Structure

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I think my Aussie boy may have hip displaysia.  He sits unusually and when her runs, he bunny hops.  I will be getting him tested mid September.  He’s such a funny dog with a good sense of humor.  I hope it ain’t so.

Raven sits differently.  Her back end is tucked under her, which is normal.  Though the crate appears to be short for her stature, she’s leaning on her front paws.  But she does this outside the crate too.  So I have had many of her parts checked.  Both her elbows and hips came out clear.  So did her neck, ears, and back.  Yet she refuses to jump her full height in AKC agility.  Such questions about why cannot always be answered.  I am working with her on exercises we learned at the Liz McGuire seminar last month.

Play Ball? Where?

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I had been planning on taking my Dobie boy to one of our company sponsored softball games for several months.  I bought a special “Play Ball!” collar.  I had it embroidered with a baseball as well.  I put that on him with his stainless steel star ID tag.  And because he’s 9 years old, I have to load a ramp to the side of the truck so he can walk up easily instead of jumping.  The guys told me dogs were allowed at the ball park, so Thursday night we loaded up the truck, drove on down, and together, had a lovely walk to the park.

When we got there, the walk was long to the location of our game, but along the way, people stopped to compliment my guy and to pet him.  When I got to our game, two men stopped and squatted to talk to my boy.  His tail stub was wagging a mile a minute.  He loves attention and people, which is not something I can say about me.

Then came the a-hole.  The park ranger with an ego.  He not only gave me grief about having my boy in the park, but he actually drove along side me – crept along – as I took the long walk back to the truck with him.  I asked him where the sign was, and after a little more walking, I finally find that sign sandwiched between two others.

“Trained Service Animals Only.”  I guess the guys I work with didn’t notice that before.  However, they didn’t notice the nifty collar on my boy either.

Maybe beer had something to do with that and the semi-lousy way they played.  But they had fun.  I guess that’s what counts.  They are letting off steam.  It seems to be the thing to do these days.

Back to dogs.  After I left, I was told, one of the girlfriends of a player carried in her dog, and macho park ranger made her and her dog leave as well.

What the hell?  Dogs are Americans too.  And moreso, they belong to tax paying Americans.  I am so pissed off that I can’t even walk my dog onto a city park to watch a ball game after all the taxes I’ve paid into this place, it’s pathetic.  There are very few options for people who love their dogs anymore.  And I want to know what the hell happened to “land of the free.”  It sure isn’t anywhere where my dog and I are standing.  I vented when I got to the parking lot, and screamed a few profanities.  Maybe it’s not the mature thing to do, but I am tired of being “nice” and following somebody else’s lame rules.

This was my first and last time to this Nazi park.

That aside, the night itself seemed to just be less than stellar.  The company team was playing a team of standbys who play all week and are not members of any teams.  They rocked.  They could catch and hit and probably wouldn’t have combusted if you lit a match by them.  Their team was from a mortuary, and I did not see Herman Munster there.  However, the mortuary team beat the company team so bad you’d think he was around somewhere.  There was something called a mercy ending.  At 21 to 1, the game was called.  I think it took two innings, maybe three.

Even taking photos was not so much fun because all I was doing was thinking about my guy in the truck waiting for me.  And on the way home, I got lost in a very unsafe area.  I had to turn around and back track finally to get my bearings.  I passed a hooker on the right side of the street as I got lost.  She smiled the first pass by, and by the time I got going the other way to get un-lost, she had changed to the that side of the street and waved at me.  Such friendliness.  Yeah, right.  She wanted what my dog and I got at the Nazi park.  But we weren’t asking for it like she was.

One Dog’s Outlook on Life

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Here is Leissl in a leopard print oil cloth martingale with hot pink lining.  It is another gorgeous creation from Lisa at Collar Mania.  The adorable stainless steel star tag is from the Pasadena Humane Society.

I took this photo of Leissl on a way too hot Sunday afternoon.  Lately, the best place to enjoy summer is indoors where the heat and humidity are not.  Though Leissl is ready for anything anytime.  She has a favorite lizard hunting spot, but frankly, I don’t remember her ever catching one.  Yet that doesn’t impede her enthusiasm for her sport.

