More Chirstmas Info and New Years Eve Remembered

I promised this in my last post but I'm not sure what I had in mind. Christmas was great, what more can I say? Of course I wish my sister and niece (that would be Claire and Laura) could have been here but that was the only non-perfect part. I was going to post some pictures of my human family members enjoying Christmas but those seem to be on my old SD card which is not where I thought it was. I hope I did not loose it! I got a brand new 16 GB SD card for Christmas. So much room for pictures and videos!

ffluffy came after Christmas to visit and go to agility shows. We showed together on Friday, Sat and Sunday of New Years. Friday was at one venue, under cover, then Sat and Sunday was at a different place, in a field, which is too bad since it poured rain. More on that later.

On Thursday I took the day off to be with ffluffy. We went walking on the road. I didn't bring the camera but of course should have. We departed from the usual plan of just staying on the road, and climbed on the remains of the dam. Dottie would not join us, instead whining at the top. I think she might be afraid of heights. Eventually we made our way down to the bottom, them climbed back up to the spot I had made it to from the top. This route Dottie could join us. With all the rain we've been having there was a very deep pool that the dogs could swim in. They could enter the pool from ground level or from the rock we were sitting on. It was a big drop- maybe 5 feet? Much larger than the drop off the official Dock Diving dock. Fancy was the first in, followed by Pickle. Eventually Pie went in also. Dottie was close, but could not be convinced. All the dogs swam and entered from ground level no problem.

After playing in the water we continued our walk. As we approached the end of the road which is the turn around point, a lone female jogger approached. We gathered the dogs up, I put Dottie on leash and the other 2 in a down and waited for her to pass. As a reminder, this is a National Forest so dogs are allowed off leash but must be under control. I always want people to have a positive experience around off leash dogs, which is why when ever we meet someone we put them on leash or in a down. I expected the lady to pass on by but instead she stopped and told us, "My husband is behind me and he has a pit bull and it fights and is uncontrollable so you need to put your dogs on leash."

Since our dogs were already on leash or under control that was obviously not a problem for us but the description sounded very unsafe. "Is his dog on leash?" I asked, and she responded, "Yes, but he is uncontrollable." To me that sounded like he might drag his owner across the road to attack our dogs- which already happened once on this road- a guy walking 2 boxers on pinch collars was pulled by his dog within inches of attacking distance of our on leash dogs before he was able to heave them away (crazy!) so we opted to turn around there.

I still want to believe in the intelligence of my fellow humans, so instead of being cynical and not being surprised by this encounter, I instead choose to be surprised that someone would choose to walk their "uncontrollable" dog in an area where off leash dogs are legally allowed. Instead I would walk my dog only where the leash law is in effect, and have a basket muzzle on him.

Even though our walk was cut short, it was still fun. I love letting my dogs swim.

On New Year's Eve I was invited to a party! Maybe I shouldn't let it be known that this is a big deal for me. ffluffy and I went and played lawn bowling (my first time) had some good food, and also played wii bowling- also my fist time. I came in second behind ffluffy by 2 points. Not bad, I think! Some of the attendees had a lot to drink so the lawn bowling and wii bowling got very rowdy. I thought it was a great party.

Our host gave us a bottle of wine with 2 GSDs biting a guy wearing a "Vick" jersey and it says- I got my wish for Christmas and I hope you get yours."

The party broke up before midnight- were were warned it would- so we drove home (watching out for drunks) and were in bed before the New Year- which is good since we had to make it to agility the next day.

On New Years Day Kiltman came to join ffluffy and we all ate wonderful traditional honey baked ham at my parent's house.

Happy New Year to everyone! Hope it is a good one!

In 2011 I hope to get Pie and Dottie's SchH one titles, and maybe be certified to enter an AKC tracking test.

Training Flake

I was too lazy to go to Schutzhund training tonight. I'm disappointed in myself, but my dogs are disappointed even more so, with the possible exception of Fancy since all she does is sit in the car.

I wrote a poem about it: (ahem-)

I was too lazy to go to training today-
I stayed home, wishing it was the warm month of May.
Come trial day, every exercise we horribly failed-
And it was all my fault because on training I bailed.

Here is the situation from Pie's point of view-

Today was very boring
My owner was snoring.
We did not do anything fun,
And I did not get to run.
However, it might not be all bad,
I did not have to bite that guy (biting kind of makes me sad.)
Instead we stayed home
And I chewed on a ball and made lots of foam.

(I took the ball away from Pie- foam and all...)

