Homecooked Meals

I'm in a short recess between semesters, and of course, I can't actually take a break for some stupid reason, so I've taken on a bunch of projects. One of which is my new plan for feeding the dogs: homecooked meals.

You may remember that last year's raw food experiment was a failure, for a number of reasons. For example, I'm a germ-o-phobe, and it bothered me to no end to watch the dogs put their paws all over raw chunks of meat, then walk around our house. I was baby-wiping their feet after every meal.

Also, Star hates raw meat. Hates it. When offered raw meat, she runs off, hunched over, head down, tail between her legs—as if we just offered her a beating.

But commercial kibble has its share of problems too. The recent food recalls. The mysterious shortage of rabbit that makes it impossible to keep Dozer on a rabbit-only diet. The 25-lb bag of food that costs nearly $60.

So I'm compromising. I'm cooking.

I bought six chickens at the store last weekend.

It's really difficult to cram six chickens into the fridge. I got three in the meat drawer, and three where the milk should go.

Waaaaiiit a minute, you're saying. Isn't Dozer allergic to most meat proteins? Isn't that the point of the special, expensive, impossible-to-find rabbit-based kibble?

Well, here's the thing. We didn't experiment much with the food allergy. The dermatology/allergy vet started us on the rabbit-based food, and things improved, so we assumed that rabbit was the key.

• Dozer was originally eating Natural Balance Limited Ingredient kibble of various flavors, and he was reacting to it. The meat proteins varied, and the starch/binder was usually rice or potato.
• With the derm vet, we started him on Royal Canin Veterinary Diet, which is rabbit and potato. He was still getting staph infections, but it was much improved.
• Then we switched to Instinct—rabbit and tapioca—and the staph infections cleared up.
• Instinct then ran out of rabbits, so Dozer currently eats Natural Balance Alpha, which uses a combo of lamb, chicken, and rabbit, and the binder is chickpeas. He's still doing great.

So I wondered, why isn't Dozer reacting to the chicken and lamb in the Alpha?

Perhaps, it's not actually a meat protein allergy, it's a starch/gluten problem. That is, perhaps Dozer is allergic to starches like grains, rice, and potato, but does fine with gluten-free binders like tapioca and chickpeas.

Makes sense to me.

Under this theory, I could switch Dozer to some non-rabbit-based, gluten-free dog food, which would be easier to find. Trouble is, most of the foods made with gluten-free binders are still RIDICULOUSLY F-ING EXPENSIVE. But, yes, I am considering this possibility.

In the meantime, I'm testing the theory that home-cooked meals might be a cheaper solution.

I cooked four of the chickens at once. I wanted to cook all six, but my pans weren't big enough.

These chickens are nothing fancy. Wash them off, rub some olive oil on them, put them in a 425-degree oven for about 1.5 hours.

Don't they look good?? Yeah, we thought so too. So we ate some chicken for dinner! In fact, it was kind of awesome, because with only one chicken, Byrd and I would fight over the dark meat, but this time we could each have our fill of legs and thighs.

Dozer stood next to me in the kitchen and drooled while I pulled all the meat off the chicken bones for storage. (Cooked chicken bones are NOT safe for dogs to eat.)

I got a total of 8 pounds of meat off the 4 chickens. And that was after we ate at least a pound ourselves for dinner. The chickens were $5-6 each. It comes out to about $2.50-$3 per pound.

I think the kibble probably costs just a little bit less. :(

But then again, I've never seen the dogs so excited about their dinner.

Recently, we also found a new dehydrated dog food that is gluten-free and rabbit protein, and it smells delicious when you add hot water. It's about the same price as kibble. But storage is much easier because the bag is smaller, yet it still makes the same amount of food as a big bag of kibble. Modern technology!

Currently, we're doing a hybrid sort of meal. The dogs get kibble as a base. They get a serving of re-hydrated food, some cooked chicken, and a supplement. They also get various snacks during the day, like cottage cheese, egg, or chicken livers. I won't pretend it's a balanced meal, but at the moment, it's an experiment to see what they can eat without Dozer breaking out with staph and Star running away like a coward.

How to foster a litter of pups

As revealed in a previous post... I'm fostering five German Shepherd mix puppies that are five weeks old.

