Well, today, Saturday, when I went to the shelter to work, I knew that all the dogs were inside due to the newest flood. I even knew that there were new dogs that came in that had to housed in crates, because we didn’t have any pens open. But even knowing all of this, when I opened the shelter door, after removing the sandbags, I felt despair, a feeling of almost hopelessness. In my 5 years of working at the shelter, I never had that feeling before. It was awful of almost not knowing what to do. Do we go ahead and clean the outside pens, knowing it just might flood again tonite? The grounds are so wet, and it is starting to rain again, do we try and walk the dogs, giving them some time out of the cramped pens?

Thank goodness, our wonderful volunteers showed up just then. I wasn’t alone, taking on the world of the shelter. We made a plan to walk all the dogs, take them to the outside muddy pens for extra time with Kelly, then back inside to their clean pens and some breakfast.

The day worked as planned and I even had time to give an interview after Debbie did hers for Channel 7 the Redding News station who came to do a story about our flooding and the shelter. We even got the pens cleaned up again, and the junior volunteers frolicked in the ‘parking lot pond’ before heading home.

Boy what a morning!! Here are some pictures of our day.

See ‘Volunteer Voices’ Kelly’s blog for what she thought of the day. Our volunteers are Kelly, Jean, Taylor, Diane and Alexis.