And a gem from Dottie:

Today was bad
No fun to be had.
No biting.
No fighting.
I had my revenge
By being very annoying.

I know that does not rhyme but don't blame me, Dottie wrote it.

And Fancy is too sophisticated to go in for rhyming poetry:

I sit in the car
Alone.
Tears in my heart
But not in my eyes
Then I get some cheese
Or a hot dog bite
and I remember I don't
Like to work anyway
Except if I am bribed with food
and my heart sings with the
Joy of a
Yummy Snack.

Apparently she didn't get the memo we are not going to training. No
yummy snack to make her heart sing tonight.


Was this really a good use of my time? I really should have gone to training!

Coming up next time- more Christmas info, New Years Eve remembered and Pie Mach News!

A Good Dog Walk

On our favorite "road" on the day after Christmas, but I am being lazy and only posting a link to the pictures.

But now I remembered I am on my parent's faster network so I've posted many of the pictures here after all.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=58264&id=100000152104007&l=3f72567e88

Here are a few of the best.

Dottie blends in.

Mom declares the mountain off level.

Pie jumps across a broken section of the road. Her tongue gets out of control.

Dottie jumps over and into a bush. Typical.

Fancy shows us all how it should be done.

Pie on the right. Mom and me in the middle. Dottie's tail on the left. But not Dottie's head. Maybe Molly's head?!

Synchronized dog swimming. New titling class!

Fancy the 2.5 legged wonder dog.

This off leash walking spot in in a Nat. Forest so it is legal to have your dogs off leash. However, it is easily accessible so it is becoming more and more popular. Our dogs are good and don't bother people, but when ever we see others we put them on leash to reassure the other people. As it becomes more popular, it is more unpractical to walk off leash there. Which is too bad because especially with the water, it is a great spot.

Christmas 2010

Another Christmas come and gone! Had good times with my family.


First, we went to mass on Christmas Eve. My 2 brothers behind me.




Wearing my cape for pictures after wards.


The whole family that still lives in CA.



Pie posing with a bow on her tail.

Onto Christmas morning!


Dottie opening her present.


Pie almost ate her's with the wrapper on. I had to help.


Fancy carried hers around warped up until I helped her out.


My youngest bro, Dad and I went to see True Grit. It was good. My dogs waited for me to come home. Pie amused herself with her new toy, but Fancy apparently lay facing the front door until my Mom locked them up elsewhere.


My older younger bro got my dogs small rawhide bones. Fancy refused to eat hers, claiming it was too small. I supervised the Mals and they ate theirs carefully. Even if they had swallowed them whole, they are so small I don't think they would cause any problems.



Three dogs on the new toy.


Pie and Dottie. This isn't really a tug toy. It has lost a limb to Pie's chewing already. (While I was at the movie.)


Pie posing with the Mal Rescue Calendar I bought my Dad as a present.


Fancy posing with Dottie's new training dumbbell.


One brother got a Kinect and you have to move around while playing it. Dottie thought he was playing with her.


You can see a video of Dottie and I practicing with the dumbbell here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrRBuSLNB9Q

And here is Fancy pestering my Mom to play with her:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVXpIoTpFeg

And finally, Fancy being "vicious" while tugging.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsGfOGvFMc8

I Got a Puppy For Christmas!!

Just what I always wanted!

Actual Conversation With A Co-Worker...

I posted this to the Belgian list, but it really did happen today so I wanted to share it with non-Belgian people also.





















The Crime


One of my non-dog owning co-workers asked me, "What are you going to do with your dogs when you go away for 2 months?" Then, because he enjoys pestering me, he volunteered, "I’ll watch them."

I knew he wasn't serious but played along, because if I don't he'll sulk and continue to bother me anyway. "I don’t know that you would survive watching my dogs," I told him tartly.

(I have a four year old Malinois, a year and a half Malinois and a Tibetan Terrier who doesn't like you until she knows you. Not horribly difficult, but they do seem to baffle and exasperate non-dog people. But back to the story at hand...)

He was indignant at the thought that I believed watching my dogs was something that would be difficult for him. This co-worker thinks very highly of himself. "How hard can watching a couple of dogs be?" I saw him wondering.

"What are you talking about?" he challenged me. "I’ll just lock her in my room."

"She’s chewed through a wall once already," I countered.

"So I’ll put her in a cage," he responded with a smug smile, thinking
how cleaver he was to solve THAT problem.

I looked at him, so naive in his ignorance, and stated blandly, "She was IN a cage when she chewed through the wall."

"Oh."

