RECORD STORE TALES Part 280:  Record Store Gallery III – Furry Friends

I’m a sucker for furry friends.  Who isn’t?  Maybe you’re a cat person, maybe you’re a dog person, or something else!  I mentioned a few weeks ago that Kitchener has a high population of Miniature Schnauzers, and the Ladano clan have owned quite a few of those.

This first picture is kind of a sad one.  The year is 2000, and that’s me and my first puppy, Crystal aka Gozer.  (That’s what happens when you let my dad name animals.)  Crystal was a great little friend but very sick.  She went blind in ’94 and had all kinds of health issues.  This picture of us is the last photo taken of her.   I remember the day we had to put her down, I had to work an afternoon shift at T-Rev’s store.  T-Rev was out of town building a new store, and I was filling in for him as I occasionally did.  It was not the happiest shift to work.

However life goes on and a year later we got Ani!  Ani can be a bad little puppy sometimes, but she’s been my best furry friend for a long time now.  Unfortunately Ani suffers from a lot of the same health issues that Crystal did.  However she’s been a resilient little Schnauzer and has outlived her life expectancy by numerous years already.  And seemingly happily too.  Which is the main thing.

I brought Ani into the store one afternoon when I was off.  She was so good, a little scared though.  But she stayed quiet and didn’t try to escape, which she often does!  Customers would occasionally bring their dogs into the store, and I never had a problem with it.  Nobody pooped or peed on the floor when I was there.

Finally, I bought my own place and got this guy to go with it.  This is Zoboomafoo, a leaping lemur from a hit Canadian kid’s TV show.  It was on every morning before work and I started getting obsessed with it.  One of our store managers, a girl who worked in Cambridge, spotted a Zoboomafoo puppet at the Cinema One store there.  They only had one, and both of us wanted it!  It was a race to see who could get it first.  Needless to say, I won!