A Crisis of Conscience

SUMMARY: I don't know what I'll do next time. Rats.

First Story

Cursed vermin! A plague of rodents invaded my attic sometime last winter and I didn't deal with them right away this time. The vile things could be heard gnawing inside my expensive-to-maintain real estate and it seemed like only a matter of time until they'd gnaw a hole in my roof, or through my electrical wiring, or even into my living quarters or cabinets in my kitchen.

Gross horrible beasts, peeing and defecating profusely everywhere in my attic, tearing up the insulation for nesting, and if you don't think that replacing that is miserably uncomfortable--and expensive--work, then you've never been in a 100-degree attic covered with protective clothing and gear and breathing through a filter mask, hunkering down beneath the low roof, balancing on the beams and trying not to fall through the ceiling into your living room. S**t.

Hate them. Why can't they stay out in the fields where they belong? Tika will hunt them down in my yard between episodes of agility training; the problem is that she tears apart everything that stands in her way--flower beds, hot tubs, you name it. More destruction to blame on the rodents.

They are just bad news. As the Santa Clara County web site says, "these rodents can infect humans directly with diseases such as tularemia, leptospirosis, arenavirus, Hantavirus, ratbite fever, lymphocytic choriomeningitis and salmonellosis (food poisoning). They also may serve as reservoirs for diseases transmitted by ectoparasites, such as tick-borne relapsing fever, Colorado tick fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, plague, murine typhus, rickettsial pox, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, babesiosis and tularemia." Jeez, you don't want to be breathing their waste or having it come anywhere near you, and heaven forfend they don't have plague-carrying fleas. Remember the Black Death? Rats with fleas. Gah.

Damned things are too smart for their own good, too. Put up traps with bait. Caught nothing. Called rat guy and paid him money to set traps in a professional manner. Set several; caught one. One afternoon I counted 8--eight!--damned rats scrambling to escape when I opened the attic door. And those are only the ones I saw. So they're breeding like--rats--and I hope they don't run at me when I open the door. Gah, yuck, awful, I suppose they could carry rabies, too.

Put in poison bait blocks. Not my favorite method because I worry about the dogs getting poisoned rats, although I've never known any of my dogs to eat dead rodents. Carry them around, yes; eat, no. Still. Anyway, they nibbled at them some and then left the bait alone. The hellspawned creatures learn about traps and become trap shy, and they'll sample bait, wait a while, get sick, and never go near it again. Curse them all!

But finally we thought we were making progress. Saw many fewer rats. Rat guy came back again to close up the hole in the roof they were going through (I suspected as much) and we didn't see any rats at all beforehand, so hopefully they were all already dead or had scrammed when we started mucking around in the attic.

But at least one was still in there, curse it! Gnawing away. Finally got caught in a trap. Had to clean out the mess. Good riddance.

Second Story

I had hamsters when I was a kid. And various friends all my life have had rats as pets. They're very smart, very curious. So warm and delicate, sitting in your hand, their teeny little toenails skittering around. The way they sit up and look at you with cute little faces, bright eyes-- And smart, too. Can learn tricks. You can start seeing different personalities, just like you can with any other pets--cat, dogs, whatever.

And I hate killing things if I see an alternative. I'll carry spiders outside and let them go. Rats--challenging. If I catch them live and turn them loose outside, they'll be back in my house or someone else's house or breeding like crazy to spawn more invaders. Dead is probably better. The thing I always preferred about snap traps is that it's really quick. Usually. So I set out a bunch of traps.

I crawled up into the attic a few weeks back to check the traps, and my perspective made a 90-degree turn: I pulled back a massed-up mess of insulation--and there was a nest of baby rats, still mostly pinkish, barely any fur, just innocent, tiny, living infants, all clambering around on top of each other to get away from the light, nowhere to go, not understanding what was happening to them, probably frightened half to death.

Which meant that somewhere there was a mother taking care of them. Mother dies, babies starve slowly to death. Or ther rats will kill them and/or eat them. OK, rats might be cute, but this isn't so much. Of course, male lions do that to other male's cubs and we still like lions.

But, anyway, all of a sudden they were no longer foul vermin. They were like my pet hamsters, like my friends' pet rats, like my dogs. They were families of smart, soft, cute, active, feeling animals.

I felt like crying. What was I doing? How could I contribute to this? Could I scoop up the nest and do the whole litter in? How, for crying out loud, drown them? Given that that's one of my phobias (possiblity of drowning), how could I do that to another critter? Stomp on them? You've got to be kidding. Wring their little necks? I'm afraid I'd just hurt the hell out of them long before dispatching them.

I still felt like crying. I backed out of the attic and called the rat guy. He said, "Awww, babies, gee, I hate doing that! But that's what I do for a living, I guess I have to deal with it." He came over, but we couldn't find the babies again. They were moved or dead. I didn't ask what he'd have done with them if he had found them.

A week or so later, I went up to check the traps again. Pulled aside another lump of insulation, and there were the babies--still really too small to be leaving their nest, still struggling against the light, but now definitely furry with that soft, downy fur common to all young mammals--puppies, kittens, rats.

Jeez.

I backout out of there again really fast.

The rats just weren't going for the traps. As i understand it, if one gets caught in a trap, the others figure out that traps are bad and just stay away. Traps worked for me in the past, but apparently these were geniuses among rats. Nothing. And still a half dozen or more rats every time I went up there. And gnawing away at my house still.

I finally put up a bunch of rat bait, seeing no other alternative. You don't want to close up the holes in the house until the rats are taken care of, or then you have rats inside looking for other ways out. So we have to make sure there are no rats.

The rats barely touched the bait. I kept checking. And the traps were getting set off but not catching anything. How do they do that? But eventually there were fewer and fewer rats and then I didn't hear any for a couple of days, and so called the rat guy to close up the hole in the roof. It was a bear to do--way down at the base of the roof, very difficult to get to. But I hoped that meant no more rats coming in, so I wouldn't have to kill any more.

And then--the final sea change in my emotions. Because there was apparently at least one rat left, maybe two, because that evening when he woke up and tried to get out, he became frantic. I sat in my kitchen and listened to him overhead, smashing and thrashing and banging and grabbing and gnawing and clawing to get out. I thought he was going to come down through the light fixtures or dig or gnaw right through the drywall ceiling. I'd never heard activity so desperate.

And that's what I heard--the desperate attempts of a living being, shut off from food, shut off from water. Maybe shut off from family. Do rats have a sense of family? I don't know--certainly the young rats huddling together in the nest and the mother caring for them have strong affinity for each other. And how would I feel, trapped, no food, no water, not understanding what had happened, wanting desperately to get out?

I hardly slept that night. I heard him all night long, trying everything everywhere to find a way out. Desperate. Scared. Frantic. Gnawing at anything, even the solid wire mesh sealing the old entryway, I could hear the metal reverberate. And it wasn't the noise so much as the guilt--what have I done? What have I done?

It continued well into the morning, then silent as the day brightened and things warmed up.

Midmorning, I stepped out into the garage for some reason, and a movement caught my eye. I turned and looked. A young rat--not an infant, maybe half grown--hesitated in the walkspace near the back door, sat up, paws tucked in, and looked up at me, nose twitching to catch my scent. Just like the little guy in the photo. "Are you my mother? Are you a friend? I can't get into my home and now I'm here and I'm alone and not sure what I'm doing." Jeez, how can a damned rat break my heart like that?

Then I moved towards him, and he moved briskly, not terrified, matter-of factly, back behind some boxes. I peered back there. I had left a mouse trap set from a mouse infestation, oh, maybe 3 years ago, and there was another young rat, same size, probably a sibling, dead with his head caught in the trap. I could hear the other one hovering nearby. Were they companions in this strange world that they'd been forced into, and one had been caught and the other hanging nearby, not knowing what to do, alone for maybe the first time in his life?

Am I anthropomorphizing?

After dark the noise in the attic started in again; not so desperate, but now determined and with a plan. Gnawing very very hard, very persistently, not in random places and small occasional bits like normal, but solid, determined, constant, very hard, very loud gnawing in one place.

Not only have I trapped a living creature in a sure-death situation, I have forced him into a position where he is destroying my property even more. But really foremost in my mind was a moving story I read years ago, "The House on Cemetery Street" by Cherry Wilder--in the attic, tiny scratchings and scratchings and tappings, trapped, slowly starving to death, running out of water, dying of thirst--

Again, I had trouble sleeping, listening to the persistent, determined, constant gnawing. Knowing that he did have things to eat in the attic: The bait blocks. The bait in the traps. And him knowing, knowing, KNOWING that those things were dangerous.

The next day, I inadvertently left the door to the garage open, and found that Tika had dispatched the other young rat.

The third night, persistent gnawing, still, but with breaks. As of desperate exhaustion. Must rest. Must keep going.

Sometime during the day, found another dead rat on the lawn, obviously had been dog-carried. Tika has been going overtime the last week or so as if the yard is suddenly full of rodents. Probably is, now that they can't get back into my attic.

The fourth night, very light, very weak gnawing. Not much at all. You could tell it was weak, weaker than all the normal gnawings and sounds from an attic full of vibrant mammalian life. Quiet. You could almost not hear it.

The next day, another young rat, even younger, dead on the lawn.

Then, that night, from the attic, nothing. And a day or two later, oh, a not so pleasant smell.

I donned my gear, hauled plastic bags and things up to the attic. Found a recently deceased rat in a trap. He had gotten desperate, needed to eat. Needed something. No matter how dangerous. Afloat in the ocean in a raft, desperate for something to drink. You know that if you drink the seawater, it will kill you. And yet--after a while--it seems like the only alternative.

I started hauling out the damaged insulation. Found another rat under the insulation. Poisoned? Don't know. Gone. Found a nest with two young, fully furred babies, curled up, so tiny, so sweet. Gone.

Don't cry into your filter mask. Harder to breathe.

Pulled out a lot of badly damaged insulation, but not nearly all of it. How many more families are up there, dead? Individuals, dead? Not dying cleanly.

How did I get to be this age, and dealt with invasive vermin several times through the decades, and only now have been so torn up by everything? If only I hadn't SEEN them alive and cute and close up.

Next time, it's live traps and I'm setting them loose in the field. I just don't care whether they come back. I'm still having trouble sleeping, thinking about it. I'm crying right now.

Damned rats.

---

Photo credits:
Evil rat, cute rat

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Knock Off That Bar Knocking and Check Out That View

SUMMARY: Working on Boost's main issue (of --um-- 2 or 3 main issues).

Spent an hour yesterday with WTC ("world team coach", yeah surely one of these days I'll make an extra page for all of my associate's aliases used here) with Boost analyzing some of her bar-knocking issues and coming up with ways to address them.

WTC watched her jump several times and she jumped nicely. Jumping when I'm moving out ahead of her, though? She's taking off early. I'd already identified that one of her bar-knocking issues (and refusals & runouts) is that she spends too much time looking at me rather than figuring out the course. Several things I've done on my own are devoted to getting her to look at obstacles instead of me. So this reinforces that issue.

We also identified that, when rewarded promptly and "punished" promptly--very promptly--after hitting the bar, she starts doing better, so she's at least somewhat aware of what she's doing with her back legs. The punishment is to immediately make her down (but in a gentle but firm voice, not scolding) and turn my back on her for at least a few seconds. That means that the instant she hits the bar--certainly by the time she's landing--I have to be telling her "lie down" or it's too long after hitting the bar for her to get it.

We also worked on ways to get her to think about the jump and looking forward instead of looking at me for a reward. We experimented with the treat-n-train for dispensing a reward after she's done a jump correctly. It's not bad, but there is a bit of a delay in dispensing the treat after the beep. I'll have to reaccustom her to that delay.


Mainly I'm going to be focusing on tossing high-value treats on the ground in front of her when she does jumps successfully. I could be standing, or sitting in a chair as motionless as possible so she's not looking at me so much for the reward. Which also means I have to be quick with the toss so she doesn't have time to look at me, but not so quick that I accidentally reward a ticked bar. Timing is everything!

