time for a pizza party

That right there is a Cruzer pizza that was consumed in the back seat of my car. If I would have waited a minute longer to take the photo, there would be no more pizza left. Cruzer is using the Daiya cheese on it's vegan pizzas and it's the best vegan cheese I've tried. Maybe "the best" isn't quite the right descriptor, as I'll continue to use Follow Your Heart and Playfood (if it's ever available again) in certain recipes. Perhaps "most like the gooey, salty, and greasy ass glue found on the kind of low-rent pizzas advertised by people waving signs on street corners during rush hour" is more accurate.

This is the vegan version of the cheese I consumed on pizzas and quesdillas and nachos and carne asada fries and all other sorts of foods I ate in my young pre-vegan life. In other words, the stuff that made me fat. I must tread lightly around this Daiya cheese. It's not health food by any stretch but still better than dairy. I want to have a pizza party with a stack of Cruzer pizzas with extra Daiya cheese and vegan pepperoni, a bunch of 2-liter bottles of root beer, paper cups and paper plates. I never thought I could have a vegan grade-school style pizza party till now.

Figures that the moment I decide to resurrect this blog, I get caught up in other stuff and then don't update. My lack of focus is only partly to blame though as we did get hit with some dog drama that needed some attention.


Got to protect my nose from foxtails

First up, the evil unholy bullshit of foxtails. These insidious, wheat wannabes are the plague of the Western states and in particular my long neglected landscape. I have tried to eradicate these things from my yard with no such luck. My dogs don't spend a whole lot of time outside and the time they do spend is supervised and usually filled with playing ball and visiting through the fence so I never worried too much about it. Then one evening my precious Lilou is sniffing around the apricot tree and the next minute sneezing violently. A trip to the emergency vet, $300, and one groggy dog later it was all over. Seeing the bloody foxtail that was pulled out of my baby's nose sent me on a mission though and I have spent just about every free hour of daylight I have getting rid of foxtails.


I'm going to be up all night

Not long after the foxtail incident, Boots decides he doesn't want to sleep at night. Or be quiet or calm or anything like that. He bounces off the walls, destroys everything in sight, and generally just acts like that naked dude on PCP that was on that COPS episode (it was an early one, had a lady cop, probably in Iowa or somewhere midwest...it's a classic). This batshit behavior occurred right around an earthquake time so that might explain it. So I had two sleepless nights on Boots Watch. We took lots of late night walks and I watched him destroy a few bones and every time I would drift off he would pounce on me and lick my face till I woke up. He's a brilliant dog with tons of drive and an insane pain tolerance, so my watch was as much to protect him from himself as it was to protect the house from him. It was over as soon as it began though and he's back to his gentlemanly, creature of habit self who goes to his crate and arranges his blankets when he's ready to go to sleep.

We also had some good drama, some major progress for our family regarding Buster and Boots but I'll save that for another day.

welcome back

I’m back. Cleaned up some and got rid a few extremely boring entries, finally got a camera (phone) so I can take pictures again. I started this blog as part of a challenge to blog every day and I didn’t even make it through the month, maybe now I’ll do better. And I’ll respond to comments too. The dogs, the food, the life. VeganPitBull. Yay.

Thanksgiving

We don't really believe in Thanksgiving here. Neither of us has much family and all our friends do so usually we just spend the day doing some funny like tearing up our floor while blaring Johnny Cash interviews or watching Reno 911 marathons. We did go to the prix fix or whatever it's called at Madeleine Bistro one year, but we have a sick dog and two cars that are leaking stuff and a fence that needs to be built so we sat that out this year. We kept it cheap and simple at home:

One year as a vegan.

I just hit my one year anniversary as a vegan. Honestly, I don't remember the date exactly but it was sometime a few days before Thanksgiving last year.

