Full gallery after the jump

Winner after the jump

Today I leave the best job I ever had, and that counts a brief stint at Trader Joe's where I tried to get health care after knocking over several cases of Two Buck Chuck with my ass. As asst. managing editor at Washington City Paper for the past two and half years, my job has been mostly plumbing, behind the walls, keeping things running without a nasty backup. But one cannot be merely a plumber and still be employed at an award-winning alternative weekly decimated by its ownership in the digital age. One has to blog.

I know all of you loyal City Desk readers have been following my posts with great vigor. And, so, as my parting gift to you, I give you the highlights of my tenure here (critters, baking, dudes living in their basements, Michael Phelps, D.C. brunch culture [FYI: It still sucks], and did I mention Michael Phelps?), as well as a super sappy goodbye.

First, I want to thank all of the commenters who agree with me regarding Sarah Palin and her inferiority to owls. Because do you know what? Owls are awesome and Sarah Palin is not. I stand by my original post. If you like that one---and so many of you did---I would encourage you to please check out my ongoing reportage on critters, including the saga of Lucy the Ninja Dog, ways coyote piss can rid this city of rats, and the adorable cuteness of this bedbug-sniffing beagle.

There were also a number of you who could not hold back the love when it came to my take on brunch. For the record: I am not leaving D.C. because of my hatred of its brunch culture. But it never entered the plus column. And, although I continue to believe what I wrote, I recently discovered that the city I am moving to has a "jazz brunch." So it seems this paticular sort of suck is not limited to the D.C. metropolitan area. I plan to take down brunch culture in greater Missoula, Mont., in the next incarnation of my career, so stay tuned.

And, unlike this guy, I do plan to have a career that takes me very far away from both my parents' basement and Brazillian "game." Thanks, Roosh V, for the memories.

But if my life as a brunch-taker-downer falls flat, I can always fall back on my many successes as a baker. I just don't know if the Marcello Goldberger Brown Sugar Chocolate Chunk Cookie will have a wider audience.

I do know that I have had the opportunity at City Paper to work with amazing, talented, tough people who make me laugh and challenge me as a journalist and who made me love my job. Among them are the above gentlemen, pictured hanging out in my old cube: Joe Eaton, Jason Cherkis, and Darrow Montgomery. I especially want to thank my bosses, Andrew Beaujon and Erik Wemple. I have never worked for finer people. I now join a cast of alumni who've left reluctantly, realizing it probably doesn't get any better than this.

Looking back on my work here, it's possible that blogging may not have been the strong suit for an old gal who started in newsrooms that didn't have Internet, but I didn't come here to become a great blogger.

I came here to be a part of something great. And I was. Thank you, colleagues and readers, for all of it.

In a posh hotel in downtown D.C., Dixie, a beagle mix, is sniffing out bed bugs. She can find them in walls, under carpets, and mixed up with cockroaches inside a spinning training device. Mattresses, the most common hiding place for these seed-size suckers of human blood, pose little challenge.

“She only gets fed if she finds a bed bug,” says her trainer and handler, Blaine Lessard, as he reaches into his belted pouch for a piece of kibble.

She seems kinda skinny, I say, and wonder if this incentive-based feeding is providing all of Dixie’s nutritional needs. “Well, these kinds of dogs do run lean,” he counters. And, in truth, Dixie’s perfectly energetic and beagle-like as she follows Lessard’s command---Seek!---to sniff the room’s perimeter.

The hotel room is clean. The bug Dixie keeps hitting on is inside the big wheel sitting on the floor. It spans about four feet in diameter with spokes that end in plastic containers, each of which holds either a bed bug or some other scent-giving item designed to throw Dixie off.

Since she’s trained exclusively on bed bugs her entire life---about nine months---she is rarely, if ever, thrown off. “I have complete confidence in her,” says Lessard, who once witnessed Dixie pointing him to a hotel closet, even though he could find no evidence of a bug. She did the same thing in the room directly above and in another room directly above that one. A technician finally found a relatively small infestation inside the wall.

Dixie’s training began at the Florida Canine Academy before she moved in with Lessard and his family on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Both Lessard and his beagle-mix are in the employ of Western Pest Services, an extermination outfit with 24 offices, mostly in the eastern U.S. The dog is part of Western’s preventive market: If she finds a bug or two, the company’s pitch is that you can nip that problem before it becomes a full-on infestation. If she doesn’t find anything, well, go ahead and go to sleep without waking up with that creepy feeling you’ve got bugs in your sheets.

