New Job and Puppy Play

First things first: Nick has a new job. He starts on Monday at GageIn. They're a marketing company that keeps tabs on lots of large companies, compiling information about them and distributing it via social media to those that want to know. Nick will be entering companies' aliases into the database and running a side by side comparison between GageIn and Google to see who produces better and more useful information about the Forbes top 1000 companies. It's a new company, and they want to entice people to use their search instead of using Google to get fast information about how a company is doing. We're pretty excited to have 2 employed people now (or at least I am).

So I have a lot of videos of the puppy. Kind of an overload, but she's just so cute. The first is a large group of dogs at the park. We recently found out that there is a park a few blocks away behind the high school. It allows for dogs to be off-leash every morning from 6-7:30, but after 5pm I'm told they tolerate it. Supposedly they ticket at all other times. Anyway, we found a pretty great group of dogs that were all very good with Echo. The adult Shepherd is Max, who we've met before. And there is even a bulldog, Uncle Dan! Also, I've met 3 black lab chow mixes this month.Click here for puppy play. Here is a very short video of Echo trying to herd Max. Click here.

The third video is her training at 4 months old. She is now 31.5 lbs, fully vaccinated, with her rabies vaccine too, and she's on heartguard and flea and tick prevention. Her training is going very, very well. Her "stay" (at least in the house) is quite good. Can't get her to sit up on her back legs, though. Click here.

Here is a video of why she doesn't often get to play with a ball inside. Click here.

The latest dog-friendly in SF meet we went to was awesome. There is a location in the city called SoMa StrEAT food park. It's a block full of food trucks. There were probably 10-ish trucks.

We're told that the trucks change everyday. I had some organic chicken apple sausage (very California of me, don't you think?). I asked if that was like a brat (meaning is it a sausage on a bun), and the guy gave me a pretty snooty look and said, "It's nothing like a brat. It's chicken, organic, healthier and..." that's where I cut him off and asked "does it come on a bun. He also lectured me for asking him to leave off the sauerkraut and onions because that was boring. Anywhoooo, it was good. Nick got BBQ ribs from a different truck, and he said those were pretty extraordinary for a food truck. We'll have to go back because it was a really cool place to just get some food and hang out with dogs and friends. We also heard that there is an even better location for food trucks that we plan to check out sometime. A really nice young lady in the group recently got a German Shepherd mix puppy named Cedar. The first time we met her, Echo and Cedar looked very similar. Two weeks later, Echo had grown quite a bit more than Cedar. Despite being a month younger, and quite a bit smaller, Cedar was more on the offensive than Echo. Here is a video of them playing at StrEAT food park. Click here.

Last weekend we went to a monthly meeting for a group of people who all own Genesis Coupes (our car).  Nick is part of the Facebook group, so we decided to go meet every one. There were probably 30 people there, and everyone brought their cars in different stages of the modification process. Anywhere from cars that had just left the showroom floor, to cars that had fully rebuilt engines pushing more horse power than some Ferrari's. This meet actually had a purpose other than just hanging out: a lot of the members were getting custom tunes from a tuner who flew in from New York. Basically, what this means is the cars are put on a dyno ( like a treadmill for cars) and tested to see how much horsepower they have. Then the tuner tweaks everything about how the car works using a computer, in order to make it faster. Some people were getting 40 to 50 hp gains (ps that is alot!). Nick already had our car tuned a couple weeks before, but it was still fun to watch the other cars make their dyno runs, and meet some new people. It also made Nick want to buy lots of new parts for the car after seeing how awesome some of the other cars were. I was not a fan of this...haha.

This is our engine

Hope you all have a great Easter weekend. Here's our Easter Bunny:

P.S.- These pics were harder to get than you could ever imagine. She thought the ears were a chew toy