0154A: Grooming Yoshi

Caring for a pet is a full-time job. And one of the quirkier challenges - especially with an especially furry dog - is grooming.

With bigger dogs like golden retrievers, you inevitably learn a lot of the grooming tricks on your own since the size of your dog means an increased rate for professional grooming services plus they're a bit of a challenge to get into a vehicle. So my years with Max and Molly helped me learn how to bathe dogs and trim their nails. But with a smaller dog like Yoshi, it seems a lot more practical to have him groomed professionally - although his P500 sessions cost way more than what we spend on haircuts. But I don't want to go too overboard and thus we only bring Yoshi to the groomer once a month and I end up bathing him periodically in the weeks thereafter.

But it's not easy competing with the rest of the grooming world. Most pet owners with toy dogs all tend to opt for the professional grooming option, most likely for similar reasons as what I outlined above. Plus some even go to the effort of keeping their dog's hair long, which is a bit of a styling nightmare.

At the end of the day, we ensure Yoshi has more practical haircuts that help cope with his active lifestyle. He gets to play around in Tobie's family garden about once a week so he naturally gets dirty then. Plus his rather productive tear ducts creates a most pungent order that reeks from his face. So it really helps to keep his hair shorter - less stuff to get in the way of his vision or even his eating and drinking.

In the pet world there are a number of short haircuts that don't resort to shaving. In terms of severity (shortness), there's the puppy cut, the summer cut and today's discovery - the short summer cut. Typically we make Yoshi get the summer cut since it lasts the month and doesn't develop too many snarls and tangles. But this time around I asked for the short summer cut since I was complaining how the last groomer had left him a lot of hair around his face that only got into his eyes all the type and dipped into his water bowl. So this time around they really cleaned him up and he's quite the adorable little guy.

But I also bought him a little grooming brush - although it's crazy how the cheapest one was over P200. But if it means I can prevent some of his shedding around the Sietch while giving him more attention and cuddle time, then I suppose it's worth it. I just need to make sure that I maintain the discipline of brushing him down at least every other day, but preferably daily. Oh I'm sure Yoshi's going to love this.

Since my leave conversion came in today, Tobie and I finally addressed some of the lingering issues at the Sietch. So yes, we finally have a new water dispenser - the old one had stopped producing cold and eventually hot water as well. And we bought a new microwave since the last one had died on us after a few years of noble service. And while my somewhat bonus pay came in handy, the bigger benefit came from BPI's Pay Later promo! Hurrah for BPI Credit Cards!

And now that the domestic stuff is out of the way, I can start considering which Transformers I want to get, hehe.