We are actually going back to agility class in Canada tonight! My friend from up there is also dropping in to the Advanced level class after mine and said she'd drop by early to hang out. Going to the Seattle KC trial this weekend. Hoping for a Double Q and then at least one Q the other day (might have already posted that goal, but can't remember). Tonight should be a good indicator of this weekend, so I really hope things go well.

Mr. NYC finally called me at work yesterday (work related), but fessed up to not having called me back last weekend. We've both been pretty busy, but I hope to catch up with him between now and Monday. I had been starting to feel frustrated and a little "postal" again lately. Even talking with him at work makes me feel happy. It's instantaneous when I hear his voice. I don't know why... and I kind of wish I could tell him this, but don't want to creep him out (that is a bit of a heavy thing, being the only person in the world that makes someone else instantly happy just by talking to them about nothing in particular) and negate any future prospect of a possible relationship whenever I can move. Should hear something about the latest job application in a couple of weeks. Crossing my fingers. I am beyond ready to get out of here...

ClickerExpo is next weekend and I just now realized how close that is. I can't believe it honestly. I'm so excited about it and I feel really unprepared! I don't know what to do or where to go or what to bring...hopefully it'll all work out though!

I'm sad that Devi can't go. I was looking forward to meeting her and Fever and also using her ClickerExpo experience to help me out there! I feel like I'm going to be absolutely lost in a sea of training-savvy adults.

I'm really looking forward to going there and expanding my knowledge on training. Although it sucks that it lands on the same weekend as the Louisville Cluster, I think this is a great opportunity and I'm glad I chose it over agility. I was looking forward to trying the ISC classes, but that will just have to wait until next year.

For the first time in her life, Kavu just went to the sliding door and WHINED TO GO OUT!
I'm so happy, I could cry.

Kavu enjoys a pretty boring diet of kibble. It's good kibble mind you, but kibble none the less. Perhaps that is why she must taste EVERYTHING she sees. It could be the dresser, the couch, the TV screen, a stick ... whatever. If it's new, it's fit to be tasted.

Sitting at the dining table tonight, enjoying a late dinner and  wrapping up some projects, a brown little face comes to my side. I abhor feeding dogs at the table, but with a few green beans left on my plate, I uncharacteristically offered a piece to Kavu. Immediately, she took the morsel and then just as quickly dropped it to the floor. She took it in her mouth again but instead of swallowing it, I could tell she was sort of rolling it around in her mouth and deciding if she liked it or not. The funniest look passed across her face as she granted approval of the bean.

Ooooh, suddenly another green bean is offered and no hesitation was needed. Gobble, gobble.

Carlos, that is.

Carlos, the COYOTE!

The coyote that likes to hang out at the deck's edge and wait for his COOKED, KOSHER, HOT DOG. No, I am not indulging this craving, but it is my father who instilled this lust for sodium.

He used to wait and then go away. Now, he waits. And waits. I have begged him to go away, I have chased him away, I have done the monster dance and banged pots together in his face, I have released the hounds upon him - both intentionally and not. He goes away, only to return a short time later. Until today. I have not seem him all day. Please make this the last day I see him.

Do you see him?


What about now?


Or, now ... later in the afternoon?

A couple of weeks ago, I went through my storage unit and took a whole bunch of stuff to Goodwill. I figure that it is better to get rid of things here than to haul them 3000 miles to the east coast and then have to deal with them there. I just emailed the chair for the 2010 National Beagle Specialty that is being held in Vancouver, WA this year to see about donating a bunch of really nice beagle collectibles I have to the rescue auction. I had planned on this being my first specialty this year, but now I hope to be gone before then. I would instead look at taking Duchess to the next specialty when it goes back to the National Beagle Club home base in Aldie, VA (I think that will be 2012). At one time I went waay overboard on collecting beagle stuff (like to the point that it might creep some people out, especially a guy, and actually makes me step back and say "whoa" when I look at them now). I have also kinda decided that, after I move, I'm probably not going to celebrate Christmas anymore (that's a whole 'nother discussion I don't want to get in to at this point), and some of the stuff is Christmas oriented (however I will keep my tacky three foot tinsle tree, because it is just too cool to part with). I also wanted to take a couple of other nicer things (not beagle related) to the local Ebay shop (they sell the stuff for you, I just don't want to deal with doing it myself). Went to check it out to get some details on how they work yesterday and found out they are closed until the 17th, aargh! I am doing this all in the name of "acting as if" the job thing is going to happen at the end of this month. The concept comes from the book/movie "The Secret." I ascribe to a lot of the concepts in the book regarding positive energy and intentions directing things to happen in you life, but I also believe that there is more to it than what the book condenses it down to (we could get into a whole discusion on theology/philosophy here, but I think I'll forego that for now too). Let's just say that the positive energy and intentions I have put forth during the last year have done a ton to move my life in the direction it is going now, but I know that there is more to it than just ME.

