TheBanyanTree: Really long story of my boring day.

[Laura]

I just spent 6 hours, that's right - SIX hours - grooming dogs. My dogs. Not
someone else's dogs, which would have been even worse except that I could
charge money for someone else's dogs. But not my dogs. Which is what I did.
My dogs. And not even all of my dogs. Only two. One of the two dogs took me
a grand total of 15 minutes, start to finish. The other dog, well - she took
a bit longer. 
 
She's a Belgian Shepherd, which means that of her 60 or so pounds, at least
10 is hair. Long, black, thick hair. Hair that after just a day or two,
makes thick, soft, grey layers on my carpet. In the spring, I don't even get
a day or two between vacuumings, I have to do it every day or learn to live
with the fuzzy carpet. So today I bit the bullet, got brave, took the bull
by the horns, threw the saddle on that pony, and decided to groom her. 
 
I dunno what grooming day means at your house, but at MY house it's not a
quick and simple 'throw the dog in the tub, scrub her, towel her off, hooray
we're done' kinda day. To start, I had to move the van out of the garage,
and park it in the driveway to keep the spousal unit from trying to pull his
car into the garage when he got home. Then I got the sawhorses out, and set
up two tables there in the garage. The grooming arm with the noose went on
one table, and the grooming bag, dryer, and clippers went on the other table
 I decided I wasn't going to mess with hunkering down on the driveway to
wash dogs today (I'm gettin' a little too old for that kinda stuff), so I
had to clean off the patio table, which is iron mesh, and drag it out into
the driveway. Then I moved the grooming arm onto the mesh table to hold the
dogs still while I washed them. 
 
Back to the grooming kit to find all the washing stuff. Bottle of this
shampoo, bottle of that shampoo - ooh, forgot I had that one, I'll get it
too - bottle of conditioner, bottle of ear wash, bottle of ear flush. Big
blue rubber scrubbie. By now all of the dogs have taken to hiding in the
corner of the deck, as far away from the bath stuff as is physically
possible. 
 
Shilo first (she's the Belgian).  There's a special technique I learned from
a groomer friend for getting soap down into the thick undercoats. You squirt
Dawn (yes, the dish soap - they use it to clean wildlife after oil spills)
in a stripe down the middle of the back, then blast it with the shower
setting on the hose handle. The blast pushes the soap down through the guard
hairs, right into the undercoat! Works like a charm. I only had to lather
her once, but then I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed to loosen the dead
hairs. Rinsing took several minutes. I got a bit much of the soap on her,
but by golly, she was CLEAN when I got done!! 
 
I let her jump off the table and run around the driveway (where she promptly
left me a big pile - sheesh, you'da thought she hadn't been let out for a
week!!) while I did Ziggy the Papillon. Two minutes for Zig, squirt, splash,
scrub, splash, all done. Since Shilo was still dripping water, I decided to
go ahead and dry Ziggy. That took another 10 minutes. Papillons don't have
any undercoat to speak of, so they dry really quickly. I brushed him lightly
 and let him into the dog yard. 
 
Another look at Shilo, who was still dripping water from that horrible (but
beautiful) undercoat made me almost give up the whole endeavor. I had
already decided to clip her down because two inches of coat is way easier to
brush out than 5 to 8 inches of coat. So, I got her up on the table and
started in on her with the force dryer. Hair started flying everywhere. I
stopped to get a mask out of my kit, and put it on. The only trouble with
the darn masks is that everytime I breathe out, I fog up my glasses. That
got annoying after a few minutes, so off came the mask. 
 
I got her dry enough to start trimming after about 30 minutes. I put the one
inch comb over the clipper blade, and started getting the longest hair off
of her. That worked great for the topcoat, but once I started in on the
undercoat, the comb kept getting stuck in the fur. I got the undercoat rake
out, and started raking her out. Hair, hair, hair, and more hair. I was
standing knee deep in it, and no, I'm not kidding. I got tired of the raking
 and tried the clipper again. No go. Still too much undercoat. I got mad. I
put the 1/4 inch comb on the blade, thinking that it was that much less comb
to get stuck. WRONG. I never got any hair off of her with that comb. So I
decided to bathe her again, and see if now that she had been blown out and
brushed, any more of that dead coat would come out. 
 
BINGO!! The hair was rolling off of her after the second wash. Cutting that
length off of the guard coat made all the difference in the world. I'll have
to remember to do a pre-clip next time. I started out with the one inch comb
again, but I didn't like the way the hair was looking, so I switched to the
1/2 inch comb. That was the magic number. Because of the way her hair lies,
I had to keep combing it backwards with the pin brush, then quickly running
the clippers over the hair while it was standing up to get it to look even.
I musta done that a hundred times over her back and withers before I
realized the reason it wasn't looking even was because I kept cutting the
same little puffs of cut hair over and over! The humidity was very low today
 which is nice because it helps the dogs dry faster, but bad because any cut
hair statics itself to the nearest object - the dog, my glasses, the clipper
 my lips (ick!). Once I figured that out, I used the force dryer to blow the
little puffs of cut hair off of her, and Voila!, her fur looked nice and
even. 
 
Then I had to trim her feathers, bloomers, and ears with the scissors. All
of those things tend to have fur growing in every or any direction, and one
slip of the clippers will result in a gouge, either in the fur or worse, the
skin! After all the trouble I'd gone too, an emergency trip for post clipper
stitches didn't really appeal to me for some reason. 
 
The scissoring didn't take as long as I thought it would. I think poor Shilo
was fairly comatose by then, she never even tried to pull her feet away from
me as I scissored her feathers. Once I finished with the scissoring, I blew
her off again with the force dryer, and after a quick brush out of her tail,
she was done!! 
 
She was *very* happy to be off that table for good. 
 
I still had to clean up and put away all the stuff, but after half an hour
or so, I was finished even with that. While I had been messing around with
the scissoring, one of the boys had made brownies, so I grabbed a couple of
those and headed for the shower. 
 
I am always surprised at the amount of dog hair that manages to penetrate my
long t-shirt and jeans and stick to my skin. When I remember the volume of
tiny little cut pieces of hair floating around in the air, I figure I'm
gonna be hackin' up hairballs for a few days. 
 
And that's the short story long, of my boring day. 
 
I was gonna put before and after pictures up on my web site so any of you
who were even more bored than I was today could go look, but insight is
apparently having a cow, and I can't get access to any of my pages. Bummer. 
 
Wolfie 
wolfljshus at insightbb.com