Id like to introduce myself and a yellowish friend of mine. I am Maria Goodavage, and the open-mouthed guy next to me is Jake. We are thrilled to be a new part of the Dogster family. We’ll be taking over where the wonderful Horst, Lisa, and Bo left off with the For the Love of Dog blog, and sniffing out the very best dog news, features, photos, and videos for you and the dog in your life.
A little about us: I (the human) am the founder of The Dog Lovers Companion travel guidebook series, and author of The Dog Lovers Companion to California and The Dog Lovers Companion to the San Francisco Bay Area. I started writing these books back in the dark ages, when dogs were barely allowed to set paw in most hotels. I wrote them almost out of necessity, when I was a correspondent for USA Today, and growing tired of sneaking my old dog Joe into hotels with me when I was on assignment. Its heartening to see how times have changed.
Among my other canine credentials, I co-produced and wrote an award-winning childrens video about dogs and other animals, starring the voice of Ed Asner as Joe the Dog, and I was the executive producer of The Canine Film Festival in San Francisco. Im currently the editor of MyWires WeeksBest Dogs, bringing together the most interesting dog news of the day. Im also in charge of a bunch of headstrong canines who pen a fun blog called Dog Daily News. (We’ve been having technical difficulties accessing the blog, so we’re not as up to date as we’d like to be. We’ll be resolving this soon.)
Jake is a yellow Lab kind of fellow who walked into my life exactly seven years ago today when he was a very vivacious six months old. My husband, human child, and I planned to foster him for a couple of weeks to fill in the empty hole left by the death of our old dog. Hah! As soon as I laid eyes on him, I knew there was no way he was ever going up for adoption. Jake is now a middle-aged gent, and is slowly giving up his more youthful habit of chewing utterly everything he can get his mouth around. Now hes down to the occasional rubber flip-flop when we have company and he wants to impress.
We live two blocks from the beach in San Francisco. Heres a video Jakes human sister just posted as part of a video contest Steve Martin is putting together for his banjo song, Wally on the Run. This short video will tell more about Jake than I could in 1,000 words. (Note that older computers and slower connections may make the video look less than optimal. Jake made me write that warning in case you think he is a large grainy mass who stops and goes in mid-air while he runs about.)
We are excited to be part of the fantastic Dogster community, and look forward to getting our paws wet in the wonderful world of Dogster! (This should be a natural for Jake, as you can see in the video.)
