feel the same way).

But this is all still in another month - I'm anxious but we're just going to have to take it day by day.

Hope you have a wonderful week!

Our crew will be one short as we say bye to Lanna today. 

 // Piri's Place on Instagram

Home is where the dogs are

I did it again. 

I rearranged the house (ok - just the living room). It's a compulsive obsession of mine to switch things around here. The tricky thing is that our home is tiny and so there aren't many combinations on how to switch the furniture around, especially since this tiny home of ours also has a funky layout. But nonetheless, if anyone can figure something out it'll be me.

How long will the new layout last?

Sometimes years. Sometimes months. Sometimes just days. Yeah. That last one drives Yangkyu a bit nuts. But he's not here right now and so I have a few more days until I get to decide whether to put everything back where they once were, or figure out a new layout. Ha! (Good news for Yangkyu: I have an inking this new layout will at least last us until the end the season).

I have been soloing it with Momo and Noah and our guest dog Lanna for the past week and a half. Yangkyu is currently in Korea teaching a 2-week workshop on tech. We had some disagreements on whether he should take this gig. First it was 2-weeks of his personal time that he would need to take to go and it would mean that Noah wouldn't be getting his sub-q fluids. He gets them twice a week to help filter out toxins out of his blood since his kidneys are compromised. In the end though Yangkyu really wanted this experience and so the dogs and I sent him off with a promise that he would bring back lots of tasty Korean treats for both human and dog. (Funny thing - the other night Yangkyu sent a text of 10 photos from inside a convenience store. He went to each aisle taking photos of chips and ramen and other goodies to see if there was anything in particular I wanted to try. Among the piles of ramen I noticed one that said tomato ramen. Tomato ramen?!)

Yangkyu flies back on Saturday but starting tomorrow things get busy around here. We'll have three more guest dogs coming by on Thursday. Then two more on Friday. And one on Saturday. Which means by Saturday I'll have 9 dogs roaming about, ruling the house from every nook and cranny. Yes. It should be fun. Hard. But fun.

Since I'm not the best driver in the world, we did massive grocery shopping before Yangkyu left. I think I was in armageddon mode as I kept buying things I normally don't eat afraid that somehow I will end up craving it once Yangkyu left. I ended up buying things like Cocoa Puffs. I'm 40 and I bought myself a box of Cocoa Puffs like I was back in elementary school. And Brisk Iced Tea. I don't think I had that since I was in high school. We bought an entire case at Costco. Almost the entire box is still sitting in our kitchen cabinet. The box of Cocoa Puffs is sitting on top of our refrigerator unopened.

During the down time I had this past week and a half with just one guest dog, I've been doing a lot of reading. I just finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and currently thoroughly enjoying Ruth Reichl's Save Me the Plums (I love her writing). I subscribed to the New York Times again (haven't had a newspaper delivery in 10 years - I used to live and breath media as my past job) and spend about an hour and a half reading through articles, editorials and columns and take a shot at the crossword puzzle too (I really suck at crossword puzzles).

I somehow have gotten through all 5 seasons of Ma'dam Secretary on Netflix. I didn't really sit and watch each episode. I had it on in the background and caught parts of episodes here and there. Yangkyu and I are huge fans of Tea Leoni in the movie The Family Man and so when she returned to TV I was quite excited.

I resubscribed to SlingTV so that I can watch soccer properly this time. 

So I guess with Yangkyu gone, I've been mostly reading and spending a lot of money. Aside from the new subscriptions, I bought that ginormous orthopedic dog bed for Noah and Momo. Oh and a toaster. And a few other things..... many other things... herbal supplements, yoga mats, grass seeds, dog treats they don't need but thought they needed at the time when I hit the "confirm" button, food scale, eye drops. I mean... so random and some (many) unnecessary. (I literally just had to go to our expense tracking data sheet to remember some of the things I bought because I couldn't remember. If you can't remember things you buy then it is most definitely wasteful and unnecessary).

We have a monthly budget that we try to stick to every month and I can say that I surpassed it spectacularly this month. We have this budget so that we can save but also to not buy things we don't need (part of the reason we got rid of Amazon Prime was because we kept buying things we didn't need because the delivery was so fast).

It's so tempting to buy things. But one day I started to see it this way. When I'm 70, whether I bought myself that pretty dress dress or expensive make up or the fancy pot isn't going to determine whether I lived a fulfilling life. I won't look back and say, damn it! My life has been all for nothing because I didn't buy that thing when I was 40. It's been a good way of looking at how we interact with material things. But somehow this month this guiding principle has just all but gone down the drain (now I'm afraid when I'm 70 I'll be remembering the huge box of Brisk Lemon Iced Tea and the unopened box of Cocoa Puffs).

Some videos if you're interested - 

 // The Story of Stuff 

 // The Lifecycle of a t-shirt 

10 things about Momo

1. Momo was adopted from Asan Angels Sanctuary, which is located in the city of Asan in Korea. While it is called a sanctuary, it is not a sanctuary like you and I know it to be. While no dogs are euthanized the living conditions are harsh. Donations are low and regular volunteers are always needed to care for the 300 dogs who live there with an old lady in her seventies. 

2. Momo was known as the kitchen dog at the sanctuary. It is because that was the only place she resided. 

3. Momo's ticket out of the sanctuary was back in 2017 when she was found ill and had to be rushed to the hospital. She spent a year at the vet clinic who generously offered her housing while she recovered from one illness after another and then moved to a pet hotel before coming home to us in January 2019. 

4. Momo got her name in 2017. She was originally named Sunja. I think it means "gentle child."

5. Yangkyu and I decided to rename her (Sunja sounds like an old name - names given to women from our parents generation). Momo is named after the character from a book by the same name (by Michael Ende). Momo is a homeless girl who lives in the ruins of an amphitheater. She is known to listen very well and give very good advice and earns the trust of the people. I thought it fit her very well as she came to us during a very difficult time. After our adoption was confirmed, Momo literally picked me up off of the floor and got me to think straight again. And I would later find out by the vet tech who worked at the vet hospital where Momo stayed that Momo offered support to all her dog friends who were scared of the hospital. A truly fitting name. 

6. Momo is generally a scared and timid dog and aside from people she is most scared of thunder, lightening and the door bell.

7. She loves food! But aside from Korean sweet potatoes she isn't really a fan of vegetables and fruits.

8. Momo was listed as a corgi mix on her flight and quarantine papers. We will find out more bout her DNA (hopefully!) when we get our results back from her Wisdom Panel.

9. Momo has never really barked although lately she has been picking it up from her Piri's Place friends as she lets out these loud barks when clients come to drop and pick up their dogs. I had hoped she would pick up on their cuddling with people. Oh well. *shrug*

10. Momo is incredibly dependent on other dog friends. She had a little schnauzer friend in Korea while she was staying at the dog hotel after her stint at the vet hospital. His name is Jangsoo (which means "live a long life") and about maybe 5 months after Momo came home to us we heard news that Jangsoo also went to his forever home with someone in Korea. 

Life lately, according to my iPhone

"We all can dance," he said, "if we find the music that we love."

 -- Giraffes Can't Dance, Giles Andreae