And he shuffled off to his office, shoulders slumped, head down- defeated at last by the unlikeliness of adversaries: 40 pounds of cuteness in a package of short brown fur, just now tipping in black, with bright dark brown eyes shining from a black mask in a pointy fox face, whiskers quivering with impish excitement- and the desire to put something- anything!- in her mouth; Dottie in all her destructive glory.

------------------------

I’m not one to brag about how horrible my dog is in a “Marley and Me” type of way, but Dottie’s bit of naughtiness as a younger puppy was worth it to silence my co-worker who has an answer to everything. And actually, she didn’t quite make it all the way through the wall in question because it was a wall to the outside. She made it through the drywall but was brought up short by the back of the stucco, and the fact that her muzzle could only fit so far through the bars of the crate. How she got as far as she did is still a mystery because the crate wasn’t even touching the wall. Darn pointy Belgian muzzles!

The Perpetrator and Defeater of Annoying Co-Workers

Christmas Cookie Time!

I traveled to my parent's house to bake Christmas cookies. Usually I just do the icing but this time I rolled out the dough, made the icing and did the decorating. That is a lot of baking work for this girl who doesn't cook. Luckily the dough was pre-made in a tub, I just had to roll it. Unluckily it seemed no matter how much flour I used, it was either always sticking to the rolling pin or the counter. More flour! I threw some on Dottie just for fun. When I threw it at Pie I think I got some in her eye and felt bad. I also had trouble with the red icing. It seems my mom puts one drop of red food coloring in and gets the perfect shade of Christmas Red. All I was getting was a pale Valentine Pink. Seems my mom knows something I don't. I ended up using the entire bottle.

Eventually I put my younger brother to work helping me decorate also. Here are some pictures from the big event.



All my dogs were hopeful. And their hope was rewarded because I dropped my Christmas Bat right in the dog bowl! (It was a Halloween cookie but was nice and big so I made one for myself.)
More decorating. Roscoe's (mom's aussie) agility ribbons in the back ground.

Dottie is peaking!

All nice and clean. And the cookies are yummy.

Is This Hat Too Small for Me?

What do you think?

The Christmas Spirit

I gave my self a swift kick in the rear and got in the Christmas Spirit. I decorated my house. See?


Merry Christmas from my mailbox to yours.


Notice the very cute miniature (or just undersized?) Christmas plants. Ignore the un-festive generator and fuel can.

Also, I took pictures for the Christmas card but you have to wait to receive your card to see those! I'll post them later for the visitors to this blog who will not be receiving an actual card.

Happy Birthday!

To my brother who is younger than me by 2 years but the elder of my 2 brothers! Hope you have a great year!

Photo of Dust in a Sunbeam

I was trying to get a good picture of my dogs but instead I got this.

Dust floating around in my house.



Thrilling, I know.

Actually- it is. (Hint: I didn't really take this picture.)

A speck of dust in a sunbeam is one way to look at this photo, but a more accurate description is the tiny blue dot in the beam furthest on the right- just about right in the middle- is the "Pale Blue Dot" or, our planet Earth, photographed by Voyager 1, when it was around 3,781,782,502 miles from Earth.

I think Carl Sagan has some very profound thoughts on this image that he encouraged NASA to use Voyager to take:

In the book, Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph: from Wikipedia

(speech at Cornell University, October 13th, 1994)

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. (end quote)

Earth sure is small when viewed from so far away (huge understatement.) I find astronomy interesting anyway, but to relate this to the normal theme of my blog: I always do my best to remind myself dog training is a silly game. And this image helps me with that goal. If that is how small Earth is, I can't even imagine how small I and my dog training game is...Sometimes it is easy to get wrapped up in self-imposed goals or competition with yourself or other competitors. Training and showing can be frustrating due to traffic conditions, rude trial officials, self-centered competitors, weather, and dogs who seem to forget everything we've ever taught them and/or put forth no effort. But looking at that pale blue dot I remember nothing related to my training hobby really matters. And instead of discouraging me with a "why bother" mentality, thinking about the pale blue dot encourages me to have the most fun with my dogs I can. When living on a speck of dust surrounded by the vastness of "the black" (Firefly reference) it isn't important if if ever get Dottie to reach out and grab the dumbbell and return directly to me (rather than making a small loop and sightseeing) and how many bars Pie knocks has absolutely no significance to that dust speck- so I might as well stop stressing and obsessing and enjoy the journey.