At this age, all day and all night, they play, eat, sleep, and potty. I'll keep them for three weeks, until they are neutered. Hopefully, they'll all be adopted during the pre-adopt period, and their new families will pick them up immediately after their surgery.

L to R: Buttercup, Lily, Sweet William, and Dandelion. Daisy is not in the shot.

If you've been following the blog for a while, you may remember my last litter of foster puppies. (Read about them here, here, here, here, and here.)

Today I want to answer the question: what does it take to foster a litter of puppies? Short answer: a LOT of time, energy, and money. Yep, even though the foster organization is covering all the medical expenses, it still costs a surprising amount of money to foster! The food, toys, and utilities (mostly, running the washing machine every day) are all on me.

Also, you need a spare room that can be ruined. In my case, the upstairs bathroom will some day be remodeled. Until then, it's a great "nursery." If the puppies gnaw on the cabinets or poop on the wall, it's no big deal. Other benefits to a bathroom: I have a sink in the room—great for filling water bowls and cleaning—and the floor isn't carpet.

The daily work is extensive. The pups constantly need fresh food and water and a clean potty area.

This is what I see every time I check on the puppies (every couple of hours):



The puppies are excited to see me—because they've spilled all their water (no-tip bowls are pointless, they put their paws into the bowl no matter what, then "walk" the water everywhere) and eaten all their food, and they know I'm about to hook them up.

L to R: Dandelion, Sweet William (on bottom), Daisy (on top), Lily

Just outside the bathroom, I have a cleaning station ready: an empty kennel, a pile of newspaper and butcher paper, a bucket and bleach, and a trash can.



Every couple hours, I change the puppies' paper. Even in the middle of the night: I change the paper at 2:00 AM and 6:00 AM. The puppies make the biggest messes during the day when they play on the newspaper. They mostly sleep at night, so I don't have to change the paper as frequently. Four-hour gaps are okay, so I can get some sleep!

Newspaper is worth its weight in gold to a puppy foster! I go through a 1-foot stack of newspaper in a few days. It's a perfect size when spread open, and it's absorbent.

My dogs were more interested in this pile of newspaper than they were interested in the puppies. :-/

I just recently learned that our local newspaper, the Austin American Statesman, has a bin of day-old newspapers destined for recycling and free to take. It's a bit of a drive to go downtown, but totally worth it to get all the newspaper I could possibly need. (Prior to this, I was digging through the paper recycling bins at our local recycling center.)

My dad also donates his and his neighbor's newspaper. The Wall Street Journal that I get from him covers a lot of area and doesn't have a lot of useless ad pages.

I bought a 1000' roll of butcher paper from Sam's Club for $20. This goes under the newspaper. It makes cleanup very quick. Every day, I cut about 15 long pieces off the roll.



Once a day, I do a more thorough cleaning. The puppies all go into the empty kennel so I can pick everything up off the floor, vacuum, and wipe the room down with bleach water.

I run a load of puppy laundry—towels, stuffed toys, blankets—every day, on the "sanitary" setting. I have a LOT of old towels, so I have half of them clean / used in the puppy room while I'm washing the other half in the machine.



Aahh, fresh paper on the floor and in the shower! The puppies go back into the room after everything is clean.

Five seconds in, someone already peed on the paper.

These puppies have decided to use the shower for pooping (most of the time, anyway). I don't know how they figured that out, but it works to my advantage. The shower lip keeps them from romping wildly through the shower, and therefore they don't play in the poop. Much.

Eating kibble.

Hanging out. Already a mess in there.

Buttercup. Teething. On my hand.

Lily. Teething. Also on my hand.

Lily didn't quite make it into the shower, so she's just peeing down the side... ah, puppies...

And that's just the daily work! Weekly, all the puppies get a bath and a nail trim. Also coming up: a three-hour round trip to the medical clinic for their vaccinations, and the pre-adopt work (photos and bios for each pup, scheduling potential adopters to see them).

I can only foster once in a while, and this is only my second litter. Some people foster litters all the time. I have no idea how they do it! I need a LONG break to recover. :)

Puppy fever

Something is wrong with me.