It was a number of things that made me decide to finally be vegan for real: not being able to tell the difference between the vegan ice cream and the regular ice cream from Scoops, the way Lilou looked at me when she was getting stitches taken out after being attacked by another dog (who was not a pittie, btw), checking out Vegan with a Vengeance from the library and not wanting to return it to the point that I owed like $15 in fines on it, hating my job and my disgusting fast food freak co-workers and wanting to find an excuse to get out of the Friday pizza meetings, being told that my vegan desserts were better than conventional ones, reading Diet for a New America. All of these things happened within a few weeks of each other and once I made the decision to be vegan, that was that. No turning back. My husband joined me within a month.


It's not just the food (although the food is forking awesome!). It's not just about health (I mean really, look at this blog, look at what I eat, I'd fry my oatmeal if it wasn't so messy!). It's about having all those "I love animals!" feelings I've had my whole life finally mean something. When people ask me why I'm vegan, I don't think I can ever fully get across to them how amazing it feels to live my beliefs and stop being part of a system I think is wrong. It's better than all the jackfruit and vegan cupcakes and the regularity that a high fiber diet brings.


When I went vegan, I was only the mama of one dog--the ever docile half-lab, half-pit Lilou. If I hadn't have gone vegan I don't think I would have adopted the troubled boys, Buster and Bootsy. My veganism and my pitbull life can't be separated. I wouldn't have one without the other. Saying no to the products of pain and suffering isn't a popular thing to do, and neither is adopting a throwaway "dangerous" breed dog. Deciding to not take the easy way out when it came to food only encouraged me to take on the tougher task of two dogs who were headed for the kill room. I sharpen my bullsh*t-fighting skills every day whether it be dispelling some myth about how much protein a person needs or whether pit bulls are good guard dogs or babykillers (the answer is "no" to both). Being vegan makes me a better pitbull mama and being a pitbull mama definitely makes me a tougher vegan.

It's been four months since Bootsy came home with us and I still get weepy sometimes when he accomplishes something new (like waiting patiently at the door and not barking at other dogs in the park) and looks at me with his eager-to-please eyes. The fact that he is here, living and breathing and going crazy for peanut butter, reminds me that you have to take action and change the world yourself. You can't wait for someone else to do it for you, because it ain't gonna happen. I tried to find Bootsy a home, a rescue group, anyone who would take him. I thought that surely someone else would see that he was a dog worth saving. When his time was up, I'm the one who got the call and I was only person standing between him and the euth needle. I can't wait for someone else to do something any more.

You can complain about world hunger, environmental destruction, and animal cruelty and wait for someone else to do something about it or you can take the first step in knocking those things out: go vegan. Choosing to go vegan and then choosing to rescue a pitbull like Bootsy are the most empowering things I've ever done. No matter what else I go on to do in my life, my veganism and my pitbull experience are the foundation. They make me strong, confident, and ready to fight for what's right. They also give me a satisfaction and joy I wish I had found years ago.

Since this is a total talk-about-your-feelings post, I give you a picture of sensitive New Age Buster:

where the magic happens...

My kitchen. Not pictured is the stove, a tiny cabinet with the microwave on top of it, and the four doorways (two of which lead directly into bedrooms).

I broke VeganMoFo

I didn't just skip a day, I skipped a whole week. Terrible.

So starting today, for one week, I'm going to double-post to make up for it.

Why did I abandon VeganMoFo for a whole week? Two things:

I've been spending time gathering signatures (and as of this week, coordinating volunteers for my part of town) for Californians for Humane Farms. We are trying to get a factory farm reform bill on next year's ballot that would effectively ban gestation crates, veal crates, and battery cages. It's a huge deal and will be a huge victory when Californian voters make the right choice in November. However, first we need to get on the ballot and that means collecting 650,000 signatures by February. So if you're a registered CA voter, not only should you find a petition to sign, you should be collecting signatures from your family, friends, co-workers, strangers, whoever!

Also, my dog Bootsy has cancer. A mass cell tumor to be exact. Due to the holiday this week, he will be in surgery next week to remove the tumor and then we will know how far it has spread and what the future looks like for him. It's incredibly sad because this boy has been through so much but we are optimistic. We're still jogging and socializing (he ate with me outside Pure Luck this week and he didn't bark at anyone or freak out...he even made new friends!) and training. He continues to amaze us with his progress.