As you may recall, I spent a good portion of last week curled up in a ball in my bedroom, drowning my sorrows with cough syrup and muddling through a bizarre sequence of subsequent side effects that gave my malarone experience a run for the money. Note to self: I am, apparently, highly sensitive to all medications. That is what I get for trying the Tim Taylor “MOAR POWER” approach to pharmaceuticals and gulping down an extra strength extended release tablet of guafensin and dextromethorphan without thinking, perhaps I should try the regular strength first. My bad.
Well here we are, a week later experiencing what I can only describe as the world’s most perfect weather. It really is. And as much as I would love to be out running and hiking and drinking it all in, my still-sensitized alveoli can muster no more than a quick cruise around the block before starting to protest, so we make do with what we have.
And it’s a real shame, because I’ve had a review item I’ve been super excited about, the Kurgo Wander Pack, sitting on the table for several weeks, just begging to be used. So I relented, and put it on Brody for a test run, even though our adventure for the day was limited to a 100 foot perimeter around the house.
Brody is a big fan of my push to get us outside and moving as much as possible. I am a big fan of a product that allows him to share some of the burden of lugging along some of the things a dog might require on such an adventure. (more…)
I stayed at Global for two out of its three day run, figuring hey, that would be plenty of time to plumb its depths. Yes, well, not so much. It took at least ten minutes just to walk from one side to the other; we’re talking 2,452 booths here. And me (yet again) without a good pair of flats. But at least I did bring a fairly decent pair of heels; the stilettos never made it out of the suitcase, sadly.
With that many products to check out, I know for a fact I missed more than a few, which of course means now I just have to make sure to go again next year- and bring my kid’s Razor scooter. In the meantime, here’s just a few of my favorite products I saw while I was there:
1. Old Soul Line from Planet Dog. Planet Dog has built a company around the concept of providing well designed dog toys with a social conscience. I was especially taken with the “Old Souls” line, thinking of Koa at home with her sad, decrepit mouth from years of prior neglect. It’s hard to find gentle toys for old souls like her.
2. Jellyfish Art. I’m the first to admit, I had no intention of visiting the portion of the expo hall reserved for aquarium items- until I actually saw it and said, Wow. This is the one item I stopped, took a picture of and sent to my husband with the word, “WANT.” A home jellyfish aquarium. Trust me, watching the little jellyfish serenely float about is an automatic blood pressure reducer. Still want, by the way.
3. Kane and Couture collars and harnesses. I spent several wonderful minutes chatting with Kane and Couture owner Amber Forrester, taken with her clever designs that were on-trend and inspired by current trends in the fashion industry. As an added bonus, she makes sizes for large fashionistas too- and you all know how often I complain that it’s hard to find items like that for big dogs. But I chose to feature this harness because it’s a truly unique item- made of comfortable and stretchy swimsuit material, this comfy harness is a great choice for dogs who need a harness but tend to chafe with the traditional strap construction.
4. Waglet Works Adventure Dog Gear. Founders Barbara and Artie brought their background in the movie industry to the canine world with this clever utility belt that allows you to customize your own system that gives you immediate access to whatever dog items you might need without having to wrestle with a big backpack. Bowls, treats, water bottle, poop bags, flashlight, all within easy reach and balanced on your hips instead of hanging off your shoulders. Count me in.
A second round is coming up, but in the meantime, I present to you the most perfect example I have ever seen of a puppy pile, spied at the Purina booth:
Understandably, passersby were asked not to pick up the puppies, but really, it’s times like these I am soooooo, so tempted to say, “I’m a veterinarian and I just really, really need to do a quick exam. Thanks,” and then run off for a couple minutes. (Bev will tell you from the BlogHer experience that I am good at that.)
You all know Caroline Golon, right? She runs the amazing rescue site Romeo the Cat and the wonderful cat resource site The Happy Litterbox and the pet PR site HighPaw and she was one of the co-founder of BlogPaws and she’s a great mom to her adorable kiddos and a bunch of other things that, taken in total, make me realize how inadequate my contributions to society have been.
Anyway, I make it a goal to surround myself with incredible people like her because I always learn a ton from them- some may call it ‘parasitism’, but I prefer to think of it as ‘commensalism’. See, that biology degree comes in handy on occasion. And Caroline was kind enough to allow me to be her commensal organism while we were at Global Pet Expo.
Now, when you look at the technical definition of commensalism, it is this: commensalism is a class of relationship between two organisms where one organism benefits but the other is neutral (there is no harm or benefit). I am sure this is what she had in mind when we were making our plans- sure, I’ll let the vet chick hang out with me, what harm could come of it?
Then I started talking to her about a video. A simple concept, really. It would be the two of us, checking out some of the newest pet products at Global. She works in PR, this is right up her alley, I said.
Then we started tossing around ideas about how to make it, how shall I put it, “unique”…. and I waited for her to scrape me off her agenda like a dolphin might scrape off a wayward barnacle. But God bless her, she rolled with it and made it even better. I’m not sure if that counts as commensalism, humoring me, or just hoping maybe it dies a quick death on the blog, but I put it on YouTube, so now it will live in perpetuity.