Three of five new foster puppies

The other two, sleeping behind the toilet

I was all like, hey, I have an exam and a presentation coming up, I've just gotten over being sick, I'm having trouble getting to the housework and website work, I'm prepping for a garage sale next weekend... Really, how much harder could it be to add some five-week-old puppies? Hahahaha!

Actually, what I really said was, I can totally foster ONE puppy for this ONE WEEK (spring break).

And my foster group was like, cool, we do not have one puppy for one week.

And I was like, but I gotta get me a foster puppy something bad.

And my foster group was like, cool, we have five puppies for three weeks?

And Byrd was all like, NO NO NO no no awwww yes all five please now now now.

And I was like, damn it.



Must touch you.

Star has somehow come to believe that she is only allowed on the bed if she is touching one of us.

Glancing at me to see if I'm "satisfied" with the level of contact.

I am at a loss to explain how she developed this superstition.

"I'm touching! I'm touching!! Don't kick me off!"

If you tell her to get off the bed, she frantically adjusts so that even more of her body is draped over you.

"Noooo! Is the paw not enough??"

"Okay, how 'bout... my whole head!"

We are not amused.

Last weekend there was this tiny stray dog in my backyard.

I took her straight to the vet for a microchip check. No luck.

She was cute and shy, but also extremely dog-aggressive. As in, she wanted to attack the neighbor's German Shepherds through the fence, and also took every opportunity to start a fight with my dogs.

So I closed her up in our bathroom when I wasn't taking her out to potty--and kept her on a leash when she was outside, so she couldn't charge the fence. Separation is possibly the best method of dealing with dog-aggression.

Dozer could have cared less. He ignored the obnoxious little dog and all of her growling threats toward him. As long as he can walk away from another dog, he will.

Star is more complicated. She really likes to tromple all over other dogs. If the other dog is a playful little puppy who's into rough play, it works out great for both dogs. If the other dog is aggressive rather than playful, the interaction can turn sour, and a little dog is obviously at a disadvantage.

I kept Star in a down-stay whenever I had to take the little dog out of the bathroom. Star restrained herself admirably, even though she clearly wished that the stray could be a tromple-buddy. She kept play-bowing to the little dog from her down position across the room, which was a sweet gesture but only sent the little dog to the end of her leash with a ferocious roar.

Anyway, after walking the entire neighborhood asking people if they recognized the dog ("Nope"), posting Found Dog notices on Craigslist and the local animal shelter websites, and making posters, it happened that the dog started barking in our bathroom... and I immediately recognized the bark. Yes, folks, I can hear a dog bark and I can guess which neighbor's dog it is.

There is a neighbor a few houses down with a solid fence, so no one can see the dog she has, but you can hear it barking during the day. This little dog's bark sounded the same.

So I managed to get the dog back to its owner in about 24 hours.

Usually I would suggest a microchip or a collar, but this neighbor doesn't speak English very well, and I don't know enough Spanish to do more than to tell her that her car is yellow, or ask whether her head is made of cabbage. So unfortunately the responsible ownership tips had to be left out. I did manage to say that "tu perro recibe un bano" (still not sure I said what I meant), and she said Gracias.

This was quite possibly the most dog-aggressive dog I have ever had the displeasure of temporarily housing. I think it serves as yet another important reminder that dog-aggression can be a problem with dogs of any shape, size, breed, or mix—and further, that the triggers and consequences of dog-aggression are different with EVERY dog. Every dog is an individual and should be evaluated as an individual.

The grass is always greener...

... in Texas "winter."

Holy cow, that grass is green.

We plant rye grass every fall, to cut back on mud during our "rainy season." It's cool, soft, and gorgeous. And sort of ironic that I have to mow the lawn every weekend in January. (We don't mow in the summer because the grass is dead.)

"Throw the ball!"

"MY ball!"

"He's kind of a jerk, but I love him."

This was our weekend project. Since we now have a garage, we can tear down this old shed. In three "easy" steps...

One

Two

Three

A little later, we moved into the new garage to do some work. Dozer made himself at home in a large plastic tub that had some old blankets in it.

"If this isn't my dog bed, why do I fit just right??"

He fell asleep in the plastic tub.