So we're going to work on one jump for now with me sitting and tossing treats, or with treat-n-train at one end and a low table or phone book or something at the other end for me to toss the treat to, anything so she's looking ahead instead of at me. And no sit-stay or anything, just telling her "hup" from where she's picked up the last goodie. She was doing very very well at not touching the bar by the end of yesterday's session.

And we'll also work on 2-jump bounce jumps, full height (actually 26"; her competition height is 22"), 7' apart. And gradually adding me standing in different places, them me moving a little bit, then both of us running at them, and so on.

So for her--and the issue may be different for other dogs--the idea is to teach her that the JUMP is the important thing, not me, and that looking FORWARD is the important thing, not looking at me. And we'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile--Just going up to Power Paws is a pleasure. I mean, the company's good, but the view is ever-changing and always beautiful.

In this photo, I believe that PP is the level area just above the stoplight on the left side. (So hard to pick it out from down below.)

The downside to living up there is that you're always looking for smoke, always hypersensitive to the scent of burning. This is a bad thing to see in the foothills below you as the fire season begins.
But--back to the upside--look slightly more to your left at sunset, and this is what you might see:

And this is what class on Thursday evening is like--looking still further to your left-- (those are neighbors' houses you see):
Gazing out over San Jose:

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My Browser Life is Complete

SUMMARY: Gotta love my browser's auto-completion feature: Easy access to all things dog agility! And--ahem, yes--important things like work.

Maybe all your browsers have this feature--autocompletion of a URL based on the the first character(s) you type and the frequency of your past accesses. So I can type:

"b" to get Bay Team, my local agility club (where I'm also webmaster).

"e" to get the english-language version of Wikipedia, where I initially signed on so that I could create an article on dog agility, which at the time was sadly absent.

"f" to get facebook, to which I was lured by a bunch of agility friends and bloggers, and where 60% of my FB friends are agility friends.

"fi" to get my own personal calendar of all my weekend plans for the next year or so, primarily agility.

"m" to get mapquest, which tells me how long it will take me to drive to whatever agility event I'm off to this next weekend.

"g" for Google. For everything! For Taj MuttHall, when I talk about how hot or cold it is, for my non-American friends I like to give the C as well as the F. So I can go to google, type "95F in C" in the search bar, and it tells me. Is that so totally rad or what?

"o" for Onelook dictionary search, which peruses a bunch of different dictionaries to find possible meanings for a word.

"p" for Power Paws, where I take agility classes with my dogs.

"r" for Google Reader, where I've subscribed to all my favorite blogs and can see any updates in one page; very convenient! At the moment, includes 13 agility-related blogs and 3 others. (I don't put my favorite LiveJournal blogs in here, although I could, because those I can sign up for permanent email notification as soon as someone posts something.)

"s" for Snopes, the urban legends reference page, which I check *constantly* to verify those emails about 20 beagle puppies who are about to be put to sleep because they can't find homes, or the parody of My Favorite Things sung by Julie Andrews, or a photo of a tsunami frozen to ice in an instant, or SO many things that come through the mail-- (Have used them for years, and they do display some advertising to pay for their site, which is fine; lately they seem to have some ads that open windows that do crappy things to my browser. Not always, but sometimes. But I haven't found a better reference site for this material.)

I type "t" to get Team Small Dog, my daily dose of dog-and-agility-related laughter or sober thought or brain-twisting set of analogies.

"ta" to get Taj MuttHall (here--although I don't have to type it often because it is also my home page).

"w" for Weatherbug, which is cool because you can see exactly where the station is that's reporting your time and temperature, and (if one is available) choose one closer to you or to the site of your agility trial this coming weekend.

"x" for the company that employs me so that I can do dog agility.

"y" for youtube. (Surprised me when I just checked it--I'd have thought Yahoo, which it was for a long time, but I guess all those agility videos have skewed it a bit...

"z" for my photo site on Smugmug--and the only way I can explain the "z" is because all the galleries are coded with random character-string names, and "z" must be pretty common. Lots of photos from dog agility trials and the nationals there, among other things.

Probably more with 2-letter combos that I'm not thinking of at the moment.

Do you detect certain themes? Perhaps themes starting with the letter "a" or "d"?

Perhaps it's time to get off the computer and go for a long hike with the dogs in Risk's memory.

Hug your dogs, your cats, your children, your siblings, your parents [parents--hope you're enjoying your 50th-anniversary oregon trip; here's your virtual hug: (( ))]. There might not be a tomorrow to do it in. And I don't have to browse the web to know that up close and personal.

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TaJ MuttHall Yard and Local Deities

SUMMARY: In which we take a camera tour in our very yard to prove that lacking an SLR doesn't mean that we can't take quick unartistic snapshots anyway. Plus an inventory of yard deities of many persuasions.

Visit here for a lot of fun photos like these, but with captions, to see what kinds of activities and lives go on in the Taj MuttHall yard.

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Cutting Back On Agility

SUMMARY: Where to cut? How? Why? When?

I have vowed to cut back on my agility weekends.

My first thought was: I'll do only the Bay Team and SMART trials, because I'm a member and because they're fairly close to home--in theory meaning that I could sleep in my own bed on Saturday night and not have to get up at 4:00 a.m. to get there on Saturday. That would still be plenty of agility, because Bay Team is now doing eight (8!!) trials a year, and SMART now seems to be up to three a year. That's about one a month--sounds perfect!

There are two problems with this:

1) Four of the Bay Team's trials are now under cover up in Santa Rosa, which actually takes me as long to get to, or longer, than the VAST, NAF, Haute Dawgs, or TRACS trials in the central valley. Plus I have to go over a big bridge, and the traffic in the evening can be ugly. And I *do* have to get up at 4 on Saturday and I *do* have to stay overnight.

2) Those 11 trials aren't well spaced through the year. They actually run like this:
* One in late January.
* One in mid-March.
* One the last weekend in April and another the following weekend.
* Nothing for 6 weeks, then one every other weekend for from mid-June to mid-July.
* Nothing for 5 weeks, then one the last weekend in august and another the following weekend.
* Nothing for 3 months, then one in mid-December, which is really holiday time and I'm usually busy.

So I don't like the way it's laid out.

If I do only the ones where I can [reasonably] sleep in my own bed Saturday night, that drops me to only 7 a year. Not only am I not sure I'm ready for that drastic a cut [Yet, at any rate], that also drops all the trials from December through March, meaning that I'd have no agility from Labor Day until the last weekend in April. Ack! Can't be done, just can't.

But maybe.

The evolving schedule is a work in progress.

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Old Age. It's Not for the Faint of Heart.

SUMMARY: A scare, sadness, and relief.

Over the last week, I've been talking to my first sister a bit about her 13-year old Lab mix who has been in declining health. But the dog still loved to go for walks, even if she could barely stand. Incontinent. Maybe a little senile, a little hard to tell. When was the right time to let her go? Would she make it easy by slipping away quietly some night in her bed?

No, she leaped down a couple of steps into the carpeted living room yesterday--the dog who could barely walk, needed a towel under her belly held by her human caretakers to help her stand, wanted to leap down the step--fell, and couldn't get up again. Her front legs were as strong as ever, but her back and hind legs had given up, couldn't hold her up. Had she damaged something, or was this just progressive deterioration? Could she feel anything in her rear legs? Could it be fixed? Guessing not--

My mother has had some serious health issues lately. She's still SO much "Mom"; no sign of the mental deterioration that she had so feared because all of her female relatives succumbed to it, but at 80, some other things have come up in rapid succession, landing her in the hospital or emergency room several times in the last half year. We've had some scares. I don't know whether she or we are more scared each time.

She's had some procedures last week to try to stabilize her heartbeat. Thought it was successful. Then problems, and to the emergency room. Then OK and home again. It's her heart, for goodness sakes; these aren't minor things. She's always been so strong, or seemed like it to me. Very active and healthy, mentally and physically and socially.

Last night I told my sister to call me if she decided to put the dog to sleep and needed company, someone other than her own daughters, whom she'd have to take care of more than they could take care of her at such a difficult time.

I've heard nothing all day. Headed out for an evening with my Master Composters group around 6:00. Home a bit after 9, and there are 4 messages blinking on my answering machine. Given that I usually have about one once or twice a week, and given the way things have been going, that couldn't be good.

The messages were from my dad, saying that he was taking mom to the emergency room again. From my first sister saying that she put the dog to sleep and shortly thereafter got the call about my mom and was now at the hospital with my parents. Two from my out-of-state fourth sister wanting reassurance, feeling outside of everything.

OK, that's not so bad--given that there were no additional follow-up calls.

I called my first sister for an update. Mom's back and legs seemed to be giving out, wouldn't hold her up, she fell or was afraid of falling (not clear on this), couldn't feel one leg. Couldn't get up. So they'd gone to the hospital.

The doctors had ruled out heart attack and stroke and were progressing through a variety of other tests. Mom was perfectly capable of chatting and being--well--just the same mom as always, just with a body that's not willing to play the same games the same way any more. Turns out that it's just a (probably) minor infection, and she'll spend the night there so they can keep an eye on her to be sure that the treatment is taking rapid effect.

I am greatly relieved.

But meanwhile the hospital can't find a copy of mom's Advance Directive. What does the directive say? If she falls down the steps into the living room and can't get up, what do we do? She's not a dog, not senile, still going to contribute a lot to her family and the world--we expect--and she's only 80, for crying out loud, that's not old enough to be frail. Is it? Isn't 80 the new 60? And 60's the new 40?

It's all so much really out of our control. We have to rely on the expertise of others, and we have no good way of knowing whether they actually have any idea of what they're talking about. We like to hope so. We have to hope so.

Because I expect mom and dad to still be around when I hit 100. That's just the way it's supposed to work. And by then, I'll have lost how many dogs to the Big Milkbone in the Sky? Four so far, two more on their way--Tika's 8, Boost's 4. Ten years from now, I don't expect that they'll still be with me. Some other young and bouncy and crazy and loving dog will most likely be in my life. It won't be the same as any of my previous dogs. It won't be as good as they were. And, in other ways, it will be better.

Not so easy to adopt a replacement parent from the local parent shelter; their screening requirements are REALLY tough. So I'll have to keep the ones I've got. And meanwhile my sister's dog is gone. In peace. But so hard for the ones left behind.

I have no clever line to wrap this up. Because the story really has no end. So I guess I'll go to bed.

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Get Uncomfortable

SUMMARY: Thoughts on moving out of your comfort zone.

The last couple of weeks, I've been pondering my comfort zones--what they are, why they're comfortable, how to move out of them, and what it will get me. Started from a couple of workshops I'm taking that have nothing to do with agility.

The point is that moving out of comfort zones is the only way to improve. That's how you learn. That's how your body builds itself. That's how your income grows. For example, you didn't learn to walk by doing what was comfortable--crawling. You struggled to stand on both feet. You struggled to take a step. You fell. And fell. And fell again. And again and again. And then, a whole new world opened up to you...OK, maybe in the short term where you could pull fragile china from tabletops, reach hot pans on the stove, and other fascinating opportunities such as those, enabling you to learn even more. But where would you be today if you were still crawling? Front crosses are hard enough to do on two legs; managing one on all fours would be a trick.

When you want to build muscle, you don't keep doing things that you can do easily; you do exercises that break down the muscle fibers, make you tired and achey, and allow the muscles to rebuild themselves into something better.

Sometimes it's hard to identify one's comfort zones. OK, I do well at work, I get pretty good performance reviews most of the time. But I'm already pretty good at what I do, and it hasn't made me rich yet, for example. I'd have to step into something that I know much less about, and risk my investment of time (at the very least), and possibly ego, and possibly status, and possibly money, to do something very different.

It's hard to do, and we don't LIKE moving out of our comfort zone. In fact, our brains fight against doing it, because in some ways it goes against the "rules" that we've built up for ourselves that say "this is how the world works, this is what's right, this is who you are." Like, "only really tall, long-legged people win the USDAA nationals" or "I am just not championship material."

