A dog, a ball and a box

This has been a pretty stressful week, what with Dad going into hospice, another round of layoffs at work and two cardiology appointments for me. Dad is doing okay. He's stable. He's not getting better and he's not going to get better. But he's comfortable. We're taking things one day at a time and probably will be for quite a while.

I still have my job. Gannett Communications cut 1,400 jobs nationwide on Thursday, including three in our office. Sigh.

On the bright side, my new heart meds are working fine and I finally bought a granny pill box to keep everything organized. Thanks to everyone who suggested this, it DOES make my life easier and right now, I'm all about that!

All this stress has effected my training time more than I thought it would. I desperately want to train and spend time with my dogs. But I don't want to do anything serious or look serious or act serious or even think serious. I tend to be way too serious about obedience work so this has been a good wake-up call. Tonight I got out my clicker and spent some time on a lovely July evening working on "Go sit in a box." Okay, that's not really the command, just the concept.

I love my clicker. I know some people cringe when they think about "clicker trainers" and believe me, there are trainers out there who give them a very bad name. Heck, for every method there are some bad apples. But over the years I've discovered people who totally reject a training method have either had a really bad experience with it or just don't understand it. That's too bad because as trainers, we can never have too many tools in our toolbox. I don't use a clicker for everything and yeah, I admit, people who run around clicking their dog for every single behavior drive me insane, but I do like it for teaching some types of things and this is one of them.

The box: This is the box. It's made out of PVC. How did we ever train dogs before PVC? Don't ask me how big it is. It's big enough for Phoenix to sit his skinny little butt in.

The send: This is a blurry photo of Phoenix spinning to turn around and sit in his box. Don't laugh at my photography. You try sending the dog, giving the command, clicking the behavior, rewarding and taking a picture all at the same time. Think you could do better? All right, I know for a fact some of you could! I love this picture because it looks like 'Nix is pivoting on one leg and swinging the rest of his body into the sit. I want him to do a fast sit, no dawdling.

Final product: a tidy sit in a pre-determined destination a distance away from me. This will eventually be incorporated into the go-out exercise in obedience. There are at least 500 ways to teach go-outs and I'm determined to try them all. 

The payoff: Phoenix's green Orbee ball. He loves his ball. I could have gone on and on with pictures that show how much he loves his ball but do you know how freaking long they take to load when you have dial-up Internet?