pet connection

Christie and Dr. Becker paid a visit to Sacramento yesterday, for our annual quarterly meeting. It’s an opportunity to review and to plan, but mostly, it’s a chance to set aside the fast phone calls, e-mails and text messages and just enjoy being the same room with each other.

Christie and I have been friends and co-workers for 15 years or so, going all the way back to running the Pet Care Forum on AOL, when the Veterinary Information Network provided the content.

I’ve known Dr. B about as long, but we really connected over coffee about five years ago at Global Pet Expo. Dr. B called me with a book idea a few months later — our first New York Times best-seller, “Why Do Dogs Drink Out of the Toilet?” — and we discovered that we LOVED working together. Christie and I had long before become a 2-for-1 writer-editor package after working together on so many projects, and fortunately, Christie and Dr. B also hit it off right away.

Our trial by fire was the pet-food recall of 2007, but we all made it through. Thousands of blog posts, hundreds of thousands of blog comments, a couple million site visitors, 13 books,  a couple hundred articles and I don’t even know how many TV segments and media appearances later … and we just couldn’t love each other more, or the work we do together. And we’ve brought some of our favorite people into the mix, with more on the way. (Yes, it’s a teaser: You’ll have to wait!)

By the way: Dr. Becker and I have another article in PARADE magazine this morning, on pet heart conditions. Here it is.

We spent the day, most appropriately, meeting in the conference room at my own veterinary hospital, the VCA Sacramento Veterinary Referral Center. VCA regional manager Diana Stetson is based there, and she has long been generous in letting us use the room. It just seems appropriate to meet in such a fantastic facility, where we can pop out and get puppy kisses and kitty purrs on a break.

Our web guru, Mike Linville of Black Dog Studios, came in for part of the day, as well, as we have some cool things we’ll be unveiling on the site soon.

After we dropped Dr. B at the airport for the flight home, Christie and I grabbed some coffee with Jennifer Fearing of the HSUS. She’s fostering a pair of 7-week-old puppies, and we got to snuggle them while we visited. The sleeping puppy is already spoken for, but the one shown with Christie is looking for a great home. She’s a smart little girl, and we could see her learning things as Christie worked with her — and she never stopped wagging her puppy tail for people walking by.

She’s a lucky pup to have landed a great foster home, but the real lucky ones will be the family who adopts her after the socialization and early puppy education she’s getting in the hands of a very loving foster mom.

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