Tag Archives: poop

Colorado pet sitter Mark

Meet Colorado Pet Sitting Superstar, Mark!

I’m in charge of: Not only do I give your pup a chance to poop while you’re away, I provide stimulation! By reinforcing pet parent training and changing up our walk routes often, your pup gets exercise for the body and mind…and nose!

My furry family: No pets right now. Sad face. I am new to Colorado and I wanted to be sure I have the schedule, environment, and a proper home for a pet to thrive in! I’ve got my eye on a Shiba Inu rescue for when the time is right!

My superpower would be: Ooooo…my favorite icebreaker question. I think I would choose invisibility to get to the bottom of Area 51 and expose the formula for Coca Cola…I’d also see a lot of free movies and concerts! If I could have two super powers, I would combine my invisibility with time travel to go back in time and watch the great artistic masters paint.

Best thing ever: Good food, live music, and the love of my wife. All three of those things wrapped together in varying daily quantities make me a generally pretty happy fellow.

Hidden Talent: The ability to flawlessly toss a poop bag into an open distant dumpster. Also, people tell me stuff. All the time. It’s weird.

Life Philosophy: Do what you love and you will never work a day in your life! Thanks for using Out-U-Go! and helping me live out my philosophy every day!!

Diahh-Roomba

Out-U-Go! staff meetings typically involve bagels, coffee, orders of business and staff members sharing  some of their experiences working at Out-U-Go!  It usually becomes clear that some of our Pet Parents’ homes produce more stories than others and at a recent meeting, one particular household of dogs proved to have A LOT of stories (mostly about poop).  Of those stories, one sticks out in particular…

To protect their anonymity, let’s refer to the dogs as Penny and Gretta G.  Now, Penny and Gretta share a special flare for life as well as anything and everything edible and not edible.  As such, it’s not uncommon for them to crap on the floor… but hey, even the best of us have the occasional accident.

Like most dogs, these two shed a lot so their owner purchased a Roomba to keep the hardwood floors clean while he’s at work.  If you don’t know, a Roomba is a Frisbee sized robot vacuum designed to roam the house cleaning the floor while you’re at work.  Between a mid day visit for the dogs from Out-U-Go! and a hard working Roomba, this Pet Parent had a lot to look forward to every time he opened his door after a hard day at work.

One day, like all days, Penny and Gretta’s owner kissed his two beautiful dogs goodbye, released the Roomba to do its thing and drove off to work.  A few hours later our walker arrived to find a house full of diarrhea and a hard working Roomba.

As it turns out, the standard Roomba is not equipped to clean a house full of diarhea, but not due to any lack of effort.  By following the parallel diarrhea tracks around the living room and noting the skid marks of partially-dry diarrhea with wheel tracks through them, our walker could clearly see the Roomba’s morning long effort to vacuum up diarrhea.  Because the Roomba has a sensor that determines whether an area is clean or whether it needs more vacuuming, it diligently attempted to clean several areas with back and forth motions until the sensor read clean.  Had the Roomba been mounted on a WWI tank it might have had a chance, but alas, the standard model uses plastic wheels and the sensor never read clean so back and forth it went.  Despite giving it the old college try, our walker wasn’t able to get the floor completely clean, just like the Roomba.

Upon hearing of this incident, our office staff picked up the phone and called this Pet Parent at work to inform him of what happened.  He responded with mostly curse words.  Penny and Gretta bounced back fairly quickly and were ready for their mid-day walk the very next day.  The Roomba, however, was never the same.

 

The Highlands Street Fair was AWESOME!

The Highlands Street Fair 2011 was a blast!  This event gets better every year which is why we were so happy to help our friends down the road at Out-U-Go! Denver host an awesome booth.

Thousands of local residents toured 32nd Street in the Highlands to visit with a lot of the businesses from the area.  The Out-U-Go! booth was very popular- hundreds of people enter our raffle to win free dogs!

We’re already looking forward to next year!

Stay tuned for information about Out-U-Go!’s next awesome event- DOGA for Charity 🙂

The Highlands Street Fair!!!

The Out-U-Go! Booth

Out-U-Go! at the Highlands Street Fair

Out-U-Go! Boulder is thrilled to help our friends down the road at Out-U-Go! Denver host a booth at this year’s Highlands Street Fair!  Held annually in the heart of NW Denver, the Highlands Street Fair has booths from hundreds of local businesses as well as 3 stages for music, food, drinks, dogs and fun.  Stop by our tent to say hello, enter our raffle and let us pass out tasty treats to your pup(s).

We are looking forward to our second year in a row at this awesome event!

The Highlands Street Fair is taking place all day long on Saturday, June 18th.  The street fair will be up and down 32nd Street in the Highlands in NW Denver.  You can find out more about the entire event here http://www.highlands-square.com/StreetFair/index.htm.

 

Mattie’s Poop

Mattie the Boxer

Mattie is a gorgeous little reddish Boxer who walks like no other dog.  She hardly sniffs a thing, and only wants to go forward, fast, and now.  She could not attract more admiring attention if she were a fine colorful Victorian lady gliding down the street under a parasol, and like such a lady, she is most particular about where she evacuates.  It is important that Mattie goes because if she comes home still loaded, she has to be crated instead of free run of the home.  Even if it takes extra-long and we have to walk all the way to Indiana, I am resolved to not be satisfied until she is.

