Well today is Sunday, so you know what that means.
Hot dads…
Cute doggies…
This puppy was pretty cute, but kept moving around so I had to wave my camera in front of his face to get him to pose for a picture. Oh, wait…no the puppy was fine I think I got these two pictures confused.
Lately for the last few months it seems like none of my friends ever want to do anything during the day, or on Sundays at all for that matter. So one of my usual activities on Sunday afternoons has been going shopping at one of the local malls. It’s a little more than just a quick shopping trip, as it usually turns into a whole afternoon of cruising around, eating lunch and browsing through some merchandise. The mall is actually a great place to go by yourself, because where else can you spend hours walking around entertaining yourself by doing virtually nothing? It’s better than staying home and watching t.v. (or wasting hours on the internet), and it gets me out of the house and forces me into a little bit of human interaction. Seriously…what else am I going to do? 
Usually I go to Scottsdale Fashion Square, but today I went to Arizona Mills because I wanted to get some cologne (my V-Day present to myself) at one of the fragrance outlets. While I was eating lunch I had some time to think about my mall trip activities, and came up with this favorites list.
Some of my favorite things to do at the mall:
1. Shop. I know, I know, you think this is really obvious. But usually when there’s something I need to buy, I am in and out of a store relatively quickly. Lately however, I’m learning the fine art of shopping…which for me has started to involve talking to sales people, trying on things I wouldn’t typically buy, buying something I didn’t necessarily need or want, and evaluating new styles and fashion trends. One of the stores I like to shop at lately has been Sephora…the sales people there are really friendly to chat with and are more than happy to let me try all kinds of different fragrances and skin products. One thing I recently found out is that they’ll give you a sample of any fragrance…even if they don’t have a pre-packaged sample, they’ll make one for you.
2. Check out hot guys. What, no surprise here either? Well, one thing you can find at the mall that you don’t normally see at the bars or clubs are hot young DILFs. Ha, seriously…lots of them. Here’s one I stalked today. I think he was totally on to me - aiming my iPhone at him with my mouth hanging open may have given it away - but who cares, you know?
3. Gawk at puppies. Every mall has one of those damn puppy stores. I’m totally against puppy farms, and pedigreed dogs and all that, but they are so cute! I would never buy a puppy anywhere except for the pound, but it’s fun to go look at them at the mall because you don’t see puppies this tiny and young at the pound. Here’s one I was hanging out with today - usually they don’t even notice people anymore outside the glass, but this one liked me and posed for a picture!
4. Eat. Panda Express is actually my favorite food, and the mall is the only place I can really get it. Sometimes I get cookies too, and totally pig out. Again, who cares? 
I haven’t been to Arizona Mills in a very long time, but Scottsdale Fashion Square is still my favorite. It was really funny today and I was cracking myself up, because Arizona Mills is very…urban. “Urban” is the code I use with my friends to describe a certain type of demographic (Jerry and I took this from an old Dana Carvey SNL skit). So I started telling myself today that I probably shouldn’t stereotype as much as I do..and just as I was thinking about that, I started to notice that there were alarms going off in almost every store that I passed by! And every 10 minutes or so, I would see security guards questioning and apprehending shoppers that had apparently just stolen something. Ha, so there you go…my urban shopping experience…complete with DILF stalking, adorable puppies, fried rice and cookies, and rampant petty theft!
I have to say that the more I think about the way pets are treated these days, well…it just makes me really angry. The two friendly dogs from yesterday are now staying with me, waiting for the County to come and pick them up. They are so cute!
These dogs look like they’ve been treated fairly well. They’re clean, well fed, and mild mannered. But what really irks me is that they are both not neutered, and do not have collars or tags on them. Usually I have been against neutering, because I don’t feel right about modifying an animal in ways that have unknown consequences to them mentally and physically, and doing so against their will obviously. But in this case, their owner is obviously so irresponsible that they can’t even keep their pets confined in a safe place.
