Well... the old doghouse celebrates it first birthday on June 1. Let me put the Sherri Lewis imitation aside for just a moment and digress.

First I'd like to say I have had much fun trying to entertain to our the visitors over the past year. I've received (or should I say Nick & Rudy have received) many kind notes from folks telling us that they enjoyed the site. And it is always a treat to read a note about how we made someone smile or gave them a chuckle that day. So to our visitors... we'd like to say a BIG THANKS for being a such great audience.

Schnauzer Lane was conceived one evening back on May 31, 1997. While surfing (dog sites of course) I just happen to stumble acrossed a geocities site and the "Free Home Page" at the bottom caught my eye. So I thought hmmm... why not, I got this scanner and a couple of photos. So I worked into the wee hours scanning photos, writing a little story and figuring how the heck HTML worked and how to move into geocities!! Well by 3:00 a.m. I had a page online (as lame as it was). The name "Nick & Rudy's Schnauzer Lane" was derived from being a geocities site and from being up all night. It probably could have easily turned out to be "Nick & Rudy's Schnauzer Avenue" (I was stuck on thinking about names to do with addresses within a city... get it "geocities"... what can I say it was 3:00 a.m.)

Well as you might have guessed, many hours have been poured into this site since that first night. In fact about a month after putting the site up, we ended up installing a second telephone line, because everyone complained that the phone was always busy!!

Over the past year I've had alot of fun putting up our silly holiday pages. But I must say my personal favorite was the first one, the Halloween Page, "The Tail of Frankenschnauz". Heck before the internet, I only got to send out silly Christmas cards to friends and relatives!

Besides all the fun, the site has developed a serious side. As I've tried to educate pet owners on issues like petstore pets and puppy mills, as well as trying to promote pet adoption (you might have guessed it, Rudy inspired me). And at the beginning of this year I started a BBS site called "The Schnauzer Rescue Message Board" which am happy to say has help facilitate many schnauzer rescues.

But amongst all the seriousness... we must never forget to have fun and to just plain enjoy our fur buddies. Now as Nick & Rudy would say... give that fur buddy of yours a Milkbone for goodness sakes!!

Once again... thanks for being a great audience and allowing me to stroll down memory lane.   I hope I haven't bored you too much... now if you haven't already go check out Nick's Father's Day Dedication for some fun... while I slip back into my Sherri Lewis costume!

Well... ok thought I'd let you have a quick glimpse of the 2-leggeds. Left is Nick & Rudy's dad (AKA Charlie) and right is me, the mom (AKA Mary), and that's Jamie and Nick. The picture is a little dated so its before Rudy's time. But it was the only one with us as a family. As you can see I am not beyond wearing a hat myself!