Dogged Blog

Slow down you move too fast

This has been an odd week.

When I was sick, I told myself on an hourly basis that I had to slow down a little when I got better. Ever since February I've been going full throttle, burning myself out on the pet food recall and never really ramping back down to even something like my previous already-workaholic baseline.

Unfortunately, I had a few assignments I'd pushed back while I was whooping my lungs out, and they were sitting there waiting for me Monday. I took a deep breath and like the idiot that I apparently am, determined I'd do them and slow down, you know... later.

The next day Michael Jensen, my editor at AfterElton.com,  bumped one of the articles out two weeks. He was all worried that I would mind, and I pretended it was a huge imposition but I'd suffer through it for his sake. And then I hung up the phone and thanked any and all lurking deities for the respite.

I blogged a bit, worked on an article due next Wednesday for AfterEllen.com, caught up on a lot of email, blogged a bit more, cleared some backlog at Club Kingsnake, played with the new video embedding system at PetHobbyist, read a really brilliant book I'm reviewing for Pet Connection, blogged a bit more, and had a relatively easy first week back.

I realized yesterday that Monday is a holiday, and called Amy Moon, my editor at SFGate.com and asked if my pet column, which I usually file on the Monday before it runs, needed to be filed today. "Oh yeah," she said. So I stayed up a bit too late last night working on it, and got up this morning to do a final draft. I was struggling with a tough part -- it's a sciencey thing and I have a tendency to assume my readers have PhDs -- when the phone rang again. It was Amy.

"Er, Christie? Your column's actually running on Wednesday this week. You don't need to file until Tuesday. Is that okay?"

I heaved a big sigh and told her I'd try to live with it.

Okay that' s a lie. I had the file shut before I'd hung up the phone.

Usually the universe sends lessons in a negative form, things like chaining you to your bed with pneumonia to teach you that you need to take better care of yourself and intermix a little rest and relaxation with the compulsive workaholic thing.

I'm actually starting to wonder if I might be able to learn something even when the universe tries a kinder, gentler approach. Ya think?

What, me, jealous?

I suppose most people at some point in their life, while sitting in Starbucks sipping a triple shot latte and not moving too much because they might knock their laptop out of its wifi sweet spot, think to themselves, "I should write a book!" One day, they resolve, they're going to do just that.

I do this approximately once a week, and while I was sick, my attention would drift away from the endless stream of home decorating shows that are my life when I don't feel well and I'd let my mind play out the possible ways I might be able to find, you know, ten minutes a day to translate my brilliant thoughts and heartwrenching prose into book form.

So now, as I fill in my daily life again after emerging from my whooping cough sick bed phase, I'm thinking ten minutes a day isn't enough. I know this because my friend and editor Gina Spadafori keeps writing books, and as far as I can tell it's a full time job.

It pays off, though, because not only was one of her recent books, co-authored with my colleague at Pet Connection Dr. Marty Becker,  a New York Times bestseller and no, I'm not jealous at all, why would you say that? but now their  new books are featured in a big spread in Publishers Weekly no really, not jealous at all.

Gina blogged about it and mentioned that her pets are not impressed. Yeah. Well.  I am.

And, you know, jealous.

The post-whoop era

I'm tentatively announcing I will live again.

My cough seems to have turned into the typical lingering post-bronchitis type of thing, with only the very rare mild whoop. I haven't gasped, choked, gagged, clutched my throat and staggered around in terror that I'd suffocate for a few days now. And my energy levels, while far from normal, are at least sufficient to walk the dogs, do the dishes, put a little bit of laundry through, and use my brain enough to write if not well then at least well enough to get by.

Plus I had someone come in and build shelves for my shoes in one of my closets so I can open the door and look at them any time I want to. Such as the red suede Franco Sarto Mary Jane pump on a red patent wedge that I hope to actually feel well enough to go somewhere I can wear someday soon.

Pet Food Recall Panel -- VOTE!

South by Southwest, the prestigious internet/music/film conference held each year in Austin, TX, is considering a panel on pet bloggers and the pet food recall for next year. I submitted this idea and will be there, and while Gina says she probably can’t make it, Ben from Itchmo.com, Therese from PetSitUSA.com and ThePetFoodList.com, and David Goldstein from the Huffington Post and horsesass.org have indicated they’d like to be part of it. And I intend to work on Gina.

This is from the panel description:

The massive pet food recall that started in March of 2007 and kept rolling for nearly four months not only claimed the lives of thousands of pets but launched an international food safety scandal. How much of that story would we have ever known without pet bloggers?

“I don’t know of a comparable case,” NYU’s Jay Rosen told the LA Times. “It shows what’s possible when people get outraged and they ask themselves, what’s happening here? They actually have the tools to start finding out.”

Using new technologies and old-fashioned reporting skills, pet bloggers delivered veterinary, corporate and government information directly to dog and cat owners in a way unprecedented in the pet world. They liveblogged FDA media conferences, went into their own pockets to pay for their suddenly-exploding blog traffic, stayed up all night waiting for midnight pet company announcements of new recalls, coordinated lists of recalled foods that were more current and user-friendly than anything the FDA was publishing, and, with the valuable input of their readers, uncovered and reported on government documents that moved the story in the mainstream media.

Industry insiders called pet bloggers “troublesome” and “off the charts,” and complained pet blogs were posting “unfiltered information,” as if there were something unjournalistic about unspun news. Jay Rosen, on the other hand, told USA Today that pet bloggers’ “networked collaboration” over the recall is part of a movement that’s “changing the journalism world.” Paul Grabowicz of UC Berkeley’s New Media Program called their work “crowd sourcing” at its finest.