Here are some everyday examples of what happens when I start to move out of my rule-based comfort zones:

• Seatbelts. I always wear seatbelts in the car. Always. After agility class late in the evening, the last person out is supposed to close the gate to the driveway. It's a long driveway, maybe 500 feet? I have to remember ALLLLL the way down that I'm supposed to stop and close the gate, not just breeze on through like I usually do. So I leave my seatbelt off because it's a good reminder, and there is absolutely no safety or legal reason why I need it on during that time. But--it just about makes my body crawl out of my skin to leave the seatbelt off. Even as I'm sitting in my car thinking "Leave the seatbelt off," my hand is reaching for the seatbelt. Even after I've started moving and my hands are on the wheel, the back of my mind is yelling "Danger! Danger! Danger! Something's really wrong here! Wrong wrong wrong!" all the way down the driveway.
• Sleeping. I can't sleep unless I have covers over me. I don't know why, but it makes me feel extraordinarily vulnerable. I become hyperconscious of the fact that there is nothing covering me. On very hot, sweaty nights, this is a bit of a problem. Through years of occasional hot, sweaty nights, I have gradually learned to sleep with a corner of the sheet draped over my hips. Then I am still secure and safe and can drift off. But if I roll over and the sheet falls off, boom, I'm wide awake, my mind yelling "Danger! Danger! Something's wrong here!"
• Shaving in the shower. OK, not to gross anyone out, but through many decades of showering, I have inadvertently fallen into a pattern of what gets washed in what order, with a little shaving of the armpits and legs thrown in. If I switch anything for any reason, I suddenly can't figure out how, fer crying out loud, to finish cleaning myself! Maybe I want to check if the razor is still sharp enough, so I do a little shaving first. Now my habits say that I'm already done with what's normally done before the shaving, and I continue cleaning from that point. Making a conscious effort to back up and start at an earlier point of cleaning makes my brain scream "Wrong wrong wrong!"

I'm not talking about phobias or obsessions here. Just patterns that my mind has established as "normal" and that I feel uncomfortable about when I dare to breach the pattern. It's OK. I deal with it. I figure it out. I leave the seatbelt off. I get to sleep at night. I come out of the shower clean.

And in none of these cases is what I'm doing ACTUALLY wrong or dangerous or risky; it's just DIFFERENT, but it enables me to (a) remember to close the gate, (b) allows me to sleep on a hot night, and (c) lets me deal with things like an injured hand that has to be kept dry.

There are other things in life that are even less comfortable, and might indeed have some kind of increased risk, but have the potential for greater reward that are also not inherently wrong or actually dangerous. The trick is being able to identify when your mind is giving you incorrect information because it is out of its comfort zone and it doesn't know what to do next.

I mention all this here because I've also been thinking about it in terms of my agility training and competition. I'm not quite sure what it all means yet. Maybe you have similar minor experiences like mine in your own life, or have made great leaps forward in agility by finally doing something that you hadn't dared to do before. Stepping out of your comfort zone.

I'm just thinkin', it's time to get uncomfortable.

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Random Things in April

SUMMARY: The mind wanders. The life wanders.

• Last week it was so cold that I ran the space heater under my desk on several days. Yesterday we beat the all-time temp record for this date, which was set over100 years ago. Hey, people, this is supposed to be April! Dogs don't much care--still wnat me to Throw The Toy--except that when they fetch it, they run and drop it in the shade and wait for me to come get it. This weekend--when we're doing agility again finally, mind you--it's supposed to be cool and very rainy. Unsettled weather: Unsettling.
  
• Last summer I bought a brand new purple Jolly Ball for the back yard. (Well, really, for the dogs, but it lives in the back yard.) The dogs love that toy. Shortly thereafter, it vanished. I looked everwhere, even underneath the miles of shrubbery lining my fence. Nada. Finally gave up and bought a new one.
  
  
  Last week I got to work finishing that trimming job I started...uh...a while back. Guess who's been overwintering 6 feet up in the shelter of the shrubbery? Yes! Mr. Jolly Ball!
  
  Reminds me of the time that Mr. Red Jolly Ball vanished from the yard and I gave up and bought a new one. Came autumn, fruit trees dropped their leaves--and there was Mr.RJB nestling in the branches of the apple tree 15 feet up. (Thought I had a post on this but can't find it. Sorry; know you're disappointed.)
  
  Now--*I* would notice if I tossed a JB into a tree or a shrub. Renter claims that he'd notice, too. OK, you guys, fess up: Who's been sneaking into my yard and tossing JBs into mysterious places?
• Huh--this horrible nasty way overgrown privet, once stripped of its branches (my intention was to remove it entirely--maybe there's be more room for another tunnel?), has apparently self-grafted like crazy. He never listened to Mom Privet saying, "If you keep wrapping your branches around each other like that, they'll freeze that way!" Makes me want to stop sticking my elbow in my ear all the time. Fortunately it did not self-graft itself around Mr. JB. The real problem here is that now I think that this is so cool that I don't want to take it out after all. Sigh. The price one pays for one's art.
• Naming dogs: I take forever to come up with dog names. That's why Jake stayed Jake as he was before i got him, and Remington stayed Remington as he was in his pre-TMH life. Keep threatening to name my next dog Spot or Fido or King or Queenie. ...So...how come no one ever names their dog Kingie or Queen? Is this sexist?
• Just lounging around in the yard, watching the Graf Agility Zeppelin float by.
  
• Painted Ladies recently migrated northward through our area in massive quantities.
  


• We're starting agility class again this Thursday, after a 9-week absence for R&R Woo hoo! Dogs will be much happier. We're just starting some practice again in the yard. Boost is still knocking bars. I've been perhaps less than faithful in doing everything that was recommended during our hiatus. But we did have a good time. Mostly.
• Unemployment rate in Silicon Valley popped up to 11.2%. California overall 11%. Fourth highest in the country among all 50 states. Wasn't high tech supposed to be recession-proof? Agility trial entries are down. Is it the economy, stupid? Or the stupid economy?

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Life

SUMMARY: Taxes, earthquake, agility dangers, necks, bugs, computers...

• There was a 4.3 earthquake not far from here this morning. Wasn't home so don't know whether dogs noticed. But my guess is not. One quick shake and then a little rolling; nothing too disturbing.
• I finally spent the time to get my papers together for the tax guy. I noticed once again that no agility-related or dog-related expenses seem to be tax deductible. Maybe if I were an agility instructor? Or an agility lecturer?
• An agility friend and her dog collided this weekend at an agility trial, she fell and hit her head and was knocked unconscious. Scary. Spent the night in the hospital; she doesn't remember a thing about the incident.
• What are those horrid sort of round bugs that are smaller than the head of a pin that have been infesting my kitchen cupboards now for probably a year? I think they came in in a batch of dog biscuits that weren't sealed up. Maybe 6 months ago, I emptied all the cupboards, threw out several things that had been infested, and put everything else in ziplock bags. But they've beeen increasing with a vengeance. Yesterday I went through the process again. Found 6 things in plastic bags that were infested; two I couldn't tell whether there was an opening in the bags--maybe they were infested when I put them in the bags. The others--they had eaten right through the bags! Another scary thing. Had to toss two supposedly sealed new dog treat things again that they somehow got through the bags.
• Yet another agility friend apparently has a little cattledog with the same neck issues that Tika has. Apparently vet said it's from all the shaking of toys. Boost still shakes things like a 7.6 earthquake when we're tugging, but Tika doesn't much shake things any more (just pulls). Maybe that's because of her neck? The friend says no more shaking toys for her dog. How do you stop it? Argh.
• I still haven't blogged my info from last weekend's trial. Tika did pretty good. But I took a few photos and I've been busy and now my computer's down, so I can't do anything with them. SOMEday I'll talk about last weekend. I took good notes!

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The Domestic Agility Mom

SUMMARY: In which we learn why it's a bad idea for dogs to play tug of war on your bed on which your bed linens also reside. We then focus on our household trimming and ironing skills.

Tika loves to heave large fabricky things (OK, how do you turn "fabric" into an adjective anyway?) around. I gave up trying to get her to stop heaving my comforter around, and instead got her her very own huge dog-type throw that she does. Throw, that is. Every morning. Sometimes she and Boost play a little tug of war with it.

As dogs are not known for their fine grasp (so to speak) of fabric qualities, sometimes apparently they still accidentally confuse my flannel duvet cover with the big furry upholstered dog throw, as Taj MuttHall discovered the other morning after exiting the shower.

Taj MuttHall just bought these sheets a few months ago and is not going to throw them out. No. We are going to repair the rends. Which requires an emergency visit to the once-ubiquitous-but-now-nearly-extinct fabric store. We benefit from our vague cultural memory that, in this colossus of a warehouse store, we need to look for "Notions." Sometimes that's a great idea. (ha ha? That's your obscure Ken Kesey reference for the morning.)

Found Notions. Found iron-on fabric. Not nearly the selection TMH remembers from our youth, shopping in the cave'o'fabric near where the deer and the mastodons play. But bits of white in the multicolored package. No idea what TMH will ever do with navy blue, black, and deep burgundy iron on fabric, but that's what one gets.

Then one trims them to size, and rounds the corners per instructions. Kitchen shears won't do this. Fortunately I still have my old fabric shears from when--in our pre-TMH days--we occasionally wanted to shear fabric. Now they're in our desk drawer for emergency shearing of printer paper or the occasional carpet snag resulting from dog teeth operating in the incorrect place.


The other handy tool for using iron-on fabric is an actual iron. Remember irons? Mine is practically new because I've only used it twice since I got it when I first moved out on my own a couple of years ago. Or was it 1977? I lose track of these details¹.



The instructions also say WARNING! Wash fabric before applying patches! But if you wash it, you know that the frayed edges will fray beyond your wildest nightmares (if you have nightmares about fraying fabric). So what are a few dog hairs among iron-on friends? Now you have to line up the edges to prepare for ironage. This is not so easy as one might suppose, with the stretchable fabric having been stretched a bit during its ordeal. Dang stripes--how can all of them line up except one?


Line up the patches right next to each other so that there are no gaps at all. (You had to use several pieces because the fabric wasn't large enough to do in one full sheet. Don't you like it how I know what you are doing and why?) Now, with the iron plenty preheated to Cotton setting, even though you believe that the sheets aren't exactly completely cotton, you're just following directions, you press for 30 seconds, moving the iron back and forth per instructions.

Learning opportunity #1: when you move the iron back and forth, the tightly aligned patches don't apparently stay that way.
Learning opportunity #2: What's that brown, iron-shaped patch of color that just appeared on my sheet? It'll wash out, won't it?
Won't it?

---

¹(I also lose track of whether we're writing in the first person singular about me the person or third person singular, whether we at TMH are actually singular or plural, whether you're addressing your audience directly, or whether one is referring in general to some third-person entity not directly emotionally involved.)

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In Limbo

SUMMARY: Not much agility training.

It's weird, trying to give Boost a break from doing agility training (meaning seqences or obstacle performance in the yard). Makes me disinclined to practice with Tika, as well. And no classes for a while, since I'm taking a break while working on Boost's possible physical issues.

Just weird.

But my month off from competition ends soon. One more weekend off, then it's two weekends in March of CPE, from which I scratched Boost but left Tika in.

And the premiums are pouring in for USDAA trials coming up. Not sure whether to try to find pairs or team partners for Boost for any of them. If I wait too long, everyone's booked and I have to ask for a draw partner. Which I do sometimes anyway. But it's nice to team with people you know. And because I'm not filling out the entries for Boost, I feel disinclined to fill them out for Tika, either.

Meanwhile, last night we did a brisk 5-or-6-mile hike (2 hours anyway) with the Sierra Club group again, just through the sidewalks around Stanford. Wore shoes that I don't usually wear because I didn't put my light hiking boots back into the van after emptying it while it was at the body shop, and the bottoms of my heels have distinct sore spots this morning. Funny that I can walk a couple of miles in those shoes with no problem, but not 2 to 3 times as much.