Her territory covers D.C. and Baltimore, but she’ll go as far as Virginia Beach and Philadelphia. She does need to get fed, after all. Prices start at $300 and go up from there depending on the type of building, how many rooms it has, and how long it takes Dixie’s nose to cover the premises. According to Lessard, she can cover 120 hotel rooms in one day of work.

He says he knows of "maybe one" other bug-sniffing dog in the D.C. region; an Internet search only pulled up Western's dog service. In NYC NY BedBug Dogs says it's been in business for 40 years.

According to Western Pest Services, the customer base here, which also includes hospitals, nursing homes, college dorms, apartment houses, and single-family homes, is starting to pick up. The other uptick comes from the bed bugs themselves. There are simply more of them.

The National Pest Management Association says that since 2000, bed-bug complaint calls have increased 71 percent. Every state and the District has had an outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control, although the CDC doesn’t have an accurate accounting; every municipality handles the problem differently.

In D.C., anecdotal evidence---including the creepy-crawly cover story we ran about bed bugs in Logan Circle and elsewhere---suggests the problem’s getting more serious. In March, the local Dept. of Health organized its first bed bug summit. There's also a Web site to register local infestations.

So what’s happened? Why does this pest now need specially-trained dogs and DOH summits? It’s actually a fairly recent problem. After World War II, the bed bug in the United States was pretty much a nonentity. DDT eradicated it. But DDT isn’t an acceptable pesticide for reasons illuminated by Rachel Carson, among others. As more people traveled the world, bringing back these notorious little hangers-on, colonies grew and they also grew resistant to common treatments.

Nowadays, says Lessard, “if you’ve one or two bugs in a room, you’re done.” And finding one or many? It has nothing to do with cleanliness. Five-star hotels fall victim. OCD clean freaks get them. Once your home's infested, two of the more common ways exterminators will treat your home is with freezing chemicals or heat; a friend in D.C. recently vacated her home so that technicians could blast the place with space heaters. It appears to have taken care of the problem.

One solution not to try? Diesel fuel around the bed. For more about that, read our cover story. Got a solution or a bed bug story of your own? Let us know in comments.

Photographs by City Paper Staff Photographer Darrow Montgomery

I learned that early this morning. Exiting my Petworth abode, I spotted a squirrel scampering pell-mell down a tree across the street. Was he fleeing a jealous mate? Had my roommate's snakes gotten loose?

Neither, it turned out. The squirrel had merely trespassed on a robin's nest, and the robin was not amused. It pursued the frantic rodent down the tree, up the street, through gutters, under cars, and finally onto my lawn, before the squirrel sought asylum within the wooden latticework of my porch.

Home free? Not a whit. Sounds of scuffling indicated that the robin, unflappable, had broken through and was now tormenting a beast three times its size. By the time the ragged combatants emerged, the robin had clamped his beak to the squirrel's tail. A great general flailing ensued; then, mutual retreat. Peace, or something like it, had been restored.

Are the robins particularly mean this year? Do they have ancestral beef with the squirrels? Has anyone seen anything like this before?

Photograph above by photoholic1

From a poster on the Shepherd Park listserv:

"Looks like a Raccoon has nibbled a hole and his/her way into our roof/perhaps attic. We noticed the raised piece of roofing late last week, and today are hearing sounds of activity from the fireplace. Today, a neighbor told my husband he has seen the raccoon scrapping at our roof and on the roof of a house behind ours across the alley. He suspects baby raccoons are, or will be on the scene soon, which as I write might explain the sounds I am hearing now. I need some advice as to who to call, what to do, possible costs involved and any other thoughts on the subject. From the sounds and frequency, coupled with my kids skiddishness, I likely need to move fast on some course of action. I thought I had saved list serv posts seen before on the subject, but don't see any in my saved msg-box, so responses are greatly appreciated!"

Happy Wednesday, D.C.! You might remember City Paper's kind-of-a-big-deal Inauguration Photo Contest, whereby we elicited "dope" photographs from readers across the land. Two weeks later, we announced the winners. Recently, we even decided to send the winners their super-special swag, inspiring fourth-placer Aziz Y. to photograph his pooch in our delightful knit cap (above right). I think Beaujon's was more of a statement, natch (above left)—but hats off to Aziz and his BFF, regardless.

