Driving In Traffic

As some of you may know, I sit on the board of an animal rescue group in Atlanta.

If you actually drop by my site in person, you will see a number of items in my sidebar. However, for my friends who read me via my Feed, I kindly ask that you consider donating $10 to the Six Degree’s badge I’ve created for them.

If you are not familiar, SixDegrees is a joint undertaking of the Network for Good and Kevin Bacon to raise money through social media for nonprofit organizations. The six organizations that have the most number of people donating will have their donations matched by Mr. Kevin Bacon, himself.

Boy— would I love for our organization to win. We are an all-volunteer organization that rescues dogs from death row and finds them homes (BTW– over 70,000 animals in Atlanta are put to death each year because they can’t find a home).

Thus I am asking you kind folk to please consider helping me and Our Pals Place out. Click here to donate. Because it is the number of people who donate that counts most, I’m just asking that you donate the Network for Good minimum of $10.
I’d love to put the badge in the post, but it keeps knocking off the formatting of my blog. However, if you would like to put it on your site, you can get the code by clicking here and

I’d be forever in your debt for any help you can provide.

Tags: Our Pal’s Place Network For Good Six Degrees Kevin Bacon Animal Rescue Dogs

It is with a great Hoorah! that I’m excited to announce that Our Pal’s Place: Promoting the Adoption Option blog is up and going.

For those of you who don’t know, I am on the board of Our Pal’s Place, a no-kill animal shelter and education center in Metro Atlanta. My focus within the organization has morphed a bit since our first meetings almost 4 years ago. Now, my job is to develop a development and marketing strategy. I for the last 7 or 8 months I’ve been a big yapper about the role of blogs in our organization. The road to this day has been quite intriquing.

In the beginning, there was some skepticsm about blogs because of an experience that some of our board members had after they went to New Orleans for Katrina animal rescue efforts. At that time, a few bloggers drew them into a fire fight by highlighting some of the events that had occurred. Subsequently, they did not want our blog to be an organizational firestorm.

However as we have taken small steps, many of my colleagues have taken the time to learn a little bit about blogs and to visit and read a couple. The biggest winning features of blogs was that it was a way to keep people informed without having to constantly e-mail people. The idea that people could subscribe to feeds and get information on demand and in a preferred format was quite appealing to folks who got tons of e-mail for work.

We’re still working on some of the technical stuff. We decided to use wordpress due to cost issues as well as the ability to interface it with our domain. I use wordpress here so I was familiar with making edits to the template, but I’ve had to have help with some of the coding and permissions. Thankfully our web guy is a great friend, knowledgable, and has suffered me well. There is some tinkering to do, but I’m feeling ok about what we’ve got up now.

So for those of you who would like to offer some constructive tips, please drop by the OPP blog and come back here to leave me a comment on how to make it better.

Gracias Senors and Senoras-

Last night at the Wine Tasting for Our Pal’s Place at the Marietta Wine Market we had a great turn out. Thanks to the new friends and old who dropped by to support both the wine market and Our Pal’s Place. The Bistro Dog wines were quite tasty and very affordable. My favorite was the Shiraz. In fact we came home with a couple of bottles.

Anyway… more to the point of this post… at the tasting we were able to meet the authors of Winery Dogs of Napa Valley, Andrea and Allen. Andrea is a speech therapist by day and a very talented photographer by night. Allen works in the textile industry as a day job but he has a real talent with writing about the dogs that Andrea captures in her pictures. This book would be a wonderful gift idea for your wino friends who love dogs (so I’ll be buying a lot more come Christmas– I bet).

You can drop by their website to purchase and preview the book. It really is a must have. Their new book on Sonoma Winery Dogs will be coming out soon.