If you have a pet, would you please keep a collar and tag on them at all times? And if you’re so irresponsible that your pet is going to get out of your control and have to sleep in someone’s bushes, would you please have them neutered or fixed so you don’t make the problem even worse? Better yet, would you please give your pet to someone who is mentally competent and able to take proper care of them?
I’ve been browsing pets911.com to see if there are ads for these dogs, but I couldn’t find any matches. But what was really shocking is the sheer number of lost dogs in this area…I mean there are probably hundreds just within a few mils of my zip code. How can so many people be losing their dogs?
As I was looking around the ads, I found an ad for the pit bull that I found a few weeks ago! I was excited to see this, so I called the people to make sure it was them who picked up the dog at the County. It was. His name is Cyrus. They don’t live far from here, and thanked me for calling. Apparently Cyrus was lost for 3 weeks before I had him picked up. They were a little irritated though that he was neutered before they could pick him up at County. And they had to pay about $500 to get him out, because there were some clotting complications from the neutering. And they were mad that now they can now longer breed Cyrus as they had planned.
Cyrus the pit bull (picture in his ad)
Well, thank goodness I prevented these people from breeding him, because apparently they are completely unaware of the enormous problem with pit bull overpopulation right now. Pit bulls are the most euthanized breed at the moment, because people like his apparent owners believe they’ve all got the most unique pit bull in the world and want to make a quick buck from selling pit bull puppies that will probably be chained or lost, and never neutered because of the ridiculous macho expectations inherent with the breed.
A few weeks ago, I went outside to my front yard to pick some grapes from the vines I have growing along my side fence. When I heard something rustle, I looked over to find a cute brown and white pit bull lounging around underneath one of my bushes. He had a lead chain dangling from his neck, like maybe he escaped during a walk. I don’t think he escaped from a yard, because this wasn’t really the type of chain that the multitude of irresponsible and cruel dog owners around here would use to chain a dog of this size to something in a backyard.
I went inside the house to get some water, but when I came back outside I must have scared him and he left. I didn’t see him for the rest of the day, but the next day I heard his chain dangling - and looked outside the window to find him asleep underneath the bushes again!
I called Maricopa County Animal Control, and they promptly came over to get him. Because pit bulls can be a little unpredictable (depending on how cruel or nice their owners are) I decided it was best to leave this to the County to take of. After all, it’s their job to make sure lost pets are properly taken care of. They gave me a case number, which I used for the next several days to call daily and get his status - until finally one day they told me that he had either been picked up by his owners or adopted. They could confirm that he had not been euthanized, but for some reason couldn’t tell me exactly who took him home.
So, that’s sort of an unremarkable story because I have seen many, many stray dogs and cats in my neighborhood ever since I moved here a couple years ago. However, ever since brown pit bull was picked up, I’ve been noticing a very large number of paw prints around the ground underneath my front yard landscaping.
If you click this picture to make it larger, you can see that the ground is covered in paw prints
I didn’t think much of this, thinking that maybe this was from my last vsitor. But then I started to notice that they multiplied every day.
So then today, as I’m working in the back office, I hear some rustling from the front of the house. I thought housekeeper might have been a little early, and maybe the doorbell was broken again. So I walked toward the front of the house expecting to let her in, and then out of the corner of my eye saw all this activity outside the dining room window. As I walked up to the window, I looked outside and saw another dog sitting underneath one of the bushes! This one was a tiny brown dog, cute.
But then, imagine my surprise when I look around and see a total of 4 dogs - all without collars - lounging around my yard as if they have always lived there. They were all different breeds, too. A medium-sized Rottweiler, a black Lab puppy, this little brown curious one pictured below, and a fluffy thing. Strange.
Two of the dogs that were sitting outside my window - these two were the friendliest, and I gave them water and a bone (yes, I have a backup bone in the cupboard!)
So, I called the County once again to have these picked up, half thinking that they might start to think I was the one abandoning these dogs. They haven’t showed up yet, but they should be on their way. For now, it seems, this is the lost & found.
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