For those who didn’t know, we recently acquired another dog. Fox was found roaming by Jeff’s friend, Kati, and no one ended up claiming her, so we decided to take her into our house. I mean, seriously, what’s one more animal in the house? Currently we’ve got 4 parakeets, 10 freshwater fish, one Beta, who knows how many saltwater critters, Chris, and now 12 chinchillas, plus 7 we are fostering. What’s one more dog, really?
Apparently, it’s a lot.
Now, a little background: Jen has had pets growing up. She took in the feral cats in the neighborhood and saw oodles of fish and birds in my house. In fact, her first job was a volunteer position feeding baby animals at a nature preserve. However, Chris is her first dog, and we’ve only had him for 2 years. Those that know our adventures with Chris know that he wasn’t (and still isn’t) your garden-variety dog, When we adopted him, we were told he was almost three, but the vet thought he was between 12-18 months, so almost out of the puppy stages.
Fox is a different story. Although she is very sweet and extremely smart, she often bores easily and has gotten into the habit of destroying and chewing things. Here is a small example of her habits:
Foxy….
… plus her toy, a clearance-priced toy bought last weekend at Petsmart…
… equals a few hours of fun, and 15 minutes of sheer horror!
This was one of the many things this pup has gotten into. We have holes in our yard, chew marks on our door frames and several broken leashes and knickknacks to prove this fact. We just have to endure it a little longer, though. Right now she is kept away from Chris and Mason because she was fixed, and we don’t want her popping her stitches, so until Thursday, we’ll have a bored lonely pup on our hands.
Aside from our dog-adventures, everything is going well here. We had a nice Easter. Jen’s folks decided to come over here to check out the new place and visit together. We thought it was going to be hard to “host”. After all, we’ve helped to plan the last few holidays, but this time the two of us pretty much did it all. It was a little tough getting things together (in particular the house being clean!) but it was still a fun day. We didn’t take any pictures, but Jen will have to steal her sisters’ cameras to see if they’ve got any photos to share!
School and work are still insanely crazy. Jeff is doing pretty well in his courses, and his grades are showing it. He did drop one class due to a missed assignment that came up in the middle of the move, but he plans on taking it again this summer. Jeff’s first term should be over by mid-May, so just a few more weeks left! Also, he started his first week at his new store in Los Gatos, not far from one of his previous stores. Jeff had been commuting from Fremont (and then Newark) to Brentwood since September because we had gotten a house in July, but when that fell through and we moved in here, he asked for a transfer. Originally we thought he would have to go to the Gap in Los Gatos (his 2nd store) but we were pleasantly surprised that he could go to the Banana Republic a few storefronts down! Now the commute is almost reasonable!
Jen’s toward the end of her classes, with the finals starting the last week of April. After this she has one more term, and then she’ll have a second bachelor’s! The plan after that is to take off a year from school to work more, build up her resume a little, and then take her GRE this summer and start applying in the fall. All of the programs she is looking at only want fall applicants, and since she might not be done in time to start, we figured this might be the best for everyone. Work is also going crazy for her as well. She is still in charge of an oncology study, but on top of that, she is also helping read over grant applications for her department. The grants are for studies that are meant to focus on child health, and normally they receive about 25 grant applications for this round of funding (roughly $35,000 each grant). This year they received a total of 44 applications, and so Jen, with her team, is having to go through the applications to check for completion, create spreadsheets of the information, and send out packets to reviewers (both online and in paper) to determine recipients. Doing clerical/admin work was never Jen’s intention, but she figured, hey, I’d get some more hours/money, I’m sure I can help out! So this will be bringing in quite a bit extra for the next few months, until she gets another study or another position.
So that’s enough for this update. We have more stuff going on, but we’ll have to bore you with it all later on!