What choice did I have? I do, after all, dearly love pet products. And you all know how far I’m willing to go to ensure a product lives up to my expectations.
So thank you, dear Caroline, for doing this bit with me. If nothing else, we gave a good number of vendors at Global a welcome respite from the boredom of their late afternoon with our camera and our slapstick. And say what you will, that bed was awfully comfy.
If I seem a little stressed in the next couple of months, I have a good excuse: we are going to try and sell our house. I say “try”, because this is one of those housing markets when upon saying “I’m going to put my house on the market” the universal response is, “Well, good luck with that.”
We’re staying in the area- after seeing all those pictures from Colorado this weekend I think it’s safe to say I am actually quite content here in San Diego, thanks- and the decision is one that has more to do with commutes and schools than anything else. Now, the last time we sold a house was in 2004, and as you probably know, the market was a little different back then. You could put a ramshackle log cabin on the market in 2004 and it would be sold for a ridiculous bucket of money back then. Our place sold in 10 days, to the second person who saw it. Ah, to be back in 2004 again.
Now, buyers are a little pickier. And the prospect of trying to keep a house in showable condition for possibly months, with two messy kids and a really rowdy Golden who would love nothing more than to go nuts each and every time someone comes by, has me in apoplectic fits. Worse than when I was taking the boards, worse than when I was pregnant. I have NO idea how I’m going to do it.
But I have a point here, and my point is: this is how we found ourselves at the mall on Saturday looking at little knick knacks, because my husband decided potential buyers would be impressed by more candles in the house. Now, I am ambivalent about that kind of stuff to begin with, and all I could think while we were wandering through the store was “It won’t matter, there’s no way the house is going to sell and then we’re going to be stuck in this house forever WITH A BUNCH OF EXTRA CANDLES TO HAVE TO STORE” and then I got even more stressed out and couldn’t concentrate. (more…)
You know by now how I feel about cutesy pet stuff, right? I mean, it has its place, but as far as my own tastes go I’m constantly on the lookout for something that falls on the sleeker end of things. (This from the person who bought a dinosaur barrette from Anthropologie, so take it with a grain of salt.)
But I digress. When it comes to pets, function still has to have a place over form, or you end up like me with a nice wooden bowl holder that is chomped to bits within a few weeks. So when I see a product that has both form and function, I get admittedly disproportionately excited. I can’t help it.
I recently received a bowl from ModaPet (“Moda” means fashion in Italian, for those keeping track) and I’m hooked. So hooked that I want you to have one too. I’m giving away one ModaPet bowl in the happy Sunflower color.
Form: This particular bowl is a 4 cup version, enough for even the big pooches like Brody and Koa, and comes in a variety of jewel tones like orange, teal, and red. They have the weight of a heavy ceramic bowl, but with the look of glass. They’re pretty enough that my daughter put a handful of flowers in them before realizing they were actually a dog dish. And somehow despite this fragile appearance, this is a bulldog of a bowl.
Function: ModaPet bowls are made of BPA free plastic that is dishwasher safe. The sturdy soft plastic bottom makes it skidproof, and because it is molded on as opposed to being glued on, it will hold up through multiple go rounds in the washer. This puppy is heavy. Even Koa leaves it in place, and I’ve seen her push steel bowls clear to the dining room when she’s in an eating frenzy.
I really like these bowls an awful lot, and I’m not one to wax poetic about eating implements, usually. So here is your chance to have a lovely bowl all for yourself, and you can impress your guests with your Italian designed dog ware to distract them from the Italian shoes they just trashed. Well, at least that’s what I did.
To enter, you know the drill! Comment on who you would like this bowl for, and make sure you enter on the Rafflecopter widget. US/Canada only, please.
Welcome back! Hope everyone here in the States had a lovely Thanksgiving. And in celebration of that and all the work it took the rest of the weekend to put the place back together, a post about cleaning products, something with which all pet owners are all too familiar.
I bought my car six years ago. Six years ago, I was obsessed with the idea of a black car with a beige interior. Sleek. Contemporary. Gorgeous. Six years ago, I was also very naive, with a nine month old who had yet to start throwing stuff on the floor and leaving red crayons on the seat.
So now, two kids and two dogs later, my beautiful beige car interior can best be described as “house of horrors”, a visual timeline of every insult that has been heaped upon it in the last half decade. No matter how much we try to stay on top of it, it’s a lost cause. It’s quite sad. I’ll come back to this in a minute.
A couple of weeks ago, Rug Doctor invited me to St. Louis to tour the factory and learn some more about their products. I figured hey, why not? I have an incontinent dog and two little kids and a spraying cat, so we definitely are familiar with carpet cleaning.
OK, so I’ll never be one of those Price is Right spokesmodels. But you’ve seen these displays in your grocery store, right? They’re everywhere.
I’ve rented the machines before, though not as often as the every 3-6 months (gulp) it’s recommended that you clean the carpets. I suppose I haven’t put much thought into the mechanics of getting a carpet clean, but Rug Doctor has.