On the dog front- Was going to go back to agility class in Canada this week, but that got derailed because I was too exhausted. Will go back this next week. Have the Seattle KC trial next weekend (indoors on carpet). Given how she has been running lately, I am expecting big things. My goal is at least one double Q and a Q the other day in either class (there is no FAST at this trial). We went to practice some before my club's monthly meeting on Wednesday and I was getting some of the best, fastest running dogwalks ever from her. She ran the whole thing. No jumping. A perfect stride through every contact zone. She has been holding up to the six weeks between accupuncture treatments (we are in the second interval). Hardly any panting in the car or other signs of stress. I even wonder if her crappy performance at Portland was because I pulled her from the last day of the trial the previous weekend (where she had been running decent) and she didn't understand why (it was because I was exhausted due to the anemia, which hadn't been diagnosed yet) and took it personally (which she definitely acted like she didn't understand why she was leaving). I am thinking/feeling/hoping that I will have the dog back that I had two years ago soon. I can't wait....

BTW- I have taped most of my runs outside of Portland, but there is nothing that warrants posting yet. I would really like to put something up (at least the first time) that shows what we are capable of as a team. Maybe this next weekend it will all come together.

I haven't updated the blog in a few days, mostly because I've been ridiculously busy until today, but also because I've had too many ideas that I wanted to write about. A really stupid interview on NPR about adolescent brains started me thinking about that whole can of worms again, why is it that our culture wants to somehow infantilize younger adults and searches desperately for proof that these people aren't really people yet? Seriously, it is appalling how often people say really prejudiced things about people under the age of 25 and think nothing of it.

So that was one topic I wanted to cover, and started collecting notes on and will eventually cover.

Operant conditioning and dog trainers was another topic I wanted to explore again. Behaviorism, as a science, is one theory to explain how things work, and it's not a bad theory, but it's hardly the only one. Operant conditioning is not just a way of training animals to do things, but an explanation for how animals respond to and operate on their environment. For some reason there are a lot of dog trainers in particular who treat OC as though it was THE ONE TRUTH, the SCIENTIFIC way, when in fact there is no such thing as one scientific way. Science is inquiry, new discoveries can change everything, and Skinner's theories on behaviorism are hardly universally accepted truths. That doesn't mean that OC doesn't work as a training technique, but it does mean that just maybe there are perfectly valid reasons why other training techniques work also. Witness Irene Pepperberg's work with Alex using a Model/Rival technique.

So that's another long topic to cover, and a hot topic too because a lot of people get in a snit if training techniques are questioned.

And more personally, this week I finally got to Mountain Freaks again after missing class for weeks and weeks due to weather and other issues. Boing! was really good, she hit every single contact and held all but one stay. Of course now that Celine is back in school I didn't get any video, but Dawn did get some video of all three dogs earlier in the day Wednesday at K9. This was a fun course that Dawn mostly designed -



Here's Fleet running the same course



I did some dog walks with Toggle. I was going to introduce turns, but after a couple of not so great tries I realized that I'll have to first teach her to do the DW without the manners minder, then teach her turns. Her success rate was about 85% for the session.



Since Toggle has been trying to sleep in Boing!s bed lately, I figured it was time to get another bed. I found one at Overstock.com that was big and had a removable cover for washing. I put it out last night. Boing! would like everyone to know that it's really way too small for her to fit in comfortably -



Toggle, on the other hand finds it way too big and gets lost in it



Stamp, needless to say, wouldn't be caught dead in it, he sleeps with me or in his Big Shrimpy. Fleet sleeps on the couch during the day and with Celine at night.

Speaking of poor, abused Boing! Fleet bit her in the leg Friday. He didn't actually draw blood, but she's got a nice bruise on both her inner and outer thigh. Thing is, she really had it coming. He was quietly playing with his favorite toy, a big furry rat that he's very attached to (never mind that he destroys one every week or two so we're constantly replacing it) while the other dogs ran around at K9 and she steamrollered over him and stole the rat. He raced to catch up with her and she plowed him over a few times, finally he just waited until she was passing him and grabbed her leg. It was pretty funny, at least if you weren't Fleet or Boing! she still didn't let go of his rat, so eventually I intervened and insisted she return the rat to him.