Ah, me.

Life is soooooo hard.

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101 Ellenphant Jokes

SUMMARY: Trimming the lemon tree. In the rain. Cold rain.

Last year the lemon tree produced almost no lemons, and they were tiny and dry and malformed and probably Republican, too. And Taj MuttHall did not go out and trim off all those two-story branches shooting straight up into the air. So this year, perhaps flush from Obama's victory, the tree is replete with pleasingly plump fruitage. And the branches start to sag toward the yard, which is bad for the agility because while the dogs can run under the branches, the handler runs face-first into them. Plus then the ground becomes saturated from the rain, and the whole derned tree begins to become overly acquainted with the A-frame.

Then a tremendous wind arises, and the hanging, heavily laden branches start flinging themselves wildly, trying to convince the tree to go over all the way. Fortunately TMH had propped the tree up after the first saggage a couple of weeks back. But today, we must do something about the overladen branches flinging their turgid lemons about.

It is cold. It is wet.

Q: Why did the Ellenphant wear a bright yellow mackintosh?
A: To hide in the lemon tree.
Q: Why did the Ellenphant wear a bright yellow mackintosh and a Cynosport agility hat?
A: To disguise herself as an A-frame.
Q: Why did the Border Collie stare at the Ellenphant in the bright yellow vinyl jacket?
A: She was wondering why the funny-looking tunnel was trying to hide in the lemon tree.

OK, enough flashback to 1960s elephant jokes.
Q: How does the well-prepared agility addict prepare for debranching lemon trees in a storm?
A: Cynosports World Championships hat and Power Paws Agility sweatshirt, of course!

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Four on the Floor

SUMMARY: On hands and knees on the kitchen floor, making the world a better place to live.

The mud comes
on little dog feet.

It spreads slowly
over carpet and flooring
in silent bunches
and then stays there.

      - Carl Mudburg

The agility equipment stands poised in a sea of mud-like substance. The dogs blow in and out through the dog door all day long. It's rained steadily for two days with no sign of letting up for another three. Hey--let's clean the kitchen floor!

Taj MuttHall installed this wonderful flooring that you can hardly tell is dirty. Well---sort of. If you're just passing through and mostly paying attention to the stack of papers on the table or the dogs trying to get between your feet and trip you.


But then--ack--you clean part of it, and then you realize how dog-awful it really is. So you can't just clean up a couple of spots; it's the whole kit and caboodle or nuthin'.

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I'm So Busy Memeing I Can Hardly Think Straight or Ten Or More Things I Learned From My Dog

SUMMARY: Another Facebook tagging fantasy: "Ten things I learned from my dog(s)."

1. To get everyone's immediate attention, roll in something disgusting.
2. Squirrels are the devil.
3. If your ancestry is questionable, claim to be purebred and let them prove otherwise via expensive DNA testing or asking your mom--who'll never give away your secrets and doesn't speak English anyway.
4. Life is like hunting gophers: Dig and dig and dig and dig until you realize you're not going to reach that goal, then go do something else and let other people clean up the mess.
5. Roofrats are the devil.
6. The boss doesn't like to lie in a bed covered with dog hair. Shed everywhere, and the whole thing is yours.
7. If it fits in your mouth, it's edible.
8. The mailman is the devil.
9. Bathing is overrated. (See also #1.)
10. Photographers love it when you show them your butt.
11. "No!" means "yes!"
12. Even though your keen sense of smell reveals what bully sticks are made from, it doesn't really matter because they still taste darned good.
13. Don't mess with Jim Basic's lawn.
14. The devil hates it when you bark like a rabid wombat and throw yourself against the plate-glass picture window, so do it as often as possible to drive him away. Everyone will thank you for it in a loud and excited voice.

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Random Things in February

SUMMARY: new glasses, daylight, weave poles, deck training, rain vs. mud...

Glasses:
My last 2 pairs of glasses have become so badly scratched that I could barely see through them. I don't know how this happens. I'm very careful to follow the instructions--don't rub them when they're dry (always wet them first), try to blow any loose dust away first, dry them only with cotton or microfiber fabric. I wear them all day so they're not being set down anywhere, and I always set them down lenses up at night. How do they get scratched?

I got my brand-new pair last week and I've been bound and determined that this pair will NOT be scratched. I have been super-careful not to touch the lenses at all. I've cleaned them once with glasses-cleaning fluid and the supplied microfiber fabric, and once with water and hand soap and a cotton hand towel. And both lenses have 3 scratched on them. This is so frustrating. At this rate, they're not going to last 6 months even.

Daylight: Badda-bing, just like that, today it's light enough when the renter comes home for him to go out back and throw the ball for the dogs and tire them out some more. Hallelujah! Wasn't it just last week that it was too dark at 5:30? Love it when we've passed the winter solstice, that slow climb back to daylight.

Boost's weave poles: Today I've tried everything I can think of to get boost to pop out of the weaves early or to skip a pole on the entry, both of which she did repeatedly this weekend. Succeeded in the latter with only one ploy, and then she got it. Couldn't repeat the former at all. I hate smart-ass dogs.

Deck training: The back of my house has a raised deck with a staircase and a railing. Very early on, I taught Boost to "go up on the deck" and wait there while the other dogs and I worked on doing agility. It wasn't too hard--she was small enough to squeeze through the railing, and when she'd do so, I'd pick her up and make her squeeze back through it, which she really hated. Now she'll dash back and forth watching us, but she doesn't come down.

Tika's a different matter. Have always clipped her to a leash on a hook, where she proceeds to bark her head off. Sometimes I can tell her to just go away or go lie down, which apparently means go patrol the yard for squirrels and other terrorists, but often that ends with her appearing suddenly as Boost is blasting out of a tunnel and meeting Boost head-on (deliberately).

So I've been working on "go up on the deck" with her; figure that if she's 8 and can earn 25 masters gamblers Qs, she can learn to do that on command, too. She can't fit through the railing so I can't make the punishment for leaving seem quite as severe or appropriate. If I close the door to the stairs, she barks. We seem to be making some progress with treats for good behavior (the food-motivated dog). I feel like it's still a broken behavior, but last week the renter saw it in action and said, "Wow, I'm really impressed with Tika's 'go up on the deck'. I've never seen that before and she was so well behaved!" So apparently I'm making more progress than I had realized.

A good reminder to pay attention to one's successes and to not focus on the failures. I'm tryin'!

Rain vs. mud: We really desperately need rain. We're looking almost for sure at rationing this year if we don't get a lot more in the next couple of months (it doesn't usually rain much, if any, between March/April and late September/October). But my yard is just now dry enough from the last rain a week and a half ago that my dogs no longer automatically come in from the yard with muddy feet that I have to clean. I like them having clean(ish) feet. I don't want my yard to be muddy again.

Rain is supposed to reappear Wednesday or Thursday. Agh. Mud. Bleah.

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Thanks For the Cake -- Maybe Next Time Some Qs?

SUMMARY: USDAA weekend summary.

We're back from our USDAA weekend at VAST in Turlock, where I had to scrape ice off the score tables Saturday morning before we could use them. The VAST location is always nice to play agility at despite the chill (warmed up later), but let's say that this was not one of our high-Qing weekends.

Out of 10 classes, Boost Qed in exactly zero. Sadly, this is not the first time that she's had a no-Qer, but really they're not THAT frequent (2 last year out of 18, for example). Still, I'm glad I have Tika to encourage my continued participation: She at least managed 3 of 10.

She did not get either the Grand Prix or the Steeplechase--the first was just a hard course that wiped out many dogs (we had a runout and a bar but no off course); the latter she knocked the bar on the triple just two jumps from the end, arghhh! So now we have to wait until April for another chance for that one last leg for the Tournament Platinum.

However, in a surprise push to finish her Silver Gamblers Championship--that's 25 masters gamblers Qs--she got the one last weekend, repeated it this weekend in what turned out to be almost exactly the same gamble, plus one more to boot, for 3 out of 3 and that's 25. Woo hoo! I hadn't expected that so quickly--

And she had a very respectable Snooker on Saturday, although missing a super-Q--again, that amazingly top-flight 26" class! For those 26ers, consider for example today's gamble: only 5 of 18 of the 26" dogs got the gamble, for 28%--but only 7 of **38** 22" dogs got it, for a mere 18%.

Tika did place 4th with all 3 of those Qs, versus 19, 14, and 18 dogs, earning...wow...1 Top Ten point for each. But at least I can say that we earned *some*, so that I can feel validated as a human being (now you know what it takes).

Boost had some credible runs--for example, her Gamblers opening on Saturday was truly lovely, earning more than the dog who eventually won the class, but we didn't quite connect on the gamble: She did half of the hard part, which stymied quite a few dogs, but we didn't get the 2nd hard part.

In the really bad news category, Boost's weaves seem to be broken again at both ends and Tika has gone back to knocking bars as much or more than Boost. Always something to work on, as They say, but I wish that sometimes They would say once you've fixed something, it stays fixed.

In the really good fun news category, the VASTards showed up with a birthday cake for me so that everyone could share it, and when I went out for dinner with some friends (to escape the cold for a little while), they bought me dinner (agility people are the best! I wish I could remember to be as nice to other people as they are to me!), AND to top it off, Boost's littermate Bette finished her ADCH on our shared birthday. And how cool is *that*?

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25 Things About Me, and 25 More

SUMMARY: Another homework assignment from Facebook.

There's this thing going around on facebook. It's like a virus. You post 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about yourself, then you tag 25 other people to do the same. It can be pretty interesting. But you can't just open up facebook notes to the entire world like I can with TMH, so I don't post there.

Plus, I don't place the tagging onus on others; I like to let people volunteer. So this doesn't have to be in FB anyway.

But what the heck who doesn't like talking about herself? Perhaps it'll reveal something new to herself, some innermost meaning, desire, or strength that she hasn't previously discerned? But to post on Taj MuttHall, it's supposed to be dog related, according to the rules that she makes up as she goes along.

So here, forthwith, are 25 Random Dog Things About Me:

1. Used to like cats more than dogs. Until we got our first dog.
2. I'd rather play with my dogs than groom them. Where'd all this dog hair come from?
3. Six of the eight dogs I've ever cohabited with have been mixed breeds.
4. I've earned the equivalent of 11 agility championships: Jake in NADAC (twice over), CPE, USDAA (championship and performance), and ASCA (although almost all those legs duplicated the NADAC legs); Remington in NADAC; Tika in CPE and Bronze Ch in USDAA (triple ADCH).
5. My Siberian Husky lived to be 17. She had one litter of puppies after we adopted her from the pound at about a year's age.
6. I promoted and chaired the first-ever Bay Team CPE trial. A brief pause now for acceptance of thanks or curses.
7. Herding dogs rock.
8. I created my first web page in 1995, same year I started agility lessons. Taj MuttHall was fated to become!
9. Kibble: Yes. Raw: No.
10. Ideal dog: Not really sure. None of mine have been perfect, but I've loved them all and miss the ones that are gone.
11. Minivans: Bleah. Only because I regularly haul dog butts around (MUTT MVR).
12. Blue merles forever!
13. For 2 years on wikipedia, I spearheaded the dog breed project to expand, edit, and standardize all dog-related articles--of which there were only a couple dozen when I started. I created the first version of the dog agility article. I created or edited virtually every dog-related article during that time. I have 85 dog-related photos there.  Go look. (User:Elf)
14. I competed in 65 agility trials before I ever bought myself a canopy. Sun umbrellas and sheets worked fine. You canopy wimps don't know real roughing-it!
15. I love teaching dogs tricks. Remington won a few small tricks contests. I'd like to spend more time teaching tricks to Tika and Boost but somehow instead spend it honing agility skills. For all that gets me.
16. Wanna see my childhood dog scrapbook?
17. Big yella dogs forever!
18. Agility trials entered: 206. Runs run: 3,052. Qs earned: 1157. NQs for leaving the collar on: 2, both Jake, darn that long hair! Bars knocked between Jake and Remington: About 5. Bars knocked between Tika and Boost: Oh, good lord, why would you ask such a thing?
19. My dogs have all learned to hold biscuits on their noses. Even the Siberian. Boost is still an apprentice. Remington could balance almost anything on his nose. I'm sure he thanked my friend's Nikki-dog regularly for first showing me that trick.
20. I have a clicker in every room of my house, in my car, and in my yard. I rarely use them these days.
21. My dogs sleep on my bed. I love it and I hate it.
22. Number of times Jim Basic has used my dogs' before/after gambling statistics in his seminars as an example of how well his distance training works: Many.
23. I had ugly experiences with AKC trainers with my first dog and I've learned so many more reasons to dislike AKC since then.
24. Spaying and neutering dogs and cats should be encouraged but not required. Cosmetic docking and cropping of dogs' tails and ears should be illegal. 
25. I take all my agility ribbons home and hang them on the wall.