OMG ur home!!!1

When saying "Welcome home" with ONE toy in your mouth just isn't good enough...

"HI!!! These are for you!! To throw. For me."

"More people?? Sweet, I gotta go get more toys."

Holiday Work

One awesome thing about the holidays is that Byrd gets an entire week off work. We didn't waste it! We finally moved stuff into our new garage, and... organized it! The result was the best Christmas gift ever.

We started by buying and assembling industrial-strength shelving.



 Then we started hauling Byrd's tools and whatnot into the garage...

Four circular saws, three drills, two brad nailers, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Can't forget all the stuff in the back office, which is still torn up 3 years after we started remodeling it, in part because we can't put it back together when it's being used as a storage room for construction items.

Oh yeah, and don't forget all the stuff in the garden shed...

The 5-gal buckets on the right were FULL of random items, from screwdrivers to PVC joints to electrical outlets.

As we pulled stuff into the garage, we went with a "Clean Sweep" kind of strategy: one spot for "keep," one spot for "sell," and one spot for "toss."

Then came the hard part... sorting the "keeps." The first day, Byrd reeeallly wanted to keep every little loose screw and nut and washer.

It was hard to even know where to start.

My sister K and my mom helped out a lot!

By the second and third day, Byrd was too tired to care as much. We threw out a lot. The garbage men probably cursed us when they emptied our heavy, overflowing trash cans.

The shelves are full, but everything has a place.

The three multi-drawer boxes (hanging on the wall) turned out to be invaluable for sorting the loose tiny items Byrd wanted to keep. And boy did he have a lot. We used ALL of the small size drawers (total = 90)!

We also got this nice wall-hook system for the opposite wall. Turns out we have 4 extension cords, 2 air hoses, 3 ladders, and 31 long-handled tools (shovels, rakes, etc).

Now, if you don't work in construction, you probably don't know (and don't need to know) that most hardware you buy in construction quantities, such as nails and screws, come in flimsy cardboard boxes. Cardboard is really not a problem normally because you use up the hardware quickly and then go get new boxes. If you are like Byrd, however, you're not organized enough to know where your box of nails is, so you go out and buy a new box of nails for every project. When you attempt to organize, you discover you have six half-empty, rotting, torn cardboard boxes with nails falling out of every rat-chewed corner. In some cases the nails aren't so much "in a box" as they are "in a pile, with some bits of cardboard for company."

So I went and bought about 30 plastic boxes to hold the hardware. And labeled every box, so there won't be anymore "I can't find it so let's just buy a new one." There is no longer any question how much we have, and of what.

I love the end result, which is a garage where both our cars still fit.

Unfortunately, we still have a storage unit to clean out. It's about the size of the garage. (I'm hopeful that we will be able to sell most of the stuff in it.)

Lest you fear that all my dogs got for Christmas was a stupid cardboard box, don't worry! Auntie K came through with a literal feast of squeaky stuffed dog toys.

"Stuffed" turkey, potato, corn, dinner roll, and greens.

Star shows off her own fat little "drumsticks."

(By the way, Star had her annual checkup yesterday, and got a totally clean bill of health. I was like, what, that's it? No medicine, nothing to keep an eye on, nothing to treat?? She's just completely different from Dozer... so easy.)

"The corn-on-the-cob seems overcooked."

Whereas the other stuffed items went to the trash within twenty minutes, Dozer took a strange liking to the dinner roll and has refused to destroy it.

This was our Christmas gift to the outdoor birds: a birdfeeder!

Apparently, this type of birdfeeder is not typical in our neighborhood. If it was, I would expect the birds to start using it easily. But it actually was very difficult for the birds to figure out. On the first day, the birds were just hopping on the ground underneath it and staring up at it. By the second day, they would fly into it and beat at it, trying to knock the seed out. Finally, a few of them tried to sit on the ledges, but they had a lot of trouble coordinating it, and three or four birds would try to get on one ledge at the same time, which always started a big fight.

It took about three days for them to get a system in place so everyone was using the feeder in an organized way. It was very interesting to watch them adapt. I suppose a birdfeeder is a pretty unnatural way for birds to eat, especially when they've never done it before.