Teaching Middle-Aged Dogs New Tricks, Part Two

Ginger the Wonder Dog and I started the second dog training class last week. So far, so good, by which I mean I didn't drop anything on her head during the first class.

The other dogs are bigger, which didn't stop Ginger from growling at them. One of the dogs lives just two houses down from me. I've talked to her owner at least three times over the past few years, but neither one of us recognized the other. The owner has a pretty unusual first name, though, so I took the conversational leap of getting her to confirm she lived on my street. In our defense, I think every time we've spoken it's been dark outside, so I'm not sure I've ever gotten a good look at her face before. Now I'll probably still forget her face, but at least I know what her dog looks like.

We're supposed to be working on extending our three minute down-stay into a ten minute down-stay with distractions. Since our three minute down-stay is more like a three second down-stay-get-up-wander-around-lie-down-again, this might be a little difficult. I'd say we're making progress on it, but for the last two days every time I've asked Ginger to do anything at all she's just wandered off. We'll get there...

A Postcard From Camp

I am once again camping at Camp NaNoWriMo for July. This time they made the concept of "private" cabins (ie, invitation only) which meant people could seek out people on their own instead of getting randomly sorted into a group of twelve.

I'm in a cabin that I found through the forum thread titled "Geriatric, grumpy, can't remember where we parked, cabin mates". (That's actually true.) The age of people signed up for camp skews very, very low (somewhere around 13-15), so at 45 I'm sort of old. But not as old as the majority of people in my cabin, so now I'm sort of young. It's a good group, though, and there are no dead bodies stinking up the cabin. We're not very likely to hit the cabin goal, but I'm on track for mine and that's all that really matters.

In other deja vu news, the little dog and I are signed up for dog training class again. I can't imagine what we'll be working on since she knows every command in existence (as long as that command is sit, down, or touch and there aren't any other dogs nearby -- stay is still a little iffy...)

So that's my life lately. In case you wondered...

Some Days...

Jeff was having his annual Sort-of-near-the-fourth-of-July barbeque today, so I made kebabs (with baked tofu) and chocolate ice cream with chunks of cherries and packed up the car and drove off.

After sitting in traffic for thirty minutes I realized that I forgot to add an ice pack to keep the ice cream cold.

After another thirty minutes I came to the conclusion that I should have bought some dry ice to keep the ice cream cold.

When I finally got to Vacaville after an hour and a half (and traffic wasn't improving) I couldn't remember why I wanted to go to the barbeque in the first place because I hated every single person in the entire world with the exception of my mom (and in another fifteen minutes that would have been iffy as well).

So I turned around and drove home.

Whatever.