And now, since there are parts of me that aren't attached at the hip to my dogs, here are 25 Random Nondog Things About Me:

1. Found a human body once while backpacking with the Girl Scouts. They didn't have a badge for that.
2. I played flute and took lessons for 12 years. I was almost pretty good. 
3. That enabled me to march in the Cal Band, one of the great experiences of my life.
4. I'd love to take voice lessons.
5. Glen Campbell enthralled me in junior high school. They didn't have a badge for that, either.
6. I was picked on terribly in the 3rd-6th grades by the horrific Nancy S and her "in" cronies. It really hurt.
7. Color of my teen years bedroom furniture: Blue and purple. Colors at my wedding: Blue and purple. Colors on display everywhere in Macy's this season: Blue and purple. W00t!
8. I still buy stamps for my stamp collection and postcards for my postcard collection even though they just go into a big box. They did have a badge for that. (Collecting, not boxing.)
9. I earned the Sign of the Arrow and the Sign of the Star in girl scouts. Pretty high honors. A couple of years later, I quit.
10. Shoe shopping: Gag me with a spoon.
11. In high school speech and debate, I earned the National Forensic League's Double Ruby, the highest pin available at that time, and in my senior year made it to the state finals in Extemporaneous. 
12. Seven No Trump. Doubled. Redoubled. Vulnerable.
13. I'm the oldest of 5 sisters.
14. My geek code is  GCS/CC/M/TW$/O d- s+: a++ C++$>--- UBLHS P+ L>+ E--- W+++$ N o? K? w$>--- !O M++$ V PS++ PE+@ Y PGP t !5 X- !R tv-- b++>+++ DI++++ !D G e++ h-- r x?  Use THAT to find out more about me. This should count for about 40 items right here.
15. As long as I'm at it, I've programmed in SPL, Basic, FORTRAN, Ada, Jovial, Pascal, PL/1, ALGOL, various assemblers, machine code, COBOL, C, Java, Javascript, PERL... and probably some others that I thankfully don't remember. Don't ask me to do it now. But I can currently whack out some rugged HMTL.
16. My 512K Mac is still in my attic.
17. No-bake fondant! Mmmmm!
18. From July 2004 through March 2006 on Wikipedia, only between 200-300 people had ever made more edits than I had. Fortunately, I recovered. 
19. Style guide quantity in my office: at least 25. Quantity read most of the way through: Most.
20. Places lived: 18 different buildings in 9 different cities in 3 states. I've set foot in almost every US state except Alaska.
21. Sold two fiction short stories. Started dog agility. Sudden change in obsession.
22. Abortion should be safe and legal. Gay marriage should be safe and legal. Curse you, Red Baron! Go Bears!
23. Once upon a time, I could recite all of Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant". While playing some of the guitar background.
24. My fastest time for a Mercury-News crossword in the last 2 years is 3 minutes and 47 seconds.
25. Household dragon count: 262 and climbing. Yes, thanks for asking, it does include a dragon-head stapler and a dragon-shaped toilet-seat lid.

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Throw the Book At That Dog

SUMMARY: Compare and contrast: Powell's City of Books vs Taj MuttHall's unincorporated village of books.

One thing I did while in Portland--which is required if you ever go to Portland, you have sign an affidavit before you leave town that you've done it--is go to Powell's City of Books. This is bookstore paradise (you could lose yourself blissfully for hours just browsing) and bookstore hell (why do I always suddenly own 42 more books than I did just a couple of hours ago?). It is amazing beyond amazing words. It is the largest new/used bookstore in the known civilized universe, Jupiter included. It has sucked up an entire city block--and more than one floor of it, too. Without remodeling, either, so you kind of go up and down and around and in and out through holes in what used to be the walls; no redecorating, either, except by the application of bookshelves to everything that vaguely resembles a vertical surface, and all of the space in between.

And everything is SO organized and SO neat--all the book spines are pulled neatly even with each other so that you can browse easily while adding to your stack of 42 books. And there's an extrahumanly helpful person at the helpful person booth in every room. PLus they have little tags dangling from all the shelves that tell you their personal opinions about books, or useful facts, or helpful lists of all the books in a series so that you don't go home with Episode 3 missing from the middle.

You can get an online tour to get you in the mood, and you can even take a real tour when you get there, and pick up a map at any Helpful Person Info desk so you don't get too lost. For those who want to remember their day in paradise/hell, you can even buy souvenirs.

Some of us walked over there our last afternoon in town so's we'd be able to sign our Powell's affidavit, and I thought I'd just kinda look around for old times sake, but it turns out that (a) if you don't want to carry your books on the plane, the cashier is all set up to cheerfully mail your books for you anywhere you want them mailed. In a jiffy or even a trice. Even 42 of them. And (b) we got to Powell's around 2:00, a 10-minute stroll from the hotel, and I had to be back by 5:15 to meet my sister-out-law for dinner, and I almost missed the whole thing. A little looking around, my astronomical unit.

Here is what they have in the way of dog books (and we're not even talking favorite fiction like Jim Kjelgaard or Albert Peyson Terhune): not merely one monolithic bookcase, 4 feet wide by 8 feet tall so that I can barely reach the books on the upper shelf. Not two. Not three, but six and a half of those sections.


I'm not sure how long I spent browsing the books. Maybe 5 minutes. Maybe 95. So many books. New and used side by side so you can save money without any extra effort. Sitting on the floor (which was invitingly clean) half the time.


One fun thing was to note that, on every shelf, there were at least 2 or 3 books that I already owned. So perhaps it's not surprising that, after all that woofer-book browsing, I did not buy a single book from that section.

Because I have my own little burgeoning mini-Powell's woofer-book section. Not only does it have several shelves of woofer books, but it has little ceramic plaques with clever dog-related sayings (e.g., "DOG") on them, and a couple of very nice cedar boxes containing the only earthly remains of former Taj MuttHallers Jake and Remington, plus my childhood favorite china statuettes of a German Shepherd and a Collie, plus various awards and mementos--although I don't have any big dog agility trophies like the Power Paws overflowing awards display or other similar talented agility friends, still, it's a collection of randomness that's starting to fill up a shelf all by itself.

So, remember that you can always click on a photo here to see a larger version of it if you want to browse bowser titles yourself. In preparation for your own trip to the world-famous Powell's City of Books.

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Making the World Safe--

SUMMARY: --for dogs and other living things.

I step away from the agility field for just a moment.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

And now, a quote from a man who knows his history: My President Said That.

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Agility Dogs Run Errands

SUMMARY: Visiting the credit union and the grocery store.

Holy Dachsbracke, boys and girls, it's Jan 8 already! We have a USDAA trial in just 2 weeks! And what have we done for agility practice to shape up all those Issues from last year? Have we done our bar-knocking drills? Reinvigorated our 2o2o contacts? Tuned up our serpentines? Honed our gamblers distance work? No no no!

I have been doing this Miserable Cold thing for a week and a half now, going up and down, now on the uphill I think--I hope--cough's still hanging in there, but mostly I can work around that. So we haven't had class since Dec 18; we'll have class tonight if it doesn't rain (iffy), and class next week, and then I'm out of town the entire 7 days before the trial, so there will be NO NO NO agility practice the entire week!

The trial is only 1 day, 5 Masters classes; should be interesting to see whether we can do ANYthing.

So, today, to get in the right mind-set for agility, we went to the shopping center. First, we dropped in on the credit union to deposit some money so that our entry fee check doesn't bounce. The shopping center's decor, intriguingly, includes a vinyard that wraps around the buildings, right next to the sidewalk on a busy street.

Actual California grapes grow there. I don't know what happens to them; apparently not all of them get picked even though they're right next to a busy thoroughfare. Here is what dried grapes look like on a winter grapevine. I know you wanted to know.

If I did not have easily bored dogs who need a change of scenery, I would never get a chance to walk around shopping centers and discover fascinating things like that! But fortunately my agility dogs take their inquisitive noses and me on brisk walks around the perimeters. Some of these centers are quite large. And there is SO much to analyze, out there in the natural wonderland that is shopping center landscaping.

Native grasses.

Groundcover all a-flower (love winter in California!)

Shrubberies surrounded by "winter color"--pansies, cyclamen, little--uh--purple flowers--

Pizza boxes (love winter in California!).

Ah, yes, it's the 8th of January, and this is what's springing to life at our very own shopping center:

Then the agility dogs give me a shopping list for the grocery store. Do I ever complain about having trouble maintaining my girlish figure? It is the shopping lists that the agility dogs write up for me. It is my theory that they are trying to ensure that I always have a desperate need to be physically active with them, and that's why these sorts of things end up in my kitchen.

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Dogz Yardz Dragonz Toyz

SUMMARY: A busy afternoon out in the back 4. (Not enough space to be 40.)

Note 1: OK, yes, I am really stupidly going to upload 32 photos to Blogger, 2 at a time. I hate this photo interface except that it conveniently resizes them and makes thumbnails.

The shrubbery has gotten out of hand. And out of feet. And probably arms and legs, too. All 90 feet of it. Here is quite a bit less than all 90 of its feet. There is a fence in there somewhere. I swear it.

This is what I am prepared to do.

This is what Tika really wants me to do.

Boost's darned ear doesn't understand the proper way for an ear to behave in public.

Mr. Rusty Yard Dragon is being overgrown by Mr. out-of-hand shrubbery. However, he remains silent on the matter.

Mr. Triceratops is not, technically, a dragon. He is a token dinosaur-that-might-be-dragon-like-kinda. He sleeps with the gravels that the dogs slide through, pushing them up gradually until they mostly cover Mr. T and then I unbury him. He continues to sleep. Extinction is like that.

I think Tika is gorgeous. Whether or not she's all Aussie. Someday--maybe--the DNA test.


Boost is pretty gorgeous herself.

What Boost likes to do while I am trimming shrubs. Waiiiiiiiting--



until I toss a branch, and then--leap and grab! Leap and grab! ...Leap! and Grab! ...






Then--waiiiiiitingggggg....


...and leap and grab!



Tika does not get this game.

This is what Tika really wants me to do.

This is what happens to the nifty yard-waste basket that you can collapse into a flat package and store neatly in the shed, when you leave it uncollapsed and sitting out conveniently in the yard 24/7 for several years where you can get at it at a moment's notice to toss yard clippings into.

Leap and grab!



The shrubbery is looking so much better. Only another--uh--70 feet to go.

Mr. Rusty Yard Dragon is no longer being devoured by overgrown shrubberies. However, he remains silent on the matter.

I like Mr. Rusty Yard Dragon (for short, I fondly call him: Mr. Rusty Yard Dragon) because he looks cool and he's supposed to be rusty so he takes no maintenance. Just hangs around.

Really, Tika wants me to do this.

Boost wouldn't mind some of that, plus agility tunnels would be cool, plus her ear is inside out. Again.

Leap and grab!

This is what I should really be doing, according to Tika.

This is a history of what happens to purple Jolly Balls in our particular back yard.

