Dogs 101 Labrador Retriever
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Get ready, on Sunday, March 7, it’s time for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards.  Bright lights, red carpets, and movie stars decked out in the latest styles.  And some will be showing up with their canine companions. Some of the most popular films ever made have starred dogs.  Hollywood has always capitalized on our love [...]

About a decade ago, not long after walking away from a job at a well-respected daily newspaper — a move that seemed insane at the time but not so much now — I walked away from the second real job of my life, running the Pet Care Forum on AOL as part of the Veterinary Information Network.

I had a $30,000 book advance in my back pocket, a regular gig at Pets.com and a six-month lease for a beach house on Alligator Point, Fla., at the point where a line dropped southwest from Tallahassee and northeast from Apalachicola would intersect. We weren’t talking a beach condo, either, but an old-style Florida family weekend house, a simple wood-frame structure heavy on bayfront windows and decking. The little blue house was perched precariously on wooden stilts with so much give in them that the entire place shook during the spin cycle of the washing machine, which had been named for a relatively mild hurricane that had had a similar effect.

My house may have been on Alligator Point, but to the U.S. Postal Service, I lived in Panacea. Looking back, that seems about right.

But no matter: I had my dogs, my van, a handful of books, some music CDs, a couple week’s worth of clothes and a Sony laptop. I was never going to have a day job again.

Well … ha!

Pets.com collapsed not long after my arrival, its sock puppet one of its only assets, along with the work I did for them, which was sold to a Microsoft content site and still pops up now and then. (The sock puppet was last seen working for a used-car dealer.)

I finished the one book, wrote second editions of two others, continued with my  syndicated newspaper column and waited for news on the new book proposals. After a few months I realized I would have to go back to the empty house in Sacramento that I was still paying the mortgage on.

Shortly after 9/11, I knew the economy and the publishing industry weren’t going to be anything like normal for months to come, so I did what every unemployed writer/editor/journalist does in a town like Sacramento: I took a government job.

It was a good fit, for the most part. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District is a customer-owned electric utility with a history of public service,  a product of the state’s progressive era, when civic-minded advocates broke the monopoly of the Robber Barons who ran the railroads and were gearing up to run the new electric and gas utilities. In more recent times, SMUD had become world-famous for renewable energy — solar, wind, biofuel, electric transportation and more — and, to a lesser extent, for mothballing a nuclear plant after a public vote. Who knew infrastructure could be so much fun?

My boss had a relaxed attitude and an infectious, honking laugh, and my co-workers were funny, smart and committed to public service. The gorgeous 1950s headquarters building had been ruined inside by the addition of beige “Dilbert”-style cubicles that blocked the light and made the place gloomy, at best, but the grounds were beautiful and every day I got to touch a 1959 Wayne Thiebaud mural as I walked in — and I almost always did, right at his tile “signature.”  For a public-service-oriented policy wonk like me, it was a great place to be.

And it it still is, but as of last Friday, I’m not there.

The Tuesday previous, I woke up and quit. Well, technically, I retired so I could be able to buy group health insurance, but the end result was the same. I’m outta there.

Of course, the seeds of change had been sown a while back, starting when Dr. Becker and I formally became writing partners, 11 (soon to be 13) books ago. Those seeds were watered by the 2007 pet-food recall, and warmed by the greater opportunities Christie and I gained from our  post-recall blogging cred, and with better, more prestigious and, well, better-paying writing gigs. That, and I have a burning desire to be a part of the sustainable, more humane agriculture movement, the heart of which beats in the Capay Valley, one county to the west of me.

The pet-food recall changed my life. I knew it would from the beginning, when Christie and I immediately realized it wasn’t a “pet story” at all, but one about an industrial  food-delivery system for pets and people gone off the rails.  I wanted to report on it, and I wanted to be part of fixing it. And I also, of course, wanted to keep writing about pets.

By any sensible measure, the decision to leave SMUD is a bad one, but truth is any of my co-workers would tell you with a smile that I was always a square peg in the round hole of civil service.

So it’s  time to put the sensible behind me once again. Besides, I don’t have much time to worry: Dr. B and I have a book due May 1 and another due  six months after that. And two more articles for Parade due within two weeks, and a weekly syndicated news feature due Monday.

This time, I hope I’m really on my way.

Wanted: A place for a puppy who will change a life
Helping Paws , a service dog training organization in the Twin Cities, needs more volunteer foster homes soon to train service dogs.
Read more on KARE 11 Minneapolis-St. Paul
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A great Agility training with Timmy the Labrador Retriever! He has got so much power! Please pose nice comments and subscribe =) Love u :-* bye
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