I usually sleep 2am-10am, so being at work at 7am made it a "caffeine day" for me.  :)  I was tuckered out by the time the day was over.  I came back home and slept afterwards.

The official news is that we exceeded our $1 million goal!  We had about 5,000 animals and 10,000 people.  We were billing it as the largest animal/person walk fundraiser on ( Read more... )

Story:  It's just one more week to the Walk, our annual fundraiser.  This edition will feature my plea for donations (link down at bottom), since I'll probably be too scatterbrained next Friday to make a post.  Here in Minnesota, there are a LOT of different charitable organizations collecting money right now (for causes like AIDS, breast cancer, ( Read more... )

Story:  Traditional medicine is great, but alternative therapies have their place too, even in animal care.  I learned at the wildlife rehabilitation conference that we have had some success in treating spinal injuries by using acupuncture.  Looking over the notes that I took at the presentation, there's a vet at a local exotic animal hospital ( Read more... )

Story:  I got to pet a baby red fox! I had helped our main Wildlife worker who mentioned that a kit was about to be transported out of our facility to a wildlife rehabilitator.  "You should come down and see it."  So I did.  :)  It was adorable, of course, and very soft.  It wasn't interested in waking up from its nap.  It basically just yawned in ( Read more... )

Story:  Possums have 13 nipples and a prehensile tail. How weird is that? They don't break bilateral symmetry though, since their 13th nipple is found in the middle of the body rather than on the left or right.  Possums are marsupials, not mammals. A baby possum is born very undeveloped and then crawls with its barely functional front legs to the ( Read more... )

Story:  I attended a Wildlife Rehabilitation conference last weekend (and again tomorrow too).  I learned a lot of cool stuff.  Some of it about rabbits and raccoons was the kind of awesomely gross stuff that would only be appropriate to share among friends while drinking beer at a pub!  *laugh*

I also practiced repairing a turtle shell.  I donned ( Read more... )

Story:  There's a trumpeter swan downstairs.  I don't have a picture of zhem, since the bird is not in a public area.  Zhey has been there for a while now (a few weeks maybe) in an isolated room.  There's a blanket hung up for privacy, but the tall swan still raises zheir long neck to look over the blanket at people passing down the hallway.  The ( Read more... )

Story:  A coworker got an interesting phone call the other day.  Apparently this building has been a place for adoptions for very a very long time.  Someone called in to ask if we happened to have any records regarding her mother's adoption.  "Mother"?  Family pet?  No, her human mother.  Apparently, many many decades ago, our Golden Valley animal ( Read more... )

Story:  My computer screen is litter box fresh!  Is yours?


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Story:  I've been running around changing antivirus programs and running machine inventories this week and last week.  I haven't spent as much time visiting the animals before/after work hours since my schedule has been weird lately.  I did learn this week, though, that some vet (medicine?) supply centers send Jelly Belly candy with their samples ( Read more... )