Your TuesdayNewspaper“Special Edition”, 9/22/26: Destiny Found, Keys Made! + Puppy Finds Forever Home (Help Name That Puppy) + Davina Needs a Truck + Please help Jay Gray find dog “BEAR” missing from 10 Mile area

We want to share a very special Tuesday with you. Someone dropped seven puppies off in the play area at the Mendocino Coast Humane Society. We went over today to meet them and we fell in love and all four of us fell in love with a big little fella with one blue eye and one brown eye! And he with us. His two brudders didnt really cotton to Caesar and Brutus, but he did. The brothers are also 3-4 Month, and also wonderful German Shepherd-Australian Shepherd mixes or maybe German Shepherd- Husky-Labrador.

We are getting a third dog.

At a time of crisis for animals and at the Mendocino Coast Humane Society, which now provides all city services (with compenstaion) and most all county services on the Coast (without compensation). The county closed its shelter, next to the Humane Society with promises to help more here. They have not kept that promise and now the veterinarian the Coast has had since the 1980s is leaving (different vets, but continuous until now). The MCHS has become the defacto spay and neuter place for pretty much the whole county. Mendocino County has a budget for spay and neuter but has no veterinarian and isnt adverising for one. Coast Humane is looking for one. We have attached their brochure.

This might seem a big absurd, but we do have reasons. Brutus is 11 and has incredible vitality and so much to teach. Caesar is so shy at times and so smart and still won’t play ball and is hard to recall still. We figure we will outlive Brutus but he will teach the new guy so much. We figure to outlive Brutus. But if the other two outlive us, they can go to a good home together.

We need your help naming the new dog! We want a Roman name to match the others, thought of Delphi and Destiny and Socrates (all more Greek than Roman) Tiberius, (from the Brutus and Caesar story) Maximus, Augustus, Vespian, Vulcan, Zeus, Poseidon, Hadrian, Gaius, Cassius . Still have Haiku left over, the runner up for Caesar’s name.

Vote for a name or suggest one! No people names for us, so no Marcus or Anthony, good Romans though they were.

The rest of the photos come from today too, another quiet, perfect day in the Paradise we get to call home.

We’ve been talking on the MCN Listserve about my difficulty getting a key made for my 2006 GMC Savana — and another for a new padlock I picked up at Davina’s Yard Sale for my storage unit. Rossi’s couldn’t do it. We figured Mendo Mill surely could with their fancy‑dancy, super‑duper new AI key machine: you put the key in, and it makes a copy without human help. NOPE. The machine crashed, took four minutes to reboot, and when we tried again it still said NOPE. So today we met our Destiny — literally. Destiny, the key wizard at Coast Hardware, took this on as a challenge and whipped out both keys, doing a bit of human John Henry majesty in outdoing the AI. Thanks, Destiny.

Now to Davina Liberty. She needs someone to do a dump run tomorrow! She will pay for it.

She and her family are holding a massive yard sale starting tomorrow (yes, Wednesday) and continuing into the weekend if supplies last. It’s on Forest Lane — the one off Odom — not Forester Lane off Pudding Creek. They’re exhausted from the sheer volume of things they’re sorting through, but it’s very cool stuff: all kinds of birdy things and more coming out of storage. And if you love Stephen King like Lisa and I do, she has every book — most of them first‑edition hardcovers.

Davina is well‑loved in this community. She moved to Washington, then lost her home in a fire. Her mom, Lisa, passed soon after. Lisa was one of my favorite people — she read my Advocate News work closely and wasn’t shy about telling me what she thought. We’d talk at Lee Chinese, and in recent years we had spirited, sometimes exhausting debates about frogs, birds, and whatever else I wrote about, the kind of intensity only two OCD minds can generate. Never personal, though we definitely startled a few onlookers. Davina is struggling with the suddenness of her mom’s passing — a long illness, but no one expected it to end this quickly. She’s trying to turn it into a teaching moment about smoking and about hoarding. Linda is a former smoker and I’m a hoarder myself, so we heard her and took good from what she had to say. If you can help them, swing by around noon tomorrow or anytime until 5. A pizza wouldn’t hurt either.

Text Davina 360-472-6724

A friends celebration for Lisa happens Saturday at Glass Beach with scattering of ashes.

At last Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Judy Martin, Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Humane Society, pressed county leaders to either fund MCHS or present a clear plan for spay and neuter services.

MCHS has been the primary provider of those services since the pandemic, and decades of work have kept the Coast from facing the puppy and kitten overpopulation seen elsewhere. The Coast’s full‑time veterinarian, in place since 1987, leaves in two weeks — with no replacement and a national vet shortage. Martin noted the county has $300,000 budgeted for spay/neuter work but is not seeking a veterinarian.

Her question was blunt: “What is the County’s plan?”

Martin warned that one breeding season without MCHS’s services could set the county back years, affecting both the Coast and inland communities.

She said that if the County will not hire a vet, the funding should go to MCHS, which is already doing the work. And if the County continues providing no services on the Coast, Coastal dog license fees should be directed to MCHS as well.

Martin stressed that nonprofits cannot keep absorbing services the County does not provide.

Her closing message was clear:The County must act now — because in two weeks, this problem becomes very real.