My teacher (the art/photography/yearbook teacher) was spontaneously rearranging her room today and gave me all this "crap" she didn't want. That included a really fantastic treasure, a Polaroid Land Camera!

Man it is awesome! Just another old camera to add to my ever-growing collection. I wish I could figure out a way to use it, but they obviously do not make the film anymore. I've found some how-to's on converting it to more modern film, but that seems like a big project I'm not ready for yet. Until then, well it just LOOKS really cool sitting there....

Is it a joke?
As of April 1, the Sunriver area should finally have AT&T coverage. It's ridiculous I must drive over 25 minutes to make a call, check mail, or use anything that requires a connection.

Marian and Doug are in Africa for a couple weeks so it was just me and my dogs. I missed having Doug's fabulous pancakes and having coffee already brewed when I woke up, but I survived. I got up on the early side and took the dogs for a nice long walk before leaving -





I shot some kind of random footage of the dogs in the fields -



Yesterday was the last day of this session at Talbot Kennel Club. It looks like I'm going to keep on teaching there, which is exciting because I have really enjoyed watching this bunch of students progress. I'm also starting teaching a beginner agility class in NYC this week, we'll see how that goes.

One of my real-life friends told me that she and another friend of my read through my blog recently and really enjoyed it. What?! Scary! Real-life people don't read my blog!! I keep my real-life and my dog-life separate! Ahhh!!! 

I don't know why I refer to my life outside of dogs as real life.


Oh yeah, Toby says hi too.

This was my club's trial, that I only made it into for Friday night. Here is the recap of those runs-

Run 1: Excellent Standard- She RAN FAST!! And I wasn't quite ready to handle her with speed. Babysat the teeter too long and missed a front cross after the following jump, so she went up the dogwalk instead of doing the weave poles (it was pretty much a discrimination between the two obstacles). Did some sniffing before I got her into the poles, popped at the 10th (pretty standard, one day when I can do some real training with a set of 12 24" spaced ones regularly we'll fix that for good). She then bounced off the table, because I had fogotten it was the next obstacle after the A Frame. When I realize it was, I just ran at it and didn't tell her anything. Even with the mistakes and bit of sniffing, she had a nice time. NQ, but VERY HAPPY to have a dog that was RUNNING!

Run 2: Excellent JWW- Somebody turned her nose on. Released her from the start line and she ran toward the gate. Got her going nice and then she sniffed her way out of the weave poles and managed to skip a couple of jumps on the way to the finish. Still running fast. She was having fun, so... SCREW THE NQ!

She RAN. She was happy. We can fix the crappy handling in two weeks at Seattle (where she will be running on carpet, so unless there are the kids sitting on the floor with popcorn again her nose should be pretty much out of play too). I have also entered one day at the Boston Terrier club trial at Argus later in the month (Saturday so we can do FAST) and we have one day of an Masters/Excellent seminar with Daisy Peel that my club is putting on. Can't plan further than that right now. After I am done with this, will be tweaking my resume and applying for the new position in NYC tomorrow. Should hear around the 19th. Hoping and planning to be gone at the end of the month....

Start my new college classes tomorrow. Got A- in both classes. Did worse on the final in the "easy" class than I did the "hard" one.

Helped at the trial on Saturday. Came home to a miserable dog, because she got left home and didn't get to play. I felt pretty lost without having her there. Since we have been trialing, the only other trial I was at without her was the one I was chairing when she had a back injury three years ago. Glad I am taking her back to classes in Canada on at least a drop in basis this week. She needs more time with mom, which she hasn't gotten these last few months (not to mention the lack of any REAL training). I am also going to focus on walking her after work now that it is staying light out later.

Questions/comments of the weekend from others to me:
"I thought you were leaving" or "Why are you still here?"- Had to give the rundown of the NYC saga at least a couple dozen times to various people who haven't seen me in a month or two.
"Wow, you're getting skinny" and "I like your hair cut"- Yep, minus 45 (and counting) since last may. To the second comment, I somehow felt obligated to explain to people about the hair loss episode. The universal reply was, "I wouldn't have known if you hadn't said anything." Guess that means I'm just self-conscious about such things.

Today marks the first full day of being the house/dog sitter for the next three weeks. I have had the last week (and a very busy one at that!)  to understand the house, the dog, the cars, the whole...system. No problem. Or so I thought.