Newsier stuff below the jump.

*In (much) more somber canine news, the Post reports that a District Heights boy is in critical condition after being mauled by a pit bull yesterday morning. Prince George's County EMS said the boy's face and eye wounds are "not considered life-threatening." It's a sad story with a weird twist:

Officer Evan Baxter, a spokesman for Prince George's County police, said county animal control had taken custody of the pit bull. Any pit bulls born after Feb. 3, 1997, are illegal in Prince George's, Baxter said

Anyone know why that is?

*The New York Times has some admirable coverage of the man-trips-over-pet trend. Looks like dogs get the short leash on this one:

The data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that while we sometimes trip over our cats, dogs are the primary cause of pet-related falling accidents.

*Speaking of pooches, Farm Fresh Meat has some thoughts on the Washington Humane Society's fundraiser this past weekend. (His headline, "Val Kilmer To Save Cats And Dogs, Get Drunk," pretty much sums it up.)

*And in this very paper, Jason Cherkis has written an excellent cover story on the March 21 triple homicide in Northeast. Nothing to do with dogs, and definitely not an April fool's joke. Just damn good reporting.

How often do you get to see a dog checking out dog prostitutes? He's like, "Homina, homina: dog prostitutes," and his owner's like, "Oh no you don't," and they're like, "How-how, big boy."

This detail is particularly weird:

Prior to my landlord coming over this morning, an occasion that has happened approximately three times since my husband started renting from her 13 years ago, we decided to pretend we do not have a cat.

My husband got up first and reported to me he put the litter container "in the closet that you can't open without everything falling out." The bag of food he put under the bathroom sink. I then got up and emptied the water bowl and placed it and the full bowl of food in the bathroom cupboard. The litter box conveniently fit under the couch. I then got out the vacuum, attached the hose, and sucked up any evidence of stray litter and known accumulation of cat hair.

My landlord arrived on time, at 9 a.m. Approximately two minutes later she was making a kissy noise in the direction of the cat, whom I had forgotten to hide.

A cleaning crew inadvertently let Lucy, an Australian shepherd/husky mix, loose from her basement apartment in Mount Pleasant. Her owners, Dan Wood and his girlfriend, Sarah Darnell, have since papered D.C. with posters. The posters urge people to call immediately, as "Lucy is shy." But today, 15 days since she started her adventure, Lucy is still still lost.

She has, however, been spotted. The day she got out, she ran through the National Zoo, where, in an image straight out of a Curious George, she was chased out by zookeepers with nets.

Since then, there have been 12 or 13 credible sightings, mostly in Crestwood and around Rock Creek Park. Wood, 33, who is working in D.C. as part of his last semester at Albany Law School, created a Web site, lostlucy.com, that tracks her movements. It includes a Google map, a blog, and adorable pictures (see above) of the dog who loves socks. "When we come home," says Wood, "she's very excited and comes to greet us. Then she'll immediately run to the laundry basket and dig out one of our socks. By the end of the week, we'll have 20 or 30 socks strewn around the living room." As a result, Wood tries to buy like-colored socks, so they're not hard to match come wash time.

The latest sighting---on Tuesday---has Lucy at Davenport Street and Linean Avenue NW, which prompted Wood to blog:

Ninja Dog is just crossing Rock Creek Park, hopping between Forest Hills and Crestwood.  We're on to you, Lucy. Your days of ninjary are numbered.

"A lot of people have called," says Wood in a phone interview. "Half of them are just very nice people asking if we've found her. They'll say...'We're praying for Lucy.'"

If he gets a call that sounds credible, either he or Darnell will try and get there as quickly as possible. But both are working at government agencies and sometimes they can't leave at a moment's notice. Their landlord has gone in their proxy on a couple of tips. "She loves Lucy, too," says Wood.

Lucy was a rescue dog, brought up from a kill shelter in Tennessee by a volunteer at a no-kill shelter in Albany. Wood picked her up on Leap Day 2004, when she was 11 months old. Losing Lucy has been heartbreaking, he says. "That first day, I thought maybe she was just in someone's alleyway smelling garbage. I called and called to her. I didn't think this would go on for weeks."