NEIGHBORS : A Furry Tale : Animal grooming in Simi Valley is a warm and fluffy affair.
Hot dogs, get your hot dogs (and warm cats too). The folks at Betty Reeder’s Grooming of Simi Valley have found an efficient way to dry pets after a washing--just pop them in the dryer.
“The dryers look like big cages. They have wire stainless steel bottoms that forced air goes through,” said Manager Emmajane Valko. “We don’t tumble the animals dry.”
The shop has two of these Pet Dryers, purchased from Doggie Products of America for the sale price of $900 each. Valko said the dryers are large enough to accommodate two cats or a large dog. “I got a husky in there. And I got a Newfoundland in there,” she said. “It was about 150 to 180 pounds. And he went in on his own accord, I must say.”
So how hot does it get inside the dryer? “I don’t have the figures,” Valko said. “It’s warm enough to dry them, but it’s not really, really hot--they aren’t panting.”
Speaking of animals: Vickie Hodson and her husband Richard Slothower of Ojai will be getting into humane mail order.
Just in time for the holiday season, the couple will make available a line of leather-free accessories, which they will publicly unveil at the Living and Giving Cruelty Free Holiday Faire on Sunday at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.
“We’ll be selling belts and purses, and we hope to expand and have shoes,” Hodson said. “I’ve seen that there is a real need for this with people who are involved with animals. If they don’t believe in eating them, they don’t really want to wear them.”
Remember Helle Scharling-Todd, the artist who wants to make Ventura more colorful? Well, she’s not alone. Bernard Tamborello, an urban designer in the city, has some ideas of his own. “I just want to get the community involved, get them excited,” he said. So what does he think will do the trick? How about clowns. Tamborello would like to see “a permanent home and school for circus performers at the Ventura Fairgrounds,” like those in Moscow, which are open to the public. For further excitement, with an international twist, Tamborello said he’d also like to see Ventura buses take on the look of the English variety. “Paint all existing city buses bright red and have black seats inside. Acquire bright red double-deck English buses.”
Marla Hanson, the New York model whose face was disfigured in a 1986 mugging, will be the featured speaker at the Women’s Health Forum on Saturday, sponsored by Charter Hospital of Thousand Oaks.
Since her recovery, Hanson has been involved in seeking legislation on victims’ rights. “She’ll talk about women being perceived as the victims in our culture by the bad guys, and how we can psychologically arm ourselves,” spokeswoman Terri Mandell said. “And she’ll talk about recovery.”
The forum will last from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and will feature workshops on a number of mental health issues including self-esteem, depression, anxiety and domestic violence. The event coincides with the start of the hospital’s Genesis program, an in-patient psychological service for women. For information about the forum call 495-3292.
The third week of November is being billed as National Children’s Book Week by--no big surprise--the Children’s Book Council Inc. Well, an occasion is an occasion, so we called up a children’s book author.
Ventura resident M.V. Carey is the author of mystery books for the Three Investigators series, Little Golden books, comics and film adaptations (including “Gremlins,” which made the New York Times Best-Seller list.) She worked with Disney books for 15 years and has free-lanced for 21.
So how has children’s book writing changed over the years? “Today’s children may have a broader base of general knowledge because of television,” Carey said. “But they also may have tunnel vision because of television.”
Her most recently completed story: “It’s about little girls, which is kind of a change for me,” she said. “It’s not about ducks or bunnies or any of those things. It’s about a little girl who saves a little boy.”
