pet connection

I phoned Gina to get a comment on the one year anniversary of the pet food recall for my next column, which will be in the San Francisco Chronicle. And she gave me a great one, and then she asked wistfully if I could blog.

Which she immediately wished she’d never asked me to do, as she got a ten minute tirade on the completely pathetic internet connectivity here in Austin, where forty zillion South by Southwest geeks are so busy Twittering and blogging and whatever the heck else they’re doing that actual working journalists such as, you know, me, cannot get online and stay there, no not even for one minute.

“Okay,” she said meekly.

Gina is never meek. I suspect it’s the book deadline thing.

So, I had to sit at the hotel’s hardline computer to finish my column and email it to my editor, and people fluttered all around looking at me anxiously, wondering when I’d be done with The Computer so they could get online, too. A crowd full of junkies cut off from their drug, yo. It wasn’t pretty, but I did my best to ignore them and get my piece filed. I could feel my editor breathing down my neck all the way from San Francisco.

Then a man wearing a cowboy shirt puts his hand my shoulder. Word of advice: Don’t touch me.

I snarled at him that I’d be done in a few minutes.

“I work for the federal government,” he informed me. “I need to file a report.”

“Well, I work for the San Francisco Chronicle and I need to file a story,” I said. “I’ll be done soon.”

“What are you writing about?”

I smiled. “An attack on the federal government.”

“What agency?”

“The FDA,” I answered, hoping he worked for them.

“Not my branch,” he informed me smugly. “But I bet I know what you’re writing about.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “You’re from San Francisco. You’re writing about those diseases.”

I have no clue what he was referring to, but from the sneering way he said “San Francisco” I assumed it was some kind of homophobic insinuation. “No,” I said. “I’m writing about the one-year anniversary of the pet food recall.”

He looked startled, then recovered his arrogant attitude. “Well,” he said, “That’s a disease.” Then he made a gesture at me like I was stupid, and walked away.

WHATever.

Therese from PetSitUSA.com phoned me this morning, to talk about the Hartz recall of cat vitamins for salmonella contamination. I was trying to get online and had to get off the phone, and then with one nervous breakdown after another, I never called her back. It did remind me of a presentation I sat in on at the Western Veterinary Conference, which I’ll write about more fully when I’m back on my own computer and have a stable internet connection and also am a bit further out from that nervous breakdown.

I’m planning to go out to Therese’s house to meet her dogs, and also to escape at some point for a pedicure with another friend, who came and saw our panel presentation on pet blogging. I enjoyed doing that a lot, and was very happy to see people there from Best Friends and Petfinder. It’s great to put a face with the name! There was also someone there from PETA, which given my feelings about PETA, was brave of her.

I’d show you more photos of the panel, but they’re on my laptop and not this computer, so that will have to wait. In the meantime, I miss all of you, I miss the Internet, and I miss my dogs!

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