#1 slowly developed little cracks from all the sharp doggie teeth digging into it to play fetch and/or tug-of-war day after day, week after week, month after month... but it is still throwable, fetchable, and tug-of-warable, and is really floppy so is fun to shake if you're a dog who likes to shake things, so we can't get rid of it yet. #2 unfortunately developed a problem with the handle, as in it is no longer there. Plus it got left on the patio in 100+-degree heat, and that concavity thing is what results. #3 is slowly developing cracks, too. Plus it got left on the patio on another 100+-degree day. It does not roll so well any more. #4 is our current experimental subject. #5 is also apparently experimental, because it vanished about 7 days after it had been put, brand new, into this very back yard. We have had 2 dogs and 2 people looking for it off and on for months. It has experimentally vanished into some odd backyard thin air.

Could the shrubbery have eaten it? The shrubberies are very overgrown-- I CAN take a photo at 1/10 of a second without a tripod, I can I can I can! ...Or maybe only if you squint and look at it in really small resolution so you can't see how fuzzy it is...Does this look like a JollyBall-eating shrub to you?

I am not complaining about tonight's sunset. Over the neatly trimmed 20 feet of shrubbery.

Now I can see the neighbor's tree house against the sky in the leafless winter tree.
Note 2: OK, yes, this photo upload process was astonishingly tedious and time-consuming. Plus reviewing images, moving them to match text--Bleah--Blogger is NOT designed for posting photos. In future, must revert to diverting you-all to my Smugmug for bigger photo collections.

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Marley and Not Me

SUMMARY: Why I won't watch this dog movie.

It's Christmas, and I'm not really feeling melancholy, but this post turned out that way. Fair warning.

So many wonderful-looking films are coming out today, and quite a few wonderful ones have come out earlier in the year. I love going to the theater to see movies. It's the ambiance, the total immersion in nothing but the film in the darkness of the movie house. It's getting out of my house. It's not having to share my popcorn with the dogs.

I saw Milk--even though I knew the ending--because it reviewed well, it was local history that I lived through, and the topic is so relevant here and now in California waiting and hoping that the state Supreme Court will toss Proposition 8.

I will go see Gran Torino, even though I know it's violent, because Clint Eastwood both acts and directs, he's tremendously talented at both, his violence is always to a purpose, and his films are gripping and leave me thinking.

I will go see Doubt, although it's intense and deals with difficult subjects, because the cast is superb and because it deals with difficult subjects in an apparently interesting way.

I will probably go see Valkyrie, even though the initial ratings aren't good, and even though it's got some violence, because how Hitler got so many people to do so many bad things has always intrigued me, and it would be nice to get a glimpse into the lives or minds of some who didn't let the wool be pulled over their eyes.

I saw Bolt because I love well-done animated family films.

I saw Bolt a second time because it was a well-done animated family film that perfectly captured the personalities of dogs and--duh--I love dogs. Even though the scenes where he's separated from his human were very difficult for me. (Maybe *I'm* the one in my canine family with separation anxiety.)

I did not see Eight Below, even though I had a husky for 16 years and I love dogs and adventure films-- because I had a husky for 16 years and I love dogs. I cannot bear to see dogs in danger; I cannot bear to imagine how confused and disturbed dogs are when humans treat them in ways that dogs can't possibly understand.

And I will not see Marley and Me. Because it's about having a dog in your life, and falling in love with it, and watching it die. I've done that too many times in real life, and now, as part of a larger dog-owning community, I've done it vicariously far too many times, and thank you very much, I have no compulsion at all to relive any of that "for fun."

Love your dogs every day; you never know when there's a tomorrow that they suddenly won't be in despite how good they look today. (Bay Team dogs suddenly gone in 2008: Homer, 2 years old today, gone tomorrow. Tack, 6 today, gone tomorrow. Cammi, 5 today, gone in 3 weeks. Honey, 9 today, gone in 4 weeks. Whoopi, 5 today, gone tomorrow.)

Love your family and friends, too--such a gift when you have them. And such a boon to have when the dogs in your life depart. Hug everyone you love today or as soon as you get a chance.

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ME WANT MORE PLAY

SUMMARY: How I can tell that I haven't given the dogs what they need yet for the day.

Because this is what I see when I look over from my desk through the sliding door into the back yard.

And this is what I see when I look up from my desk through the railing into the kitchen.

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Trimming the Tree

SUMMARY: Of course I mean literally.

I like Christmas trees with room inside to hang ornaments. Because I have a lot of ornaments. And because ornaments that lie at an angle down the outside because the branches are so thick don't count as "hanging." That's more like lying on the tree. And who wants to encourage lying at Christmas?

If I could afford it and could find them every year, I'd always get a silver tip (AKA abies magnifica). But they don't grow 'round these here parts, apparently don't grow well in many places, grow really slowly anyway, and they cost a purty penny when thems getsk here.

Second best is noble firs (AKA abies procera); sometimes you can find them almost as nicely openly layered as the silver tips if you spend a lot of time looking in various lots and paying more than average moolahs. But often they're just barely open in some places but too dense in others. Like Mr. Tree who came home with me this year.

So a little thinning to correct to bring out the open beauty that it really wants to display is sometimes necessitated. (Compare to previous photo of unthinnedness.)

And this is so much easier than fixing a bar-knocking problem with TWO individual dogs.

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Digital Photography at Agility Trials

SUMMARY: Here's what I hate about digital photography.

In "the old days", when a photographer shot photos at an agility trial, the usual routine was to shoot all day Saturday, print the photos overnight, then make them available Sunday by posting, stuffing into albums, or just putting into boxes for you to leaf through.

I could spend maybe 5 minutes, usually less, looking at the photos to identify my dogs. If I liked the shot, I whipped out $6, bought it, took it home, and put it into my album.

Compare and contrast:

Digital photography has put the onus of work on the dog-agility buyer. Understand that I do a lot of digital photography and I spend hours going through my photos, tweaking most individually, labeling them, and uploading them to my photo site. But some--if not most--photographers at trials do only the uploading, with minimal or no sorting and minimal or no editing of any of the files. And they take a whole lot more photos now than they did then, too.

So, instead of maybe 2 to 5 minutes at the trial, now I wait until the photos are available, days or weeks later. Then I scan through barely legible thumbnails on sometimes hundreds of pages containing hundreds or thousands of photos, trying to identify my dogs. Thank goodness that all of my dogs so far have been easier to recognize in thumbnails than, say, black and white border collies, or shelties, or corgis. But it's still a challenge at thumbnail size. It takes real concentration.

For example, I just spent an hour and a quarter going through one photographer's photos of a recent show, and that's without finding anything that I particularly wanted to buy.

If you find a photo of your dog, you click the thumbnail to display a new page to confirm what the photo looks like somewhat enlarged. But of course it's still not quite the same as what you'll see in print; I've been disappointed a couple of times. If you like it, then you click the "buy" button. Then you fill out what size you want and whether you want it cropped and so on, then click the add to cart button. Always waiting for the pages to load, which even on broadband often takes time.

Then you find your way back to the thumbnail page that you were browsing and continue, repeating the whole process for every photo that you're possibly interested in.

Then you go to your shopping cart, fill out all your personal info, go to the payments screen, pay for it via paypal or credit card, meaning that you're going to have to deal with that payment later when it comes due. And you pay postage, which often isn't trivial--it usually makes it so that buying just one photo makes that photo seem amazingly expensive.

Then you wait a week or so for the photos to show up in the mail--which means that someone somewhere is spending the time to package and label them, and ship them, and there's the material used for the shipping container, which now most likely goes right into the recycling bin.

And furthermore, most (not all) photographers charge a stunning fee for the photos. No $6 or $8 prints. We're talking sometimes as much as $20 for 4x6 prints, here. I mean, really. They promote them as works of art, I guess, that are color corrected and cropped and all that. They must get buyers, because they keep doing it. But I resent having to spend all that time and then PAY SOMEONE ELSE more than I used to spend on snapshots. The ones who are still in the under-$10 range are particularly the ones who don't seem to sort (for quality) or do any precropping or anything like that. OK, I can put up with some of that for a lower price.

But I can't even offer to process and print them myself to save $; most photographers charge at least as much for the digital version of a photo on the assumption that then you could, heaven forfend, print as many copies of the photo in any size that you want and THEY wouldn't get any more money for it.

And many of them sell photos through a photo service, removing some of the advantage of dealing in digital--no individual dealing or edits or anything. For example, I recently won cert's for about 6 free photos from one photographer who was generous enough to donate them to various raffles. But I found out afterwards that (a) you can apply only one cert per order and (b) you can apply it only to the photo, not to the postage and handling. And the photographer said, sorry, that's the way it's set up.

From a business perspective, I guess I can understand that. But now i have free cert's that will probably never be used. I guess that makes the photographer happy, too: Looks like a nice guy but never has to deliver.

And are the photos I get any better than the ones I used to get? I'd argue not--because in the day, I bought only the ones I liked that turned out well anyway. Do the photographers make more money at it and are they happier about it? OK, unhappy customer, happy photographers. You figure out how often I buy photos of my dogs any more. Makes me sad, but thank goodness for friends who like to dabble in photography and sometimes do it at agility trials, or I'd have nothing.

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Chewing

SUMMARY: I've been a little stressed lately and needed a constructive way to channel my gnashing of teeth.

"So, Teek, ol' buddy ol' pal, can you explain this chewing-the-bully-stick thing?"


[[Ummm...can I go now?]] "C'mon pleeeze oh c'mon pleeeeeeeeezzzze???"


[[Maybe if I ignore her, she'll go away.]] "OK, like this? With the stick between my paws? Am I doin' it right? huh? am I? huh huh? Am I?"

[[I'm really not believing this--]] "Gnarrrr arrrrgh rrarr grnarrr..."


Somehow it was less satisfying than I had expected.

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Mom is Home and Improving

SUMMARY: Sounds so much better. Still things to follow up on.

The assorted drugs led to side effects that led to dehydration that led to really bad dehydration that led to brief renal failure and two and a half days in the hospital. She went home Sunday morning. I talked to her last night on the phone, and her voice and her words are completely mom again. She's still weak and still has the original pain that the doctors can't explain yet. More investigations forthcoming eventually, but they're taking it easy on her kidneys for a while.

I am so relieved that she's home and back to dealing with "only" severe pain and recovery from all the side effects, not loss of mental capacity and bodily shut downs. I'm sure she is, too. And my dad and my sisters.

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Mom's Getting Better

SUMMARY: Being off drugs helps; being in hospital helps.

Sisters report that, two days after being taken off the drugs I was most suspicious of, her voice has come back and she seems to be mentally completely Mom again. Plus now she's in the hospital getting IV fluids and meds to deal with some other snowballing nasty side effects. I'm hoping she'll be home again within a day or so and completely back to normal. More tests are pending.

Drugs she was taken off of were Vicodin and oxybutynin (thanks, dad).

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Competition This Weekend

SUMMARY: USDAA trial, and it's going to be warm.

I'll be in Turlock this weekend for a USDAA competition. And it's going to be pretty warm; can you believe these temperatures for mid-November?

Tomorrow is supposed to break a 70-year-old temperature record for this date in San Jose by at least a couple of degrees. What ever happened to "the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh through the white and drifted snow" for Thanksgiving? --Oh, yeah, I'm in California.

I've practiced pretty much nothing with the dogs all week, just running them in wild circles mostly through the 3 tunnels in my yard. If we were still doing NADAC, we'd be all set for the Tunnelers class, except that Boost still doesn't get the idea of a rear cross going into a tunnel. I'm practically tripping over her before she goes in to give the idea that I'm crossing to the other side, and she doesn't seem to get it. I'll think of something to try.

I dragged out a set of 6 weave poles yesterday and set them up against the back of the lot so the only way into them is at a 90 degree angle and we played with that a bit. Both dogs need work, but neither were terrible at it.