We could take lessons from such a beautiful frame of mind.  Leissl gets out there and does something she loves for the fun of it and doesn’t come in at the end of the day pouting because she didn’t catch a lizard.  Instead, she looks forward to the next time the door opens so she can have a chance at the game again.  I’d say that’s a healthy outlook on life.

To Everything There Is A Season

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Today marks the closing of ten years I worked for one man at one company.  And today he told me he is leaving the company.

I had a feeling he was leaving.  Certain things a person does, such as removing a couple of keepsakes from his office after having them there for 10 years makes a person suspicious.  I had other signs of imminent departure, and from looking at his calendar, I even pin pointed it for this week, the week after a 10-day vacation.  He also had a 9-day vacation last month.  That was odd behavior.  After working for someone for so long, you get to know regularities about the person.  He wasn’t much with people skills and frankly, we rarely talked about anything personal, but he was a good person to work for, and I will miss my daily interactions with him.

After he told me, he asked me not to say anything to anyone.  I needed an outlet, so I took a walk outside.  Since I started working for this company, we moved buildings just a couple years ago.  So it was funny that during my walk, I passed a restaurant that he took me and our group out to when I first started working for him.  It was a celebration after an annual meeting.  We were all just fairly new with the company, one year or less.  Except him, he had a few years under his belt by then.  The restaurant was barren now.  Like so many shops and restaurants in this area.  Empty shells with signs begging for occupancy.

I am an emotional person.  I’d go as far as saying above average emotional.  So when my boss told me he was leaving, keeping my tears from flowing for a good minute really impressed me.  However, that didn’t last and once they started, they would periodically return depending on where I let my mind go.  It is sometimes difficult to stop my mind from going places when everything around me is work related, and of course, inspired memories.  So he let me go home at lunch time to stay home for the rest of the day with a huge headache I’d come into.  I’d woken up with a sinus headache, and this news enhanced it tremendously.  Even though I had my suspicions, I was not mentally willing to accept his leaving as reality.

So this brings me to the conclusion of all this.  The feelings I have are close to the feelings I’ve had when mourning the loss of someone close to me.  It’s a death of sorts.  Or to put it more lightly, a divorce of a relationship.  He doesn’t know how long he will be there at this point.  I guess that will be determined by the upper echelon, which makes the scene a little difficult.  I will see him for who knows how long wondering, “Will this be the last day?”  It’s like a prolonged euthanasia.  To further my plight, I have no idea if this company will see the need to keep me or not.  Will he be replaced or not?  And neither does my boss.  Er, my former boss.  Boss in transition to non-boss.

There is a lesson to be learned in all of this and I thought about that in between the pounding sensations in my head.  Then I got out my DVDs of a Lanny Basham seminar and decided to watch all four DVDs during my afternoon, but I only made it through the first.  I took notes and listened to it twice.  I think I’ve been letting life happen to me more than making a life for me.  But that is another thought which I have to work through.

Good-bye today.  I woke up with the routine and security I’ve know for a decade.  Tomorrow?  Who knows.

The Girls and Me and Agility Class

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Tonight was our first agility class and it was great.  I am sure everyone came out of class with their own twists on what to take home and practice with their own dogs.  The main thing I came out of it was very important.  I have to be on guard to mark my dog the moment she has done a behavior I like.  Now that is easy to do when I am set up in the back yard teaching a trick, but on the agility course it’s a little tougher.  For example, Raven is still choosing to jump a jump then sometimes run off into the wild blue yonder.  Tonight she had company by way of a lovely Aussie named Parker who had to join her on her run.  His owner thought he was chasing a deer.  Raven does look magnificently like a deer when she runs.  (?)  OK, except for the tail and color.  And most deer usually don’t do agility.  But it was dark where they were running.

So for Raven, I have to watch out for the moment she makes the choice to turn to me when I see she is thinking about taking another route off the course and into mischief.  I will be like a fencer with my sword.  En guard, Raven!  Oh, and when Raven runs away, I shan’t yell “Raaaaaaaaaaaaaven!” like I used to.  But that was always a way for me to release some stress.  Now I have to work on a more quiet approach, not my typical Alvin the Chipmunk yell.  Oh well.  We’re all a work in progress.