Tags: wine, Napa Valley, books, winery, dogs, dog lovers, gifts, photography, shout out

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In keeping with the theme around here of “Driving in Traffic” to people, places, and issues I care about, I wanted to announce an event that will benefit Our Pal’s Place, the animal rescue group I work with. The wonderful folks over at Marietta Wine Market are having a wine tasting with a doggie theme on Wednesday,July 19th from 5-7pm. So to all my friends, enemies, and local readers, grab your boss or a cube mate, scoot out of work a little early and please drop by leave a small donation and belly up to the wine bar! It is for a great cause! Click here for a map to the Marietta Wine Market. Tags: Our Pal’s Place, Marietta Wine Market, Fundraising, Atlanta Events, Nonprofit

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I two months ago lost my cat, Augustus. He was a wonderful pet that we shamelessly spoiled. The profound sadness has dropped away and now the Hubby and I have had fun remembering all the good stuff about having our boy around to entertain us.

It was just a few days ago, my eye was caught by a headline that read “Lynx look to top pick Augustus for leadership.” WOW! I always knew that kitty was destined for greatness! He definitely demonstrated his leadership skills in his ability to hurry us to the treats or to the food bowl each morning to fill it for HRH’s royal dining pleasure. I quickly clicked on the article. Eventhough I knew it was not about our boy, I was still a bit disappointed to find that it was not about my Augustus at all… instead it was about an LSU Lady Tiger baskeball player going to the WNBA.

It was about that time I got notice that a friend of mine was starting her own jewelry business, DanaRuth Designs, and one of her lines was going to be pet jewelry. I couldn’t help but think about how a little Crown for Augustus’ collar would have been his “Cat’s Meow”. (I know she calls them Princess, but I wouldn’t have told my very manly cat that).

Dana also has some really cute dog tags (Pictured below) that can be personalized. Drop by her site to find information on how to order.

I know it seems silly— pet jewelry…. But you know, it is that kind of fun stuff that adds a bit of folly to life. And it’s calorie-free, no-sugar added, and cholesterol-free. Sign me up!

Technorati tags: pets, Dogs, Dog collars

My grandfather always said “It is better to be lucky than good.” Well, when God was dishing out the luck quotient for our family, he heaped it on my grandfather and my brother. I got the minimal amount required to ensure that I would continue to wake up each morning and that’s pretty much it.

So it is with great elation that I wanted to share that I’ve had a part in actually winning something. Granted, the success probably comes from the fact that this was a combined effort of a lot of people. But still…. one must always celebrate when given the opportunity.

So what did I have a part in winning……

The animal rescue organization I work with participated in the Helen Woodward Animal Center’s Home 4 The Holidays Campaign. We entered one of our success stories from the campaign in the essay contest—- and we won the grand prize. See the story by clicking here.

Like I said before, this was not an individual accomplishment. There are numerous volunteers who care for these neglected and abused critters. There are also a lot of people who think over the kind of home an animal needs and then makes sure they get the right home.

It is good to get some recognition for trying to make a difference in your corner of the world. It doesn’t happen very often and when it does it is important to be thankful!

Addendum: The story was the same one I mentioned in the previous post. I think I will resubmit it to the lady and see if it is worth a mention now…

technorati tags: animal rescue, pets, thankfulness

This weekend I am going to a board of director’s retreat for a non-profit animal rescue group with whom I work. The goal is to come up with a strategy for 2006 that will help us adopt out more dogs and gain more volunteers and donors to help us with this endeavor.

My role over the last 6 months has been to try to get more press attention for our organization. To do this, I have sent out a number of press releases, info e-mails and short stories about successes. Overall the effort has been pretty successful thanks to the willingness of a colleague, Russ, to be on TV and talk about the dogs.

Today, I got my first, “gee thanks” but that is not a worthy story e-mail from a reporter who had solicited for heartwarming stories about adoptions. That caused me to wonder what will make us stand out and be noticed. This story was about an animal that was picked up by animal control because of neglect. Actually, the owners (if you can call them that) had chained this dog and its puppy to a tree. They had not changed the collar on the dog since it was a puppy. Subsequently, the collar had become embedded in the dogs neck and had to be carefully removed. It left a pretty bad scar, but has healed ok. The volunteers at OPP were able to find a great home for the dog and now she is living in the lap of luxury.

So that made me think… how can I make things stand out… and what kind of world are in that animal neglect with a happy outcome is not noteworthy? What could make us different? What would be noteworthy? How can I present what we do in a new and interesting way?

Technorati tags: animal rescue, public relations, non-profit