I've been worried about my mom's health; I think that some medications weren't appropriate for her. Doctors have changed that, among other things, and hopefully she'll be on an upward curve within a few days. I've been so lucky with my parents that they've been reasonably healthy and active, especially for people approaching 80. Mom's birthday is in 2 weeks. It would be nice if she were back to her normal self for the family Thanksgiving gathering.

And I've been looking at retirement-plus-continued-care places with my Dad. At one of them, saw someone walking a dog, and it suddenly became important to me to find out whether they allowed pets of any kind. My parents don't have pets these days. But I do! What if I wanted to retire at a young and perky age and take my dogs with me? The lady giving our tour doesn't do pets, so she wasn't sure whether there were limitations, but said she knew people there who had multiple cats or small dogs. Small dogs! Hah! These would be 12" agility dogs, or maybe 8". Not like REAL dogs. Present company excepted, I'm sure.

Trial Size

This is sort of a trial-size trial. Only about 60 dogs in all of Masters, about 10 in Advanced, about 8 in Starters. Wow. That's like trials when I first started agility, where Remington would be the only dog in his height in Starters.

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Divesting

SUMMARY: Trying to have Less Stuff

Ever since the last time I moved and was horrified at how much Stuff I owned--even after my Ex got a chunk of it--I've been trying to divest. It's hard. I like my Stuff.

Every month I seem to get rid of something, but every month I also seem to find things that I just have to have, which I then have to add to my inventory database. I try not to. But it's hard. I like my Stuff.

I finally made the goal a couple of months ago that, by the end of 2009, I'd own 25% less Stuff. And I've been poking away at that goal ever since. This is REALLY hard! I REALLY like my stuff! And it's becoming clear that my goal is a little unclear, too. Is it 25% less Stuff by volume? By value? By item quantity? If I keep all my books, do I have to get rid of all my Christmas decorations to make up for it? If I keep all my furniture, do I have to get rid of all my dog agility equipment to make up for it? This is like an immense puzzle in figuring out how to interpret what I really wanted and what I really meant.

And speaking of puzzles--I love doing jigsaw puzzles and I own a large ton of them, many of which I've bought since I sold the previous house in November 2000, which was the last time that I actually DID a jigsaw puzzle. So do I get of all of them because I haven't touched them in 8 years? Do I pick a few favorites that I've done more than once in the past because I enjoyed them? Do I pick a few new ones that I haven't yet done and hang onto them for that emergency spurt of jigsaw neediness?

Even my dogs have Stuff. We used to get Thanks For Coming check-in goodies at every trial (fortunately that seems to have mostly gone by the wayside), and I accrued so many toys that way. Plus we go through favorites, and I stock up on them, and something happens: Remington used to go through those ropes with knots in them, so I bought a ton, and then when he was about 3 or 4, he completely lost interest in ropes. I still have a bunch. He liked the soft furry "flippy" frisbees, and I bought a ton of them. Then cancer took him. Jake loved the soft plastic spiny squeaky toys, like the little porcupines and other similar shapes. He'd squeak one like crazy for a few weeks, then tear it to pieces. I stocked up on soft plastic spiny squeakies--and then he died very suddenly. Things like that.

Over the last 2 years, I've donated a bunch to our club's worker raffle and given away a bunch at the holiday gift exchange of BOTH agility clubs of which I am a member.

Today I gathered all the dog toys from all the places I've had them stashed and organized them across the living room floor. Holy cow. Or holy dog. I'm guessing there are millions of children in the world who have fewer toys than my dogs. (Remember that you can click on a photo to see a larger version of it to make out more details.)


Many of my stash are new, unused, still with labels or very lightly used. Some are old and battered but I don't want to toss because my dogs like those in particular, such as, for instance, the plush squeaky that used to be a--um--never sure--mouse in an easter egg?--that Tika still loves, even though there's no squeaky, no stuffing, it's just a floppy plush well-worn body.

So should I give away all the brand new ones? What about the somewhat used ones? It'll take me years to go through them all. I'm getting better about tossing the various parts that come off of various toys, even though some of those parts are brand new and are larger than some of the individual brand-new toys themselves. But, still... so much!

Tons of tug toys of various manufacture--ropes, snakes, floppy plush things. Bones to stuff with peanut butter. Kongs and similar objects to stuff with treats. Squeaky plastic toys. Squeaky plush toys. Chew toys (which my dogs have never been interested in chewing; they all prefer sticks from the yard). Frisbees of many varieties, including a bunch of hard plastic matching ones when I thought for a little while that I might start doing Disk Dog, even a sheep-shaped one. Dumbbell shapes, both squeaky and solid. Balls--squeaky, soft, tennis, solid, kickable. Bait bags, tug'n'treats, and toys with velcro openings, all of which you can put treats in and use to encourage dogs to play with toys if they're inclined not to--which was Remington, which is why I have so many of them. Already gave away quite a few of those, but still have many left. Toys that make noises other than squeaking, which Tika particularly seems to like, but the mechanisms never last very long, and I hate to toss a toy that's practically new. Latticework balls--I like those for fetch; they throw, but not really far, they're lightweight, they're easy to tug with--and eventually the lattice breaks. The Jolly Ball of which we always have to have one in the yard and we play with it every day. Tika in particular loves that one; Boost'll play with anything although she defaults to that one because we play with it with Tika. And on and on.

Boost and Tika are dyin' out in the hallway looking at the wonderland of dog toys spread out in front of them but unreachable. Such dog abuse!

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Rain. And Phone Books.

SUMMARY: Boost does some surprising fetching and is surprised by water from the sky.

It last rained in San Jose on March 15. Yesterday's forecast called for rain last night and this morning. An agility friend posted on her web site, "I wonder what rain feels like?" Anticipation lay low, humming, in the background of all conversations in the valley. Rain. At last.

Every morning, Boost fetches the newspaper for me from the driveway. Today, she woke me at 5:30 demanding to go out (drat, are we not over this yet? And it was going so well--). The ground was dry. Another wet forecast turning out to be all wet?

Since I was getting up at 6:00 anyway to go for an early hiking adventure, I opened the front door to see whether the paper yet sat in its plastic rain-bag at the end of my driveway. Nothing was there. But Boost burst past me, down the sidewalk, and skidded to a halt next to a dark, hulking, plastic-wrapped shape near the roses, and began to work at grabbing it. --What on earth--?

I walked out to the sidewalk, and discovered that the Phonebook Fairy had left the new phonebook for me, carelessly wrapped in plastic so that one end was protected from potential rain but the other end lay completely exposed. And dry. Boost was wrestling enthusiastically, trying to find some pages to grab, as the whole thing was, shall i say, a wee bit larger than even the usual Sunday-supplemented Saturday paper. I hurriedly aligned the phone book with the spine towards her, to prevent having the entire M section ripped out with a too-effusive effort to Get That Newspaper.

I didn't think she could actually manage it, but with several bits of assistance and several drops and re-pick-ups, she managed to get that whole huge thing into the house and deliver it to where she always delivers the paper. Quite an entertainment for her mom early in the morning.

As I gave her some thanks-for-fetching treats, the sky opened. How grateful was I now for being wakened early and also having the dog run out the front door without permission? Had she done neither of those things, I'd now have a sopping wet gigantic blob of former phonebook.

A few minutes later, Tika put up a big racket about Something Dangerous In The Front Yard. I peered out the door, and sure enough, the paper itself had arrived. So I fetched Boost, lined her up, said, "Ready....Get The Paper!" and released her. She blasted down the steps to the sidewalk--and skidded to a halt. She jerked her head and body left and right. She ran to one side. She stepped back. She looked at the roses like she might be about to spook. She started to wuff a "Danger! Unknown danger!" wuff, when I realized what was happening: She hadn't been rained on in 7 and a half months.

So I had to run out into the rain to reassure her, run with her down to the paper at the end of the driveway, and then follow her as quickly as I could as she dashed back inside, plastic-bagged paper grasped firmly in her jaws. OK, so now **I'M** wet, but at least the phone book is dry.


(I'll try to get my hike photos up soon. No dogs this time, though.)

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Aloneness

SUMMARY: Being alone is not the same as being lonely.

I'm staying at a hotel (in french: hotel) within the Hilton domain. Sure, the linens are luxurious and the setting is more than comfortable (in french: confortable...see how hard this is?). But what I really have enjoyed in my first 12 hours here is being alone and relaxing in my own room.

I am very fond of my dogs, and they are quite integrated into my life. However, these aren't dogs who go off to some other part of the house to sleep at night. Or who open half an eyelid but then return to snoozing when I get up and start moving around. No, these dogs sleep on my bed, and in my face if I let them. And who leap to their feet, eyes bright, tails a-quiver, whenever I make the slighted twitch that looks like I'll be moving around.

I am never ALONE in my house.

I travel so seldom without the dogs--maybe twice a year or so--but I always share a hotel room with someone. This is so nice!

But today I give up my aloneness to step back out into the world-- I have ambitions to explore miles and miles of Montréal to make up for a day of mostly sitting. (I'd have walked up and down the airport instead of sitting and waiting, if I could have, but I unexpectedly had to check my rolling suitcase, and my computer and camera/purse bag were so heavy that there was no way I could stroll comfortably for any length of time. Ah, well.)

See y'all this evening.

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I Hate Computers

SUMMARY: Why can't everything just be perfect AND easy so I can spend time practicing running contacts and going over obstacles that are in front of you?

Tika: "Mom--why are you pulling your hair out?" Note empty high-tech boxes. With Boost-chewed box corners ("take that you computer things").

I am trying to upgrade my computer and software a little bit. I can't upgrade it a lot because I can't afford it.

I want it to be FAST and EASY so that I can get back outside and work on agility activities in the sun with the furry beasts. But--this is computers--

For many months I've wanted to run Blurb's BookSmart because it sounds perfect for making books of your own photos. And now, ta-da!, it supposedly automatically slurps your blog from Blogger or your photos from SmugMug. This would be tres cool if it also sucks down all the text that I've typed for my smugmug photos! Because there's no way to get all that text into a book except by copying and pasting it from every photo individually. For thousands of photos.

But to run it, I need OSX 10.4.9 at least, plus Java 1.5, which needs OSX 10.4.something at least, and I am still on 10.3.something. Plus 10.4.something plus booksmart suggest that I have at least 6-zillion gigahoots dual processors, and mine are only 400-something megawhootz. Plus I'm out of space on my system disk, so no more room to put system upgrades OR more applications that won't run without the upgrades.

Plus my 15-year-old laser printer died, what's with that?