With Leissl, I learned to do a “side” signal.  (Come to my right side.)  We are going to do this in front of distractions, which is something I haven’t done before.  I have called them both to my side and heel positions, but in easy peasy circumstances, not with a choice of me or something more tempting like a tunnel.  They love their tunnels.  And not with me running and she having to come to my side and run with me.  What’s neat about Leissl is she automatically goes into do-over mode, so I didn’t even have to tell her go back in the tunnel and exit to me so we can take the teeter.  She did the tunnel on her own.  She’s such a gem.

As for me, I get too tensed up and manic out there when my feet and plans don’t do the same thing.  Frankly, agility is a lot harder than the good handlers make it look.  It’s sort of like running and doing pirouettes left and right while keeping your eye on a moving target with whom you are leading in a dance over, on, and through a bunch of props. Yeah, that’s it.  Plus tonight it was raining.  We had fun and were such a bunch of troopers finishing off the day in the rain.  It was reminiscent of Private Benjamin.  We rocked!

Evidence

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I put my bag of dog supplies together for Raven’s class tomorrow night. The only thing I forgot to do is zip it up. That was bad. I heard someone ripping a toy apart earlier, but I thought it was a toy they’ve been working on regularly for days. One of those Tuffies toys. So when I finished writing an email to a friend, and turned around to see Luigi on the futon with a rabbit tug – minus all the rabbit fur – let me tell you, was I the one feeling I’d been had!

Honestly, I don’t think Luigi did the eating, but he probably did snatch the leftover nylon.  However, tomorrow, I will look very closely at the pooping going on out back to find out which one of my devoted rascals ate that rabbit fur off my barely used new tug!  A friend gave me that tug.  That goes to show me if I don’t zip, latch, or otherwise close things around here, my ever loving dogs will find the loophole and dig right into it to take advantage.

Mimi’s Flappers

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This isn’t the cute picture I tried to take an instant earlier where Mimi had her ears standing upright.  Why not?  Recently, among all her other adorable quirks, Mimi has become camera shy.   I took this photo from a distance and zoomed in on her.  Check out those front paws.  They are paddles!  She is so funny with the way she flops them onto me  and curls them around like a hand.

She is still The Termite.  Not much has changed except now I keep stainless steel bowls in some spots.  Those are the spots where she climbs onto and uses those paddles to pull things off that she might like to chew.  Lately she’s focused on the pens by my computer.  Last night I was about to use a blue pen I had put down in front of me earlier and couldn’t find it anywhere.  So I got up to search for it, and sure enough it had been moved to another room, and it was well slobbered.  The good news is it was still usable, unlike the last several pens she got.

I just love the white rainbows on her legs.  And the freckles on her snout.  Herding breeds come in such beautiful colors and patterns.  They are definitely unique in the variety they offer.

Signals and Happiness

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Looks can be deceiving. Take this picture. You would think it’s a remorseful look, but actually it is a smart dog looking away from the flash bulb going off.   One of my cameras shoots a red light out before it takes a picture, which gives my dogs a warning to look away.  It doesn’t take them long to get the message and react.

Sometimes people send signals that are deceiving as well.  I guess that’s why some of us get more guarded as we mature, but wouldn’t it be nice if people had the same warning lights as cameras?  So a red light goes off for the “I’m about to bullshit you” mode.   Brown flashes for “I think I’m way more important than I am, so I’m gonna tell you what to do.”  Yellow for, “I don’t know what the heck I’m doing, but I’ll look like I do until you figure it out and I’ll take the credit.”  Well, maybe that would work.  But instead, we sometimes have no warning and are left with that “WTF just happened” look on our faces.

When I’m bamboozled because I didn’t foresee the color of those imaginary lights, the next thing I do is self talk.  “Just let it roll off you.”  “Shake it off baby.”  “Hey, brush it off and move on.”  And these sayings remind me of dogs.   Dogs roll, they shake, and I brush them.  And dogs are my reason for being.  They make me happy.

And when it comes down to it, happy is the place to be, but boy does it take practice!