Wow! Things are incredibly crazy around here and in such a good way it's hard to complain. As an example let me just tell you that I woke up really early this morning for our trial surgery day with a planned 4 surgeries and two added on. Michael got home and into bed right as my alarm went off at 5:30am. We've been pulling a crazy schedule to get these things done but it does look like we'll make our Crepes Suzette opening day!

Our beautiful new sink

Ok, to start with we had our final plumbing inspection last week and I did not have any verification that the sink had been certified. Apparently sinks can be made all over the world, especially China and are not certified for safety. NOT ok in a business. We emailed the company we got it from who emailed the supplier and no licensing or certification. I had a hard time finding that sink and now I was faced with finding another. Not only did it have to be certified, it had to be the right size to fit the faucet that was already on the wall AND it had to be in stock locally because we wanted the plumbing inspection in 2 days in the morning so the final inspection could be that same afternoon! Talk about pressure. Well, I went around a few places and was having trouble finding anything. Finally I remembered A Ball on W. Burnside near where we used to live. They were so wonderful there. She had 4 certified vessel sinks in stock and started telling me the colors over the phone. When she got to gold...I rushed right over! The size was perfect - even better than the red sink and I must tell you, it looks great! (Even better than the red sink!) So it was put in the next day and we passed plumbing inspection the following day. Whew!

Then it was final inspection a few hours later. Our same framing inspector came out (the one that wanted us to insulate over our beautiful exposed fire brick!)  Well, it was interesting. There were some pretty big scary moments around our oxygen tank. There were all sorts of safety precautions they were talking about us putting in. A single sprinkler run to the back, venting the space - that would have been impossible! We'd have to go through 2 floors or into someone's backyard and we would not be opening anytime soon! Luckily, our Hazards inspector got things straight and we don't need to do the sprinkler or the venting but for some reason, unlike any other veterinary hospital in the area, we need to build a room for the oxygen and nitrogen tanks. It really is the best of all of the options for us and our framer, Derek built the room yesterday with a fire rated door. It looks really funny - we're talking about putting a welcome mat in front of the door.

Puddy - our first surgical patient!

And then, my friends, there was the trial surgery day I was talking about earlier. What a day! Not only passing my husband like ships in the...well...morning but not even anticipating all of the craziness that could happen that day. Both Katie, our veterinary nurse, and I arrived early. She got to the clinic at 6:30am because we were expecting an emergency early shipment of our pain medication and anesthetics that wouldn't be there until later in the afternoon originally. Ok, I did order everything in advance BUT things got a little weird at corporate because my originally shipping address for the distributor was to my home. A big no-no for controlled drugs! They had been sending all of my things lately to the clinic so how should I know that I needed to check on that?! Anyway, they came early. Our kitty patients had stayed the night and were there. We went to get started and realized that I forgot to order the preanesthetic profiles we needed to run bloodwork on them ahead of time. Oh yeah, no artifical tears either and the sterile water for the antibiotics (if we needed them) was on back order. There were other issues that I just can't bore you with right now. I took a trip over to visit my friends at Rose City Veterinary Hospital and they were nice enough to loan us some things. Granted, I didn't know about the eye ointment at that time and needed to take another of many trips out to Walgreen's. (I'm on a first name basis there now!). While at Rose City I picked up 2 more strays that needed spaying and neutering - that is 6 surgeries total on a day when we were discovering we didn't have everything that we needed!

To make a long story short, we ended up doing 3 of the surgeries and will pick up the rest next week. We definitely were ambitious even with the 4! Between using new equipment and discovering the things we needed and didn't have it was a long day with just doing 1/2 of them! But I can tell you, for as stressful as it was we are all grateful to have had this trial run with these shelter animals - they received services for free and we got the chance to run through our surgery protocols before we open. 

Friday we are doing a trial appointment day with friends and family and final inspection should be the day before we open! - I'll keep you posted.