Each Rug Doctor machine has three components: the spray hose, which shoots the cleaning product into your rug; the vibrating brush, which vibrates at 1700 vibrations a minute, and the vacuum hose, which pulls everything back out. Compared to what I usually do when there’s a spot on the rug, this is the mega-nuclear cleaning approach. Seek and destroy.
There are two main keys to getting the rug clean: The machine and the cleaning product you use in it. Here’s a nice tan rug, right? Remember this.
We got a demonstration from engineer Jason Hill, who told us about lift- the industry standard for suction. It’s near impossible to describe suction in a positive way that does not have some sort of inappropriate connotations, so let’s just leave it at “they demonstrated convincingly the superiority of this product’s ability to lift all sorts of garbage from your carpeting.” They run those motors to failure in the lab, just so they know before sending them out to stores how many hours of use they can expect (it’s about 1400, if you’re wondering.)
There are few things worse than that sinking feeling of looking around for your pet, and realizing he or she is gone. Not just hiding, but gone. Perhaps you’re like my neighbor, whose tricky latch on the side fence meant that whenever the gardener didn’t pull it shut all the way, the labs would push it open and go for a run.
Or you have one of those dogs who likes to dig, dig, dig, right under the fence and out onto the street.
Or you’re just unlucky, like a client of ours whose dog Tinker pulled his leash right out of his owner’s hand in our parking lot and disappeared for a month and a half before being found, slightly thinner but miraculously none the worse for wear, up in the hills, communing with nature.
They are all happy endings, though not without a great deal of stress and angst on the owner’s part. Not all stories end well, as we all know. Which is why I was so happy to get to be one of the first people to review the new Tagg the Pet Tracker, a GPS tracking device for dogs from SnapTracs, a division of Qualcomm. You may not know Qualcomm, but if you own a smartphone, you know their mobile technology.
My husband insisted we make an unboxing video for the Tagg the Pet Tracker we received to review this week. Unboxing videos are definitely a guy thing.
“What do I do?” I asked. “I haven’t gotten to review it yet.”
“You don’t review it,” he said. “You just take it out of the box and explain what you see.”
It makes no sense to me, but I’d watch people unboxing Louboutins all day so I suppose you like what you like. Anyway, I actually have an actual review of the Tagg coming up, but if you’d like a sneak peek at the box it comes in, as well as what the device itself looks like, here you go. It really is a nifty device, by far the most attractive of the GPS devices on the market.
I do think a handsome Golden would have been great for the box. I’m just saying.
I’ve spent the last 4 days in Vegas, feverishly taking notes on what’s up and coming in pet products at the annual SuperZoo pet retailer convention. The expo floor was this massive labyrinth of pet foods, toys, grooming supplies, software, treats…you get the picture. Every time I thought I covered the floor there was some alley or other that I had missed and more goodies to check out.
Cat scratching posts from Imperial Cat. I love cardboard scratchers- I think cats really do prefer them. I was so impressed at how sturdy the cardboard is in these, because a lot of cardboard scratchers are flimsy. Plus, they’re just super cute! Who doesn’t need a Halloween lounge shaped scratcher in their lives? (more…)
There are litterboxes, and then there are litterboxes. The kind that make you stop in your tracks and say, “Wow. I can’t believe I am so impressed by a cat toilet.”
Since the first time I stood mesmerized watching a Litter Robot in action, I’ve been coveting one. And because I am lucky, Litter Robot recently sent me one of these mysterious little devices to try out for myself.
For such a complicated looking device, it’s actually ridiculously easy to put together. Stick the tray in the bottom, place the globe on top, fill, and go. It took 5 minutes, tops. (more…)
We are an Apple family. Between the iphone, the ipad, and the Mac, I’m constantly on the lookout for the next great app. I love Angry Birds as much as the next guy, but given my background I’m also always hunting down good pet-related products. They’ve been a little slow to come out compared to other categories, but I’m finally starting to see some quality apps on iTunes that I deem worthy of the bucks.
For Back to School Week Wednesday, we’re going high tech: Here are my top 6 iphone apps for pets (because I just couldn’t narrow it down to 5!)
Based on the popular website Free Kibble, Kibble Katch is a game that directly translates into free kibble in real life. For every 250 pieces you ‘catch’ in the game, FreeKibble.com will donate a meal to a pet in need. $2.99. (more…)
Back to School Week continues with a stylish offering from one of my favorite designers of modern pet accessories: Sleepypod’s Yummy Travel Bowls!
I have a dog who, despite his low-maintenance background as a retriever, is much too fussy to actually drink water from a bottle and prefers it to be delicately decanted into a bowl. Preferably chilled.
Whenever we go for a walk, this means I have to remember to bring his travel bowl. This offering from Sleepypod is my new favorite, for a few reasons:
it’s sturdy (I hate those flimsy ones that bend as soon as you put water in them and spill all over the car)
it allows you to carry food and water together, in a sealed package
it’s covered
it’s cute
It matches my blog. I can’t help it. I love that. They have other colors, too, if teal isn’t your thing. (more…)