So here I went:

What	Process	Results
New laserjet printer	Two and a half hours of unstringing and restringing cables. The old printer setup was a little complicated.	Works pretty OK. Much faster than the old one and does double-sided much more easily. Except when it won't. Then it just prints pages of fuzzy gray lines. No way to tell what its mood is until you actually print. So I have lots of one-sided things printed on the backs of sheets covered with fuzzy gray lines.
New humongous external disk drive	External because I hate opening the computer and working inside. I haven't yet blown up anything when I've done so, but there's always a first time. And those warnings! DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING IN ANY WAY WITH ANY OBJECT OR THE WORLD WILL END ELECTRICALLY sorts, which scare me immensely. Anyway, plugged in Firewire cable and installed driver.	Works. Some farkling around to divide it into partitions, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I'll probably regret it later.
Move system software to new drive	Downloaded a nifty tool that makes a bootable copy of your existing system drive. Except that it kept dying with some unintelligible error. Their site had online help forums, where others reported similar messages, but apparently the meaning can be divined only by the initiated. Fortunately, one of the initiated responded and all I had to do was to reinstall some things that had been working just fine to the naked amateur eye but apparently the nifty tool didn't like its attitude.	The copy finally worked but, not surprisingly, it took a very long time to copy 30 GB. So my old system is now working on my new drive. Because it's external, it's slower than it would be if I were to go out and buy ANOTHER disk drive of megahungus gigawhoo size and install it inside the box after taking out the old one and again using the System Software Copier to copy it all back... the cost and the time and the logistics just give me nausea. So it stays on an external drive for the nonce.
Upgrade processors	Rather than buying a whole expensive new computer, my company is just upgrading processors in all our office machines of roughly the same vintage, and they hope to get another 3 years out of them. So I buy a new superhuge dual-processor, at 1/5 the price. But first I have to upgrade the something firmware whoozie driver whatsit software. At least twice, maybe 3 times, because I've got all these versions of the operating system on different disks (including the old System 9). Oh, and there was the part where it wouldn't reboot under system 9 and I had to go find some sort of CD that it would boot under so I could try again, and it takes FOREVER to boot from a CD. But, OK, everything's happy now. Then I have to open the computer (ewwww... scary...), remove the old heat sink and old processor, and I'm shaking in my virtual shoes the whole time for fear I'll TOUCH SOMETHING WITH A BURST OF STATIC ELECTRICITY AND FRY EVERYTHING. But aside from losing a screw and taking a while to figure out how to get those clips off (they have detailed descriptions and photos and I'm still slow to get it), then "simply align the single connector" must have taken me 5 minutes at least, and then the box wouldn't relatch...	But it's in! And the system powers up! And it runs! And, wow, the computer really DOES run faster! Except now, sometimes, when the computer goes to sleep, there's this shrieking rising high-pitched sound like a jet engine revving or a solenoid about to explode (there aren't any solenoids in modern computers...are there?...). But if I hit a key really quickly, the noise stops. Maybe it's one of the fans on the new dual processor. Maybe it's something else that's coincidentally failing. Do I really want to go through taking the new one out and shipping it back and reinstalling the old one? No. So cross fingers and hope it's just a settling-in fluke.
Upgrade to System 10.4	(Which of course you can't just download--apple doesn't have it any more since they're now selling 10.5. So I have to go far afield to get a copy.) I put it into a different partition Just In Case, and it takes a couple of hours to go through all the hoops. Well, of course, that means that it doesn't understand ANY of my settings or application preferences from system 10.3.x. I checked with one of my gurus, and she said, "Why'd you do that? Just install it over 10.3." So I did. But updates are funny--many are serial, so after a very long system install, then I check for updates,and it installs those, then I chck for updates again, and there are more, and it installs those, and I check again, etc. etc. until now finally I'm up to system 10.4.11 and now finally the java updates start to install, and those seem to be sequential...	6 hours after I started installing 10.4, I'm now fully running on 10.4. There goes another day. It actually seems to be working fine so far (except that every application I run says "you're running this for the first time; OK?").
BookSmart install	NOW I can download and run BookSmart--except--their web site is down. It's down for most of the day. Have they gone out of business? I dunno! Can't find anything about it on the web anywhere. Finally I try once more, and the site comes up, and I download BookSmart.	Seems to run. So, OK, let's just play with it. First, you can use only preset page layouts. It has lots, but you can't design your own. I've tried laying out 3 pages of photos and already I don't like what I can't get. What if I have 5 photos and want to lay them out as if I have 6 but put text in the 6th box? Can't do it. Gahhhhh.... OK, it's a new product and still in beta. Be patient. Next I carefully resize the photos for the page layout. But then decide that I want a different layout. So I switch layouts. And it shoots all the photos back to their original sizes and I have to resize them all again. Same thing if I switch the position of two photos--have to resize them both again. This is not quite the easy-to-use thing I was imagining. But let's see whether it at least does what I wanted it to do.
Slurp SmugMug albums	With just a few button clicks, it brings down all the photos from my chosen gallery. Slick.	Well, guess what--it doesn't seem to slurp the text! I look all through their help and online materials, and I can't find anything. Why did I think that it would? I can't find that info on SmugMug, either, so maybe it was just wishful thinking. Since it doesn't do that, I can just use the photos that are right here on my computer. But I want the text! That's frustrating. There's a Windows utility (which I can run an emulator for on my system) that will slurp the photos WITH the captions EMBEDDED in the photos. Still have to open each one to see the text, but at least I'd have it. But does booksmart take any info out of the embedded photo info? Apparently not, not that I can find. Well, crud!
slurp my blog	Just a few button clicks again. I'm surprised that there's no way to specify which part of the blog you want to get, can't even specify certain labels or anything, near as I can tell. It's really going to slurp 1250 entries and hundreds of photos and put them all into one book??	No, of course it isn't, it keeps barfing after loading about 25 entries, saying that the blog is unavailable, try again later. Well, it's not unavailable, dagnabbit, it's right there and I can view everything. I post a help request on their site but have to wait one BUSINESS day. So there goes the weekend and any likelihood of creating a real book.
Blog labels	Instead, let's put more labels on my older blog posts (have been doing it only for a year or so, so 5 years worth of posts have no labels). I did a few topics a couple of weeks ago, using the Search box to find all relevant posts.	But now--what?!--the search finds only posts from the last few months! It's not finding ANYTHING older! It's not finding the posts that it found two weeks ago! I spend an hour on their site trying to find relevant info. It claims to be a beta search and it seems to be broken, but there's nothing posted about it anywhere, and searching their massive billions of forum posts doesn't bring up anything useful. Used to be when you reported a bug, the bug went right to their support folks...although I do remember having to search for the right page, like they didn't really want you to find it. Now their "report a bug" goes straight to a public forum with 85,000 posts in it and if you're lucky maybe a Blogger person will come by and answer the question. So I posted the question yesterday and have yet to get a useful answer.
Photoshop elements upgrade	Meanwhile, Photoshop Elements 6 has become available, and I bought it at a discount. I use this all the time, so it makes sense to buy it. It installs OK (except that it says "insert CD and follow the instructions on the screen", but there are no instructions, there's just the CD, so I have to find the right folder with the right thing to run...). But man, I think it took as long to install as the whole new operating system! MAN, it took a long time.	Then I start it up. And it takes up my whole blinking monitor screen. Welcome to the new software--there's no resize handle in the lower right. There are no min/max buttons in the upper menu bar. I just want a little tiny photoshop window so that I can view other things at the same time. I look everywhere, all the menus, all the icons. I try Help. I try the User Guide. I try their web site. Another hour down the tube and I've done nothing except trying to resize my window. I finally find a support place on their site where I can post a question, so I do. Now I have to wait for "1 to 2 business days"(?) for a response. It's probably something stupid that I just overlooked. But I hate this, HATE it...I've got over 20 years of experience on a wide variety of window-based applications, and I CANNOT FIGURE IT OUT!

Gah! I just want to scream.

Instead, guess I'll take the dogs for a walk and get my shoulders ripped out some more. It'll take my mind off the fact that I HATE COMPUTERS.

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What a Waste

SUMMARY: Recycling and doggie droppings.

Back in high school in the early 1970s (there, I admit it), I wrote a couple of speeches about ecology and the environment, and then I got all hot under the collar about Things We Can Do At Home To Save The Earth. This was back when recycling was something you did to get back on a bicycle. Or else weird counterculture stuff. I believe that I was the instigator for my parents to start recycling bottles and cans. This was back when you had to buy your own containers for recycling, if you wanted it separate from garbage, and then you had to go find someplace that would take your recyclables and transport them there, and sort them yourself into the appropriate bins, after crushing all the cans to save space, of course.

I think I let my parents do most of the actual work. Although when I moved out on my own I did all that stuff.

Also, just to be a good person, I have always picked up my dogs's messes in public. I used to get complimented because I'd walk around picking up after my dogs. Now people swear at me because my dogs poop in public. Weird world. Anyway. In your own yard (if it's not a giant ranch in, say, Marfa), you need to pick it up or else reencounter it in many unexpected and not necessarily pleasant ways.

Eventually, when I grew up a little bit, like in 1995 or so, I went through the program to become a Master Composter because I learned that soil is SO much happier with organic matter added, and besides it makes so much more sense to process your own yard waste. (Ask me someday for why. I'm a Master Composter. I have a very long list of reasons.)

Then there was the doggie droppings thing. When I walked out in public, we used to carry a trowel and a small paper bag. Then I'd scoop the poop into the bag and then throw out the bag. When I started doing Dog Activities with Dog People, I realized that plastic bags were way more convenient in so many ways: Moisture doesn't leak through them. Before use, they crush easily into a pocket. You can do the grab and lift and don't need a trowel. You can buy them on a very condensed roll and attach them to your leash.

When I had a Really Big Yard, during the winter, when it rained, we'd mostly leave the doggie deposits where they lay, as they'd fade into the soil under their own power. But the rest of the time, we used to gather it all into a large grocery bag and toss it in the trash.

So, Taj MuttHall Mom, What's Your Main Point?

And so, here's my main point. With my Concern For The Environment and finally being a Master Composter, I decided that I needed to find some way to deal with all of the solid waste produced by my canids.

So I bought a Doggie Dooley digester, which is basically a big plastic box with a lid that you bury in the ground, like a mini doggie-doo septic tank, and you periodically throw in your dog waste and some Doggie Dooley Digester Enzymes. It's supposed to just vanish in a trice and sink into the soil in an unobtrusive way.

Well, I tried for probably 3 years to get that thing to work. I added more liquid. Less liquid. More enzymes. A lot more enzymes. Fewer enzymes. I kept a big pole by the (very-rapidly-completely-filled) Dooley and stirred it and aerated it. A really fun thing to do on weekends. But I never, never got it to work. There were notes about clay soil not being perfect, but since our clay soil drained very well, I thought it wouldn't be an issue. But noooo--- I gave up finally.

I have corresponded with people in other parts of the country who have had good success with the thing. But not here.

So here are some other possibilities:

* Put in a plastic bag and into the trash. Actually, at least one agility site near here REQUIRES that the dog poo must be in plastic bags before it goes into their trash. But--all those plastic bags!

* Put into a paper bag and into the trash. However, some municipalities now apparently ban pet waste in the garbage entirely (hmm, trying to find a reference for that and can't. I believe it was Pacific Northwest somewhere). Plus, really, stuff that goes into the landfill gets buried so quickly and thoroughly that a lot of it just doesn't break down, or won't for centuries. I don't think paper or plastic really matters.

* Compost it. Ugh. Doggie poo (and that of most omnivorous/carnivorous animals) can or usually does contain all kinds of ugly pathogens that normal backyard composting won't kill and you don't want in contact with you, your vegetables, or your children. Not a good solution.

* Same applies, maybe, to leaving it lying around the yard to break down on its own, if you have a large-enough yard. But in this case, it would be far enough from where you're usually in direct contact with it that it wouldn't matter so much. But how many of us have yards that big?

* Flush it down the toilet. Gak, carrying that through the house?

* Put it into the sewer in some other manner, like build a sewer connection in your back yard. Expensive, although maybe cost effective for larger kennels. But now there's some indication that many of those pet pathogens are not destroyed in the water treatment process and are finding their way into the waters of the world. (Limited references available; mostly applies to cat waste.)


So what's an ecoconscious dog owner to do? I dunno. My current strategy is plastic bags into trash, both for public poos (small convenient-sized bags) and for backyard cleanup (one large bag weekly).

But someone just pointed out this gadget. Looks like an interesting idea, if it really works. And if you have $400 left over after doing dog agility. Anyone out there have any experience with this thang?

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Let Lying Dogs Lie

SUMMARY: In which I work and they don't.

One big advantage of working at home is that you're at home. One big disadvantage of working at home is that you're at home. At least I get to see that mostly the dogs just lie around and sleep all day, waiting for me to do something interesting, like eat a pretzel (then they get to have some) or look in their direction (which is very exciting for them, I can assure you) or maybe twitch (which doesn't happen often when I'm at the computer, or at least not until I've been there for at least 12 hours, when the twitching starts in earnest).

But mostly they lie around.

Sometimes Tika lies around at my feet under the desk, sighing dramatically and occasionally resting her chin on my feet, my shins, my knee, or my lap.



Sometimes they hang around by the sliding door into my office, monitoring both the visuals in the yard and the sound effects of me at my computer (has she stopped typing? did she swivel the chair? did she push the chair back? did the computer power down? is she reaching for a pretzel?).


I tell ya, it's an exciting life, working at home.

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