Go back and look at the picture again. If you get out a magnifying glass and squint real hard you can see me sleeping with my three dogs cuddled up against me in the bed, warding off the winter chill. We have each other and are doing our best to "to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Boulder City Trial Day 2

Fancy did not show today. Pie ran clean in jumpers and I thought QQ number 19 was in our future, but in standard she took an off course to a tunnel. It was a hard a frame, tunnel discrimination that many dogs fell victim to. I thought we had it, but alas, no.

Dottie ran in Open jumpers and Open standard. She was clean in open jumpers for her fist open leg! In standard the same tunnel/ a frame discrimination was present but with and easier approach. Again I thought we had it but Dottie ducked into the tunnel at the last minute. This time she did not go under the table, but ran around it again.

We are having a specific training issue. I use the toy to get Dottie to drive ahead of me. If she thinks I have the toy on me, she'll stay next to me, which is not the purpose of the toy. However, when she thinks the toy is not on me, she spends the entire run trying to find the toy, which includes attempts to run out of the ring. Luckily Dottie comes when I call, but the purpose of the toy is not to distract her and have to call her firmly every few seconds while she tries to make a break for it. Sigh.


Our ribbons from the weekend. Fancy has a QQ Ribbon and Dottie has a New Title Ribbon.


In other news, I successfully backed the trailer into a parking spot today. The key is to move only the car's front wheels while the car is sitting still if you need the car to go in a different direction. I know that isn't ideal for the car's wheels, but it gets the trailer and car both going where I need them to.

Speaking of Rescue Mals

Speaking of rescue mals...(See post below...)


A Malinois was just pulled out of an animal shelter in Tulare County (Northern CA.)

She was there for 9 days while Malinois Rescue tried to arrange a foster family for her. Once one was found (meanwhile she hadn't been adopted and the law in CA is a stray only needs to be held for 5 days then can be euthanized) she was bailed out and a volunteer drove her to Davis, then from there she went on another trip to her new foster home.

One volunteer to bail her out, another to drive one leg of the journey, and then the big volunteer to foster her. Lots of volunteers make dog rescue work. Another volunteer person is the coordinator of all this and was altered when the dog was noticed in the shelter and begged people to go evaluate the dog, then drive her to the foster home and do the actual fostering. Money from the Rescue Calendar (post below) goes to getting her out of the shelter and vet bills. Most times the transporter donates the gas to drive the dog to the foster home (does not ask for reimbursement) and the foster home pays for all the dog's food and other equipment like grooming or flea treatment. Know that if you buy a Rescue Calendar (or just send a donation) your $ is going directly to help the dogs.

Anyway, here is a picture of the girl the foster home named Reeses (because she is sweet.) Look like anyone we know? Sound like anyone else we know??

Have Some Pie in July!

Pie is Miss July for the 2011 ABMC Rescue Calendar! (Thanks to all who voted for us.) She is also a small picture in October. Here is the link to order your calendar. Poor Dottie was not picked. However, the calendar is still great!

http://www.malinoisrescue.org/43mkvdat09/calendar-2011-order-form.shtml

All proceeds go to Malinois Rescue to help great Mals in need, such as Pie and Dottie were before coming to live with me.

Boulder City AKC Agility Trial

Here I am, living the exciting life on the road. Blogging from the trailer in the overnight parking spot at an AKC agility trail in thrilling Boulder City, NV.

I drove out Friday afternoon. The weather was hotter than it has been and the temp gauge on the car moved up and down, even when cresting only smallish hills. As we got further into the desert, the outside temperature dropped, which kept the car happy. There are a few very long grades, one over 16 miles, that I do not want to attempt in the summer.

On the way here, I spotted this car parked outside a shoe repair place:



Today I had all three dogs entered. Fancy had 2 clean runs and 2 second places! (The competition is not quite as stiff out here.) Pie knocked 2 bars in jumpers (our Mach 2 is no closer!) and was first in standard. Dottie moved up to open standard and knocked the first bar and also went under the table (weirdo!) In jumpers she was clean and took first and got her NAJ title. She still isn't moving with the speed I would like. I know she has it in her. It is a training issue that I have to figure out.

ffluffy made delicious stakes and fried potatoes for dinner. We were going to have backed potatoes in the microwave but the small generator can't run the microwave so that plan was tossed. The fried potatoes might be even better.... Right now the generator is chugging away, powering my laptop. The trailer has a battery which will run the interior lights and the water pump, until it is all used up.

Now all the dogs are napping and I will be soon also. I see it is still early, but I am tired and there isn't too much else to do.


Setting up some x-pens while Fancy watches.


Dottie sleeping on ffluffy's pillow.


Fancy under the bed, again...