This is why it’s always very exciting when the great moment arrives.  You can tell it’s impending when she lowers her head to actually consider the ground as we walk.  Then as we approach the drop zone, she begins to swing her body back and forth in ever-tighter turns, just like a fish swimming up stream, if that fish were also a belly dancer playing hopscotch.  I stand back and enjoy the show, trying not to laugh (any disturbance could be fatal to the endeavor) as her turns get tighter and tighter and quicker and quicker until she is not actually moving around but rather just flailing like a possessed and very negative head-banging rock star.  Then comes the squat, which is more like a self-defense pose than anything, and then Mattie sheds about a quarter of her body weight.  But that’s not the best part.  The apex of this little ritual, the part that had me laughing like a mad man in the street the first time I saw it, is what she does with her legs. After all that twisting and dancing, all that kinetic energy needs somewhere to go, and so it shoots through her legs and discharges into the earth like lighting, as her hind legs thump up and down like the happiest of cartoon rabbits.  Then, lighter and leaner, she’s off again.

I feel privileged to witness this.  It’s what zoo keepers must feel like when baby Pandas are born.  Mattie’s creation is oh-so-much less cute than a baby Panda, but nonetheless receives prompt attention.  And this is the real advantage of having what is by now a preternatural ability to tell when a dog is getting ready to do his duty.  Before the pooch can begin kicking up earth, I have their rejected kibble bagged, tied and ready to toss. Dogs can somehow predict earthquakes, but I too can spot the tiniest shift indicating impending seismic movement in the seismometers themselves.  The 4th lumbar vertebra lifts about a half millimeter, the sniffing becomes 4-12% more assiduous, the path straightens out and The Poop Walk begins.  By this time, I’ve already got a bag open and ready.  A pair of figure skaters could not pick up each other’s poop with more speed and grace.

But there is a darker side to this ability?  The fact that I’m so proud of it is itself quite worrying.  Is the price I pay for my new talent…my sanity?   Could laughing like a madman as Mattie does her poop dance mean that I’m actually a madman? Is it wrong to be so emotionally invested in a dog’s baser functions?  There are little alarm bells in my head that chime even as I strut down the street chirping “Good Mattie!  Such a good little pooper!  And such a nice big poop!”  I’m afraid I’m over the hill.  Or the mound, as it were.  But I am a professional dammit, and no one can convince me that Mattie is not a good girl.  Dogs have such little responsibility, you can’t deny them their little glories.  I won’t be the parent that reproaches his 3rd grader for messing up his lines in the school play.  Yes it’s poop, and yes I’m losing it, but way to go Mattie.  I’m proud of you.

 

Tales from a Naperville Pet Parent!

Are you ever amazed and shocked at how much you are willing to do for your pet? Like you have this logical sanity that tells you, you won’t spend outlandish amounts of cash at a vet because it’s just a dog, but when confronted with the puppy dog eyes and potential loss of your dog, all logic goes out the window? My husband and I just went through this with our dog, Penny. After throwing up for three days, we went to the vet because now she wasn’t even taking fluids. X-rays (X-rays!) confirmed Penny had a large quantity of something in her stomach. We were certain it wasn’t food. Blood tests were drawn, but since she wouldn’t take in fluids, they were unable to collect a urine sample. Thus, we were sent home with a urine collection tray and instructed to collect a urine sample ourselves.

Unsettled, I went home and searched for hope….on the Internet, of course. Oooh! They have pet prayer blogs. Score. I’m not the best at prayer, but I’m still God-fearing and wanted at least someone praying for her. And incidentally, did you know that there is a patron Saint of dogs!? St. Roch. Note to self: See if bobble-head or hula dancing St. Roch exists for the dog crate…or car dashboard.

So the morning came and Penny was ready to go outside for her morning potty. Commence operation urine sample. How does one collect a urine sample from a dog? Ideally, husband who is dressed in full suit for a wake later that day duck walks behind the dog with aforementioned collection tray waiting for the female dog to squat. You, the neurotic wife, follow behind barefoot and in pajamas, gesturing wildly with suggestions. After contribution has been made, take syringe provided with collection tray and draw the urine from the tray. Deposit into a jar of your choice. Should that be an old jar of baby food from when you hosted a Kappa Delta brunch and your friend brought a child and strained carrots, so be it. Repurposing at its finest.

After vet confirms that blood, urine and all other vitals are fine, begin thorough poop investigation. This is not a fun job because you have neglected to pick up yard poop for the past few weeks because….errr…it’s cold outside. I save my empty, vegan, protein powder jugs for trash poop collection. Wait, doesn’t everyone? After donning a pair of latex gloves, I tried to pep talk myself into the task at hand.  The first method was simply to detach emotionally by taking on an alias of a CSI technician or a dinosaur archeologist. I still wasn’t feeling enthused. So I started narrating the process in my head with an Australian accent. That made the task more bearable. Finally, hurrah! I found the trouble-causing toy that has made its trek successfully through the land of doggy digestion.  Peace and sanity was restored in the kingdom. Now we are on to more important matters, namely finding dashboard saint figurines.

Amy Gausemel , Client of Out-U-Go! Naperville                                                                 Proud pet parent of Penny, a 1-year old Treeing Walker Coonhound