Rolling over - not what you think

We think of 'rolling over' in pet circles as teaching our pets how to 'roll over' as a trick. Maybe 'play dead' or another fun trick.

I knew one client's dog that loved playing dead. The taught the dog to, as they pointed their hand to the dog in the shape of a gun, they would say 'bang' and the dog would fall down, and play dead.

Then he would jump up to get his reward!

It was so cool.

But what I am talking about is that my car that I drive just rolled over 200,000 miles on Thursday!

I'm excited and proud of that. I like taking care of things as best as possible. The opportunity to share the moderate little excitement of life, but it is like our pets, who we nurse along to enjoy this familiarity of the little quirks that we all have.

We grow to love those little quirks.

Or at least I do.

Puppy classes very popular - and over 200K ... miles

It is amazing to me how much we veterinarians and staff take for granted the logic of pet behavior and obedience.

Since we deal with dogs and cats every day, and we know our clients deal with their pets every day, we assume they have a lot of knowledge about how to train them.

And that is not always the case. Just because I drive my car daily, does not mean I know the best way, or a new way to take care of it properly. Maybe there is a new technique (car wax) that will last longer and work better to protect my car.

So we try to work on informing you as to the latest information to help your pet. We have many avenues we use for this purpose - sometimes the blog, the email newsletter is great for instant information on recalls which we find of utmost significance.

And of course, a good old fashioned phone call, or even better yet, a personal conversation is very helpful in helping to share the information we have.

Our goal is to try to 'translate' the medical jargon into more commonly understood language for all of us, and that will be different for different people. So if something does not make sense, ask us and we will try to use a different analogy to explain the information we are trying to share.

Also, on the way to work on Thursday, September 17, my car rolled pst 200,000 miles! Woohoo!

Much of those miles were put on the car in my previous practice life as a relief Dr. We were in Wisconsin, Chicago, Rockford, St Louis, Lawrenceville, Mt. Vernon, Peoria, Pekin, Bloomington, Normal, Springfield, Champaign, Urbana, Decatur, and many other towns throughout Illinois. I am truly glad for that opportunity, but more grateful for all of you who are now allowing me to be your regular doctor for your dogs and cats.

Now if any one knows of someone who would like to buy a 4,000 sq foot Victorian house south of Bloomington, let us know, so we can sell the house and move into this wonderful community.

School start and new routines

We are all used to - or we like routines.

We have our morning routine of hitting the snooze alarm so many times before we finally get up. Or maybe you're like me, and I am up a few minutes before the alarm even goes off, and you are ready to go.

But we like the routine.

Which is why we love our pets. Our dogs like the routine, the breakfast, the 'dance' before breakfast, the outside, the place to lay when we leave the house....

They 'know the routine'.

Our cats like the routine - waking us up by playing with our face when we sleep in on the weekend.
You can almost hear them say " Hey.... who said _you_ could sleep in when you are in charge of feeding me?"

But we love those personality quirks our pets have.

So celebrate those enjoyable moments we get to live in the 'little things' of life. They truly help us out, and lead us along a great path.

New receptionist hired.

Welcome to our new receptionists!

Brittany O'Brien and Joe Sholl have joined our team as receptionist. They will be sharing the position, and you will be seeing them as we begin their training process. The entire process is going very well.

We'll have more information on the web site soon.

also, we often talk about having a good plan for your pet's health, and a good contingency plan. That is a 'what if' scenario. That goes in every day life as well.

When the computer server went haywire last Saturday, we found out that our backup system was indeed very good - once we figured out the problem, and realized we needed to get the backups, it took us a few minutes to figure out which backup was best, then we copied that onto the back up server we have, and set up the workstations.

We are limited with the backup server with the number of workstations, but we have all the information, and all the previous records and files.

Good planning is important.