Throughout the last week, many discussions were had as to where all the dogs would sleep. Both of mine sleep with me. Jorga under the covers with her big head on the pillows and Kavu anywhere and everywhere else on the bed - at any given moment. Tashe likes to sleep either in her crate with the flap open or up in the bed. (This is new! Both for the dog and the people to allow!) Would my two allow the intrusion of third?? Happily yes! The two youngsters even slept through the night and didn't think of playing until well past daybreak.

Later in the morning,  I turned on the TV and started looking around the Command Central remote unit ... the type that could cook you breakfast if so programmed. Only no breakfast appeared, and instead I rec'd the blue screen of nothing when I tried to get the sound to come through the receiver speakers. Well, actually, the screen did have words to the effect of "NO SIGNAL" Huh? I was watching the tube just last night. Was the cable out? No, the other TVs worked, what's up with this one? After about 45 minutes, I discovered the microscopic button on top of the TV unit that toggled between video and TV, and tried pushing that. Viola! I don't know what I did to initially cause the problem and thus avert in the future, but at least I know where that blasted button is now.

The noon hour - and the required poop time  - approached rapidly. Carlos was hanging out and I did not want all the girls in the back running amok with him. In fact, I just want him to GO away, but Dad is pretty keen on him (that's another post). At any rate, almost every day that I've been here, we have gone down to the trails and fields at the local airport and let the dogs run. Why should today be different? Not to break routine, I put all the girls in the rig and drove us to the site. It was a beautiful early afternoon and the along with the resident planes moving about, resident horse owners were working their horses at the stable next to the airport.

You'd think my brown dogs had never seen horses before and were quite obnoxious as I tried to wrangle the three of them past the paddock. Essentially, all three of these beasts are not leash trained and the oldest felt necessary to snarl, growl, foam at the mouth, screach, and attempt to drag the other three of us to our knees so she could get closer to the horses. Thank goodness the alert gelding was dog savvy and cared less about the commotion being  caused. His canine partner, however, charged us. That was fun, and then his owner actually asked me if I "walked all three of these dogs together a lot, 'cause it looks like I've got my hands full."

From the moment we arrived at the airport trail, Tashe's e-collar was beeping ... a piercing beep on regular intervals. I hate this collar, but she is trained to respond to this, and usually does. I simply couldn't stand the beeping anymore and let her off leash given we were past distractions relevant to Tashe. Kavu goes nuts with jealousy, but we're still close enough to the horses that I'm not yet comfortable letting her go. I'm so glad I did not. As we walked a few more feet, a tributary of the Deschutes River has created a large pond, and in this pond is a very playful Otter! His splashing about caught the attention of the RRs and they so wanted to investigate. Their mom was so mean and made them keep walking past, but not without a long stare by the now grounded Otter.

At last, we make it far enough past the horses, the pond, and the people traffic that the RRs are allowed free reign of the land. Off they gallop, crow hop, and chase to their hearts delight. The paved trail we are on, traverses amongst trees, fields, and frequently parallels the main Deschutes River. Soon, a large area banking the Deschutes has a thousands of strange, large and dried grassy plants beckoning the dogs to play chase. I pull out my camera and film hoping to catch the sounds of puppy thunder and the thrashing of the foliage. The glee on their face is huge, but suddenly I realize only two dogs are playing: one brown and one spotted. Where is jorga? At this very moment, I hear a loud "oomph" and see jorga shooting up the bank of the river and is running pel mel towards me. What a good girl, but wait...she is completely wet! Jesus, she had fallen into (as in submerged herself)  the mountain run-off river and I had had no idea. I hadn't heard a splash, nor even known what direction she was in! I am SO thankful she was able to get out of the water and had the strength to get up the bank. Her heart was having a workout, but otherwise seemed unharmed. I wanted to turn back right there, but the girls took off in the opposite direction. After my own heart calmed, I figured it was warm enough and arid enough that she would dry quickly and kept on.

Not a mere 100 yards away is a turn in the river. At this turn, a little beach has formed that the girls discovered a few days earlier. A fallen tree offers all sorts of branches to break off, a flat of unmelted snow, marshy grasses, and of course lots of room to run. Off they go, until I spot some bicyclists that will soon make an appearance along "our" piece of trail. Jorga is close by and I latch onto her collar and call the munchkin over. When I reach for her collar, it's not there!?! WTF and now what? The bikers are in sight and nothing is more fun to a RR than chasing a bike... especially to obnoxious - and now collarless - little kavu. Thank you to Spindrift for having a handle loop on the end of their leash that also has a clasp. I secure that around the pups neck and then snap to jorga. Thank you to ?? for having an informational sign staked right in this riverbend and I secure the dogs to that while I ponder where kavu's collar may have come off. (The collar that hours before had had it's new rabies tag attached to it!). I was further thankful to have just completed filming the girls running amok in the marsh and saw a glimpse of kavu wearing her collar in the marsh.

