28 MarGoodbye to our Third Avenue dog training studio
Our Indiegogo campaign is going gangbusters. Thanks for everyone who has reached out!
If you don't know about your campaign, here's the deal in a nutshell: We lost our dog training studio (and my apartment) in a big fire three months ago. We're now looking to move the biz to a new (bigger! better!) location, and are crowdsourcing funding to help us get us there.
You dig?
If you're following the campaign because you love puppies, then please head over to Gizmodo to check out our new Spring Gift Guide. (Our dog training business supports our blogging habit.) Or go ahead and donate a $1, and you can get our $1 perk: A cute picture of a puppy emailed to your inbox. There are a lot of puppies on the Internet. Let us curate for you!
Not into cute dogs? Then you must be following this campaign because you love stories of things destroyed by fire! Well, then, read on.
On Wednesday I went back to our old studio to sort the salvageable debris from the charred holy-crap-I-have-no-idea-what-that-object-used-to-be debris.
As you probably have never seen what a dog training studio looks like at 1000 degrees, I thought I'd share some pics.
We often recommend people give their dogs bully sticks. (Guess what they're made out of!). Normally they look like cigars. This one ended up looking like… a dilapidated kitchen cabinet handle?
This is Amos' portrait by my dad.
Here is what it looked like when dad did it in 2011.
My sister's pet portraits.
Dog training storage. Yikes!
But look what survived! A drawing my bestie made for me. It had been on the door. Survived a firefighter boot.
Also, an illustration my dad did in the 90s for the cover of The New York Times book review.
Here are two of of our Assess-A-Hands. We still have two… But one is really creepy.
Melted pushpins, burned student pics.
We used to give buttons to reward dogs and humans for achievements.
Hey, look what made it through! Our friend Alex gave us these — he found them in a second-hand store and gave them to me because he thought we could use them as socks for dogs.
Soot-caked clickers. No amount of soap would get these things clean.
A peanut butter-filled condiment bottle.
We had two red battery-operated plastic candy dispensers that we used sometimes for dispensing dog treats.
This is what they looked like on the shelf after the fire:
A former Tricky Treat ball, before and after.
Here is what the whole scene looks like, three months post-fire.
If you're a damage junkie, we could go on and on. But we won't. We managed to sort things pretty well and now just need to get some movers to get stuff out of there. Sad to say goodbye, but packing and scrapping felt like a good step towards putting this behind us. Huge thanks to my friends Keith, Eva, Wendy and Alex for helping sort through the ashes. Your assitance was huge.
x
Annie