Pulitzer-winning reporter Abigail Goldman wrote, “Bloggers and owners of sites such as Itchmo, Pet Connection, Howl 911, The Pet Food List and Pet Food Tracker have been deluged by millions of pet owners who are grieving or railing or both — and digging for answers. Their online barking is being heard in Washington’s halls of power, including the Food and Drug Administration and Capitol Hill.”

Even two years ago, when rescue efforts for animals affected by Hurricane Katrina got national media attention, there was no coordinated pet blog community to dig into that story. How did they do it, and what can we take from it to use in the next big corporate, medical, or government scandal that impacts our animals’ health – and ours?

If you’d like to see this panel idea at the 2008 SXSW interactive conference, please visit SXSW’s Panel Picker and give the idea some stars! You do have to register first, but it’s fast and free.

To vote:

Go to the “Pet Blogging: Not a fluffy puppy story” panel submission page here.

If you aren’t already registered, click “sign in” to comment, then follow the directions to create an account. Once you’ve done that, go back to the panel submission page and give it the number of stars you think the idea deserves… five sounds good to me. ;)

Comments are also very welcome!

If you have any questions or problems with the process, please post them here. And thank you!

Wow, I'm so brave and everything

I am like the postal service. Neither rain nor sleet nor hail nor snow nor the dread bordetella pertussis can stop me from my appointed rounds.

Okay, it totally stopped me from almost everything for the last month, but I did manage to finish my column for SFGate.com:

Since I'm a pet writer and basically obsessed with animals, I belong to dozens of pet-related e-mail lists, many of them about health issues. And not a day goes by that I don't see at least one person spreading information that's completely wrong. I don't mean expressing an opinion with which I disagree; I mean someone solemnly informing the group that the sky is orange and the moon is made of green cheese.

Even worse, having worked with veterinarians for more than a decade now, I've discovered that an awful lot of those people then go into their vet's office and share these gems of misinformation with their pet's health care provider, introduced with that phrase guaranteed to make the vet's blood pressure rise: "I read on the Web that ..."

And that's a shame, because in addition to being a terrible place to find pet health information, the Web can also be a wonderful place to do research and connect with other pet owners facing similar issues for support, networking, and education. The trick is in figuring out how to evaluate the animal health information you find, how to locate the reliable stuff when you need it, and how to discuss it with your pet's veterinarian in a way that won't make him or her tune you out before you even get started.

Full article here, so you can marvel at how completely brilliant I can be even when my brain is deprived of oxygen!

Still whooping it up

Because I know you're all sitting there going OMG how is Christie, here is an update on my ongoing battle with whooping cough.

What seems to have happened is that I am now coughing much more frequently, but it's a weaker cough. I still "whoop," and it still hurts my head and makes me feel momentarily exhausted, but it doesn't knock me to the ground moaning and wanting to die.

And hey, I wrote something!

I'm thinking I might write something else soon!

*crawls off to take nap after becoming exhausted from blogging*

Hello there

I'm emerging warily from my cave and thinking maybe, just maybe, I felt semi-not incredibly terrible today. It's not impossible that by Monday I might be able to have a half-normal schedule.

And I'm almost done with my pet column. And I'm actually thinking I'll blog at Pet Connection tomorrow, I have something to say. Now if I can only find the energy to get a little bit of a rant going.

In other news, apparently the world went to hell in a handbasket while I was huddling in bed coughing.

Whoop whoop whooping cough report

"Are you dead?"

It was a phone message from a worried friend. I wasn't sure she was kidding.

I'm not dead. I was actually better, then I had what I hope was one last full-on bout of paroxysmal coughing, which gave me the worst headache of my life; I couldn't even move my eyelids without intense pain, and two Aleve and four extra-strength Tylenol did nothing for it at all. My mom asked if there was anything she could do to help me, but when I told her, she refused to shoot me.

I mean, why ask if you're not going to help?

So I'm still here and now that the headache's mostly gone, I'm glad to be alive.

Ummmm, can someone please finish my SFGate.com column which is due Friday? Thanks.

Oh, and thanks to Alison Brendel DVM for the nice photo of a toy bordetella pertussis germ.

*crawls back to bed*

whine

I felt better yesterday, then I had another one of those gasping-for-air, thought-I'd-die, almost-passed-out whooping episodes last night, and felt dizzy, shakey, and drowsy for hours afterward. Then I had another one, although it was much milder, and then I slept until past 1 PM, and now it's 5:30 and I'm sleepy and yawning constantly and shaking.

WTF IS WRONG WITH ME? I left a message for my doctor yesterday but she never called back, and while I realize I can call the advice nurse and/or go to urgent care, I just want someone to tell me what's wrong with me.

/whine

[UPDATE: I found a sound file of an adult with whooping cough on the web. It sounds just like me. Maybe you can see why it's so freaking scary.]

Magical writing

It's amazing how much stuff I've written is just magically appearing even though I'm sick in bed and not capable of much more than these little intros to linkage.

I may have done permanent damage to my airways by going to the Rufus Wainwright concert in San Francisco last Friday, but damn he was good. But I did notice something a bit disconcerting about the audience:

Oh, Rufus Wainwright, how you sparkle.

Oh, audience who went to see Rufus Wainwright at the San Francisco Masonic Auditorium last Friday, what’s wrong with you?

I refer specifically to the absolute flat-boring way the audience was dressed. There were perhaps five of us wearing anything that could remotely be considered sparkly, except, of course, for Rufus and his band, who were appropriately blinding in their shininess.

And that’s why I want to know what’s wrong with the people of my city, especially my gay brothers who I once could count on not to go see a diva like Rufus wearing little zip-up track jackets and running shoes.

Full judgmental little rant and yes, a few words about the actual concert story here.