Had the collar fallen off in the marsh, it would be a goner, but this current location offered some hope of finding it... and I did. Getting to it was another story and required me to shinny out on the very slippery trunk of the fallen tree, over and past (dog) chest deep muck and goo. Of course, right when I'm at the point I can potentially jump over the morass of dead branches and to the safety of solid land, I discover kavu and jorga have become tangled in such a manner that jorga cannot move and is starting to panic with her diminishing airway. I've already known one dog to be strangled this year and certainly wasn't going to watch my own; miraculously some ninja skills I didn't know I had emerged and I flew back over that fallen tree and rescued my girls. Hooray! But I still didn't have the damn collar. Back I went over the tree and through the snow pack to the collar. It's all in one piece, but I don't trust it anymore as this is the 2nd time it's come off in 1-2 day span, and will shop for a new collar tomorrow.

Amazingly, I'd had enough of this adventure and started the trek back. Well before the Otter pond, I put the three back on leash and marched them right to the car. Fortunately, they were tuckered out enough that this was uneventful journey. I safely tucked them in for their nap and then went back to the pond to watch the Otter.

All of that happened before 3pm. Now, it's a hair past 11pm an I'm exhausted. The camera is charging and if I can find the camera to puter cord, I'll upload the Otter. They make strange humming/buzzing sounds.

Look, we got more snow!



Of course attention and focus go hand in hand with motivation, with instilling a love of training and strong drive, because without attention and focus, drive doesn't mean anything. A few recent conversations have made me think that some people don't believe that their dog can learn to work with incredible focus, drive and enthusiasm. They long for a dog who has that kind of intensity, but have been convinced somehow that their dog just doesn't have it. Often it's that breed 'thing', many people honestly do believe that the breed of dog they have is a sort of impediment to success. Maybe they don't say it in those words, but I often hear people say, or even read in articles and even sometimes in books, that their breed can't handle repetition, if they do something more than once the dog shuts down, or that their breed is super-sensitive and if the dog makes a mistake the dog shuts down. Or their breed is easily distracted, or extremely visual, or sound sensitive or whatever. Of course some dogs are visual, distracted, sound sensitive, whatever, but those are training issues, and most normally mentally sound dogs can overcome that sort of problem. I am not talking about dogs with serious temperament issues, abused dogs, etc. but dogs with normal issues and quirks.

The conversation was about Hattie, Marian's Norfolk who came to live with me for a couple of weeks to learn how to weave. In the end, because of bad weather, we only got in four training sessions during the two weeks she was here, so we never addressed entries and her weave performance is far from reliable and not nearly as fast as it will be, but at the end of those four sessions she was able to to weave 12 poles on her own at a perfectly respectable time of 3.2 seconds. The conversation was with someone who was asking me about the details of how she was trained. I talked about how, at one point in training, around the middle of her third session, she kept making mistakes, I think I counted 11 failed attempts in a row, 11 times of not getting rewarded. At that point the person I was talking to stopped me. 'THAT'S why you were able to do it.' she said, 'it wouldn't work with my breed, they would just quit if you didn't reward them right away.' Funny, because that's what people say all the time about terriers. Seriously, it's not because of her breed that she was able to keep trying to get it right until she got it right, it's because that's what she's learned, that she has the option to keep trying, to figure things out, to stay in the game, or the option to quit and not be forced to do it, also not cajoled or begged to do it. Because I had Hattie such a short time, I didn't spend any time teaching her focus and attention before starting in on weaving, I just incorporated focus training into her weave training. Focus training sound so, I don't know, serious? maybe that's it. It doesn't sound like something easy, intuitive to the dog, and fun.

The funny, or maybe sad thing is that people have been saying the same thing for many, many decades. Way before agility came on the scene, we'd hear the same thing in obedience. The language has changed somewhat, used to be that people would say their breed was too stubborn or too dumb, now they're likely to say too soft or too sensitive, but the general sentiment is the same, we've just found a different name for it. In 1989 when I got my first Whippet, Chance, everyone, especially people who had them, said all kinds of things about how difficult Whippets were to train, that sighthounds were bred to be independent, that sighthounds were too distracted by all the visual stimulation around them, that sighthounds could never be trusted off leash. Chance has to have been one of the easiest dogs I've ever trained. What's really surprising is that twenty years later there are still people who say the same thing about Whippets.

