Things con­tinue to go well with Rita Mae’s adjust­ment to her “forever home” (as they like to call in in pet rescue cir­cles). In fact, the only member of the house­hold that RM seems to have an issue with is the vacuum. I’ll let the footage do the talk­ing on this one:

Things con­tinue to settle at the house. Lewis is now com­fort­able laying down in the same room as RM. And, in a major break­through, Lilah actu­ally walked within 5 feet of Rita Mae. She still won’t set down any­where near her, but we’re hoping in time for a cool detente between the two

So admit­tedly, we’re being those new pooch par­ents and taking lots of pic­tures. You can see the grow­ing amount at my flickr account. What’s great for me is that this has been giving me an excuse to start really explor­ing some new tech­nolo­gies for cap­tur­ing, man­ag­ing, and stor­ing pic­tures. Here are a couple “must haves”:

• Shozu
  It’s a mobile phone appli­ca­tion that allows easy upload of pic­tures and video to social media sites like Flickr. What’s really cool about it is how it han­dles meta data. Not only can you add titles, tags, and cap­tions on the phone, but if you have GPS enabled (like on my phone) it will grab the geo-​coordinates and wrap them into the meta­data as well. Which means that Flickr (and other ser­vices) can imme­di­ately place them on a map. That’s par­tic­u­larly useful for later encod­ing geo-​coordinates onto other pic­ture take in the same loca­tion using cam­eras with­out a GPS feature.
• Adobe Light­room
  Where have you been all my life? This is hands down the best Photo Man­age­ment Soft­ware out there. Between its orga­ni­za­tion capac­i­ties, the non destruc­tive retouch­ing, and the meta­data cool­ness, I can do about 90% of what I nor­mally need to do with Pho­to­shop in Light­room. And its faster and more orga­nized. It also has, thanks to web folks out there, solid Flickr inte­gra­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, I had to loose a lot of pic­tures to Apple Plat­form quirks before I learned my lesson and made the switch.

That’s about it for now. I need to get out­side and start a little gar­den­ing and then work on the HP grant for the OPL.

It’s been a busy 24 hours or so. Yes­ter­day, Dre and I trav­eled to Ithaca to bring Rita Mae home. As I type this she’s laying qui­etly next to Dre.

Every­one is adjust­ing well. Or per­haps I should say as well as we could hope. The cats, when we see them, still are not sure what to make of RM. Lewis is intrigued, but keep­ing a cau­tious dis­tance. Lilah had decided the safest place to be is on the oppo­site extreme of the house, under the largest piece of fur­ni­ture she can find. On the plus side, this used to be her reac­tion to human vis­i­tors – so we’re pretty sure she might one day be ok with being on the same floor (if not the same room) with RM. RM’s fine with the cats. Her tail starts to wag every­time she spots one and she hasn’t shown the least bit of inter­est in chas­ing them.

She loves car rides and was as good as gold on the trip back to Rochester. This morn­ing she went with us to buy a couple extra tod­dler gates — we’re sec­tion­ing of her free roam of the house in hopes of help­ing the cats adjust. She also helped us choose new plants for our gar­dens at Coun­try Way Garden Center.

We’re all get­ting used to this new dynamic and we’re all pleased (we’ll at least us humans) with the new addi­tion to the house. Here’s a Flickr Slide show of pic­tures taken from yes­ter­day (the trip into Ithaca, pick­ing Rita Mae up, and bring­ing her home).

I’m really start­ing to make progress on get­ting my day-​to-​day life under con­trol. There have been a number of great oppor­tu­ni­ties that have recently come my way. Unfor­tu­nately, each of them has required a “drop every­thing you’re doing right now” type of atten­tion to take advan­tage of them. The latest exam­ple was a grant oppor­tu­nity for the OPL from HP Labs. It’s a chance to get some great fund­ing for our work (which is good). It also requires that I shift my atten­tion from help­ing our summer co-​ops with their research (which is bad).

Thank­fully Dre and I haven’t been let­ting these type of upheavals com­pro­mise our well­ness work. We’re avoid­ing going out to eat, are trying to eat more veg­gies, and even have begun run­ning in the morn­ing. I’m even find­ing myself kinda, sorta, liking run­ning in the morn­ing. Weird.

We’re also spend­ing time get­ting the house ready for Rita Mae. We’ve been spend­ing the last few days shop­ping for doggie sup­plies and Dre’s already enrolled her in obe­di­ence courses. We’re still trying to figure out how the cats are going to react to the new member of the house­hold. We’ve asked, but as you can see from this pic­ture, we only seem to get one response…

Quoth Lilah the Cat "No Comment"

Things have been moving fast the last few months. The RIT Inno­va­tion Fest was a suc­cess and has led to a lot of good pub­lic­ity and oppor­tu­ni­ties for the OPL. Then there was the race to grad­u­a­tion and the bit­ter­sweet expe­ri­ence of saying good­bye, for now, to a number of excel­lent stu­dents. And since then there’s been lots of activ­ity at RIT and in our house.

Which leads me to the new addi­tion to our house­hold, a sweet beagle/jack rus­sell mix named Rita Mae:

Dre and Rita Mae taken the day we went down to meet her. 

Dre had wanted to get a dog for quite a while and I finally real­ized what was good for me and got with the pro­gram. So we began to look at local animal shel­ters and at rescue dog sites, trying find an older dog to adopt (nei­ther of us was inter­ested in get­ting a puppy). The key thing was find­ing a pooch that would get along with our cats (as they obvi­ously have seniority).

After a lot of search­ing and having a few dogs adopted before we could meet them, Dre came across <a href=”http://cayugadogrescue.org/ritamae.htm”>Rita Mae</a> and imme­di­ate feel in love with her. Rita was res­cued from a high kill shel­ter in Ken­tucky by a group in Ithaca and has been living peace­ably with other dogs and cats at a foster home.

We finally got to meet Rita Mae in person this past Thurs­day (after a phone inter­view and a home inspec­tion) and there was no doubt she is the dog for us. We vis­ited with her for a couple hours, took her for a walk, saw how she inter­acted with other ani­mals, and got lots and lots of kisses from her. We just got the news yes­ter­day that the adop­tion is a done deal and we’ll be going back to Ithaca on Friday to pick her up!

Need­less to say, we can’t wait to bring her home. So more pic­tures and sto­ries are coming soon.