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In this episode, Annie talks about her epically bad day. She describes how a teenager has trained people to stop leaving her voicemails. 

She talks to Joan, a Manhattan woman who has MS and an out-of-control adolescent shepherd in downtown Manhattan. She wants the dog to be a service dog, and also wants to breed him. She also talks to her longtime friend, New York Times columnist Ronda Kaysen, about her recent search for a non-shedding puppy.

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

Hey everyone. This is a bonus Q and A episode. I try and answer questions live every Thursday. You can sign up to come to my free live Q and A at schoolforthedogs.com/qanda, and you will see the next one I’m doing. I then am trying to take recordings of those Q and A’s and post them here to the podcast feed. If you have a question, you can email me directly annie@schoolforthedogs. You can also go to anchor.fm/dogs and record your question there. Thanks for being here.

I was going to wear sunglasses for this episode, but I think I can’t see properly.

Hey Yolanda, nice to see you and Joan is here. Hi, Joan. I just, I need a second to recover. It’s been a bad day. I would say this has been a really bad… first of all, well second of all, second of all, I just posted a podcast episode, like just bonus…well bonus sounds like it should be like a nice cherry thing. It didn’t feel like a nice cheery thing, but anyway, but I felt like I needed to post this episode. And as I posted it, like the microphone has like a little thing on it ….. Anyway as I… it’s actually, the second part is funny. The second part is right as I posted this episode, just now I like spilled an entire bottle of seltzer on my laptop.

Like not a little bit, like the entire bottle of water just went over on my laptop. Fortunately, I have like a desktop PC, so I have a computer, but it was like, anyway. And the first thing that happened today, which was much worse, thing is I just learned that my dog is dying. It was like that phone call that you don’t ever want to get. Well, I got that call this morning where that said that he has something in his liver that’s inoperable most likely. I mean, I guess I could get a second opinion, but it sounds like, sounds like this is probably it. And he’s been in really good health up until pretty recently when a couple things started to seem off. He’s 15 and a half-yesterday was his 15 and a half birthday. And you know, they don’t live forever.

It’s just just processing. He’s doing really well, he’s doing pretty well. We’re going to give him something to help his appetite, but he’s been his perky self, mostly. My daughters and him are so sweet together and I’m really glad that like she had the experience of having him as a dog, even though she probably won’t remember it, but like, he’s just been such an important part of my life for so long. And obviously now I have her and  it’s different, but I’m glad that they had a little bit of overlap in my life.

Full transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/podcast

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