Dogs are dogs are dogs, there's variation among the breeds, but they've all got more in common than the small details that separate them.

Then there's another odd belief, that you can't teach a dog to be really fast unless the dog is toy motivated. In magazines, at seminars, and in a lot of classes, that's what people strongly believe. Now, don't get me wrong, I love working with toy motivated dogs, and I can certainly see that there are advantages to toy drive but I've also seen students really struggle to teach their dogs to love toys, and when they weren't successful they gave up on the idea that their dog would ever be super-fast and drivey. Fleet is a great example of a fast drivey dog who is super toy-driven. On the other hand, Boing! is focused, fast, drivey dog who is way too intimidated to play with toys around other dogs. I know several people think I should pursue it, but frankly, if I did it would just be for the challenge of teaching her, I don't think it would make her any faster, more focused, or drivey.

Another thing that I'm as guilty of, or at least almost as guilty of as anyone else, is forgetting that we don't actually need to use food to teach everything, that dogs are social beings and yes, really, they can and do learn to work enthusiastically for praise, petting and attention. We used to all know that, then we forgot. Or maybe when we learned that food was a really useful tool and little by little we used it more and more until we stopped training anything without it. Maybe that's where toys can come in handy, as a bridge to rewarding in different ways. Many of us had dogs as kids and taught those dogs to do all manner of remarkable things without worrying about attention, drive, reinforcers, toys, or much anything else. What we did do was play with our dogs, we wrestled, we chased, me patted, we bounced and raced together, and our dogs loved working with us.

Maybe eventually we'll be able to put it all together, to acknowledge that food is a useful tool, that toys are wonderful motivators, and that there are many other things we can do with our dogs as well. Maybe we'll realize that any dog can learn to focus and love working with us, rather than feel guilty that we're 'making' the dog work, or that we're coercing the dog to work.

Here's an interesting example of Boing!s understanding that rewards are great but there's more to the game. Starting at about 1:03 on this video, Boing! runs an entire course and misses the contact on the last obstacle. She does not get rewarded. I actually put her back in her crate and worked with Toggle for a few minutes. The next run on the video is Boing!s next turn out of her crate. Rather than what some might have predicted, that she would shut down because she hadn't been rewarded, or fold because she's basically a soft dog, she attacks the course, running even faster than the previous runs, and when she gets to the dog walk, she makes a point of planting herself exactly where she'd made a mistake the run before. I think it's pretty clear that she loves the game, the treats are great, and she definitely appreciates getting them, but at this point in her training, treats are not her reason for running.



Here's some dog walk work with Toggle. The DW was set at 36 inches. She had a better success rate than last time, a little over 80%, and over all did pretty well.



and a little Fleet action -

This last month has been tough and it led me to get a bad attitude about things. I talked to Mr. NYC for the first time in three weeks last week. He had noticed that my Facebook posts were starting to sound a little "postal". Talking to him completely changed my attitude on things. It always does.

This weekend is my club's agility trial, which I only made it in to for tomorrow night. My goal for tomorrow is a Double Q. Let's get out first one at home in front of everybody we know. We havee another trial in Seattle in a couple of weeks and will probably enter another trial Saturday only for later in the month (because the have FAST that day). I have decided that until I can have some real time to TRAIN my dog, I am not going to try to enter her back in Rally or Obedience. We will just mostly focus on agility this year and I plan on starting back at classes with my trainer in Canada this next week.

Will be updating my resume this weekend and putting in an application for one of the new positions back in NYC next week. Should hear about it by the middle of next month and would start training in April if it happens.

My instructor actually took the assignment that I forgot to turn in and graded it! Not to mention that he gave me 98 out of 100 and didn't take any points for it being late! That put me back at an A-. I might be able to get it up to an A if I did well on the final. Right now I'm on my week off between class sessions and will start Foundations of Business and Research Writing next week.

I went to the Olympics last weekend! I stood in line and took some good pictures of the cauldron with the flame on my camera phone. My regular digital camera just got glare no matter what setting it was on (and with the flash turned off!). I didn't actually go to any of the sporting event, but seeing the flame qualifies as being there. Many of the streets in downtown Vancouver are shut down and it is like a huge street fair. Bigger crowd that even Times Square in NYC.

Better get going...Need to go help load equipment for the trial a bit later. I DO hope to finally get some decent video I can post tomorrow, as I should easily be able to get some to film me.