Road trip!

The Belgian boys, the Lab girls, Michele and I are off to Kansas City tomorrow for a Linda Koutsky obedience seminar. This will be the first obedience seminar I've gone to with Phoenix since he's been in the ring and I definitely have a list of things we need help with.

Seminars are great. Two solid days with dog friends, learning how to improve as a trainer and handler and team. It will be so GOOD to focus on working my dog for an entire weekend and get some new ideas. Not to mention the food . . . breakfast, snacks, lunch, going out for dinner . . . yeah, you can tell where my priorities are!

It's done nothing but rain all week and the Farmer is getting a bit edgy. Tomorrow is May 1 and he's only got 100 acres of corn in the ground. They keep reporting Iowa is "ahead of average" in corn planting progress. They're obviously not interviewing any farmers around here.

Now if we can just get to KC and back without contracting swine flu . . .

ABMC '09 Nationals

Congratulations to ALL the Carousel Malinois for their wonderful showing at the American Belgian Malinois Club national specialty last week! It was in California, so we sat this one out.

A few of the highlights were Promise (Phoenix's mom) taking BOS in Veterans Sweeps, best veteran bitch in the regular show and earning an Award of Merit, all as she celebrated her 10th birthday; Cayenne (Phoenix's litter sister) taking BOS and Joker (Phoenix's litter brother) going HIT! (I think I got this right, someone please correct me if I screwed it up.) Plus I know there were lots of other Carousel dogs who were brilliant in herding, agility, obedience and the breed ring.

I'm sure Catherine will post everyone's achievements soon on her Web site. Check it out at www.carouselmalinois.com.

I'm already making plans for the '10 national at Purina Farms near St. Louis. Can't wait to meet all the Carousel folk who are already planning to come from the west coast and sounds like there might be a Wild Litter reunion.

No more orange water!

Oh glory be, the Poweshiek Water Association is finally a-fixin' to run rural water to our farm! After 18 years of scrubbing rust out of the bathroom fixtures, buying drinking water in town and not owning white clothes because they quickly became orange-tinted, we is gittin' GOOD WATER!

I'm excited. Can you tell? Sorry, Tammy and Bill, I'm a firm supporter of Team Orange but there's only so far I'm willing to go and living with orange water is just too much.

Okay, our well water wasn't toxic. It was a good well, deep and reliable and all that. It was just full of a lot of stuff that made it taste bad. And stain things. Lots of things. If you poured water into a Thermos jug with a white interior, the water was, well, yellow. If you filled the jug often enough, the white interior quickly turned orange. Ditto for the toilet, bathtub, sinks, etc. I wonder how many gallons of Whink rust remover I bought over the last 18 years?

The Farmer grew up on this water. He doesn't think there is a problem. (He wasn't the one scrubbing rust off everything in the house, either.) I grew up on a farm with a sandpoint well. The water was clear and sweet and didn't come loaded with minerals, especially iron, which pretty much ruins the taste.

We don't know exactly when we'll get hooked up but the rumor is within a month. I think I'll go buy something white to celebrate. I'll probably have to start paying my stylist to color my hair, now that I won't have the "rust rinse" to keep these lovely red-brown highlights anymore. And possibly the coolest thing? When our power goes out, we'll still have indoor plumbing because our toilet won't rely on the electric well pump to fill the tank. (I'm still in therapy after that week w/o power back in February '07.)

I think this must be how our grandparents felt when the first rural electric cooperatives strung power lines to outlying homesteads. What new fangled thing will they come up with next?

Here are the water lines leading from the road to our house.

Poweshiek Water rocks!

Sunday fun

This plant is called Pig Squeak. Seriously. I totally bought it for the name (it's also called bergenia but that's not nearly as much fun as Pig Squeak.) I wonder if there are plants called Cat Yowl or Sheltie Bark?

I am Connor, King of the Skunk Dogs. You will do my bidding.

You annoy me, peasant. Away with you.

I will use an old Jedi mind trick. Bring me the cookies.

Totally barking mad.

Rainy Saturday at home

Let me tell you right now, staying home on the weekend is more work than getting up at 4 a.m. and driving to an obedience or agility trial. I'm exhausted, beat, wiped out, worn to a frazzle and really, really, REALLY want a Mt. Dew right now. But no. I will be strong. No caffeine. How about a nice caffeine free Diet Coke instead?

It was cold, windy and spitting rain when I got up this morning. I trained Phoenix in the hoop building after breakfast. Important stuff first. I think he has the beginning of a nice drop on recall. Yippee, if we can master it by June, we'll do Graduate Novice at the Fort Dodge trials. 

He's learned to retrieve a food tube (one of those View-Tainer things from Mennards that normal people would use to store nails or bolts or whatever. I put dog crunchies in mine. It's perfect.) So when we're training on a dirt floor like the hoop building, I can still throw food as a reward for a fast recall and it doesn't get all gross. Not that gross, dirt-covered food bothers Phoenix but it bothers me. So the food goes in the food tube, I throw the tube, he fetches it back and I give him a cookie out of it. No, he has not figured out that he could crunch down on it really hard and have all the cookies at once. And I'm not telling him.

Then the big chore of the day: cleaning out the garage. I cannot remember the last time I cleaned it out. I may never have cleaned it out (which is pretty much what it looked like). It looked like it had a dirt floor, too, and it has really nice cement floor. Which I found 3 hours later.

Since I was feeling ambitious, I decided to take everything out of C3 and clean her out, too. I tried just rolling down all the windows and going down the interstate at 75 mph but all the dog fur did was blow around in a little tornado and I don't think any of it went out the windows. I vacuumed everything, washed the crate fuzzies, scrubbed the water buckets, dusted the interior and washed the inside of the windshield. Does a vehicle really NEED to be this clean?

I switched out Phoenix's "skinny" SUV crate for a bigger 26" General Cage like Jamie's. Here is proof you CAN fit two 24-inch-wide, 26-inch-tall General Cage crates side-by-side in a 2008 GMC Acadia. I may never get them out again but they do fit. 

The Farmer and Co. started planting corn Thursday but since it rained today, he wasn't in the field. I talked him into putting up my official National Weather Service rain gauge. Okay, it's a $1.75 Wal-Mart rain gauge. But it looks very official, even if it is a bit "farmered up," mounted on scrap lumber attached to the front fence with zip ties. We're supposed to get heavy rain tomorrow, so this is just in time. See that nice big building on the right side of the pic? The one that would make a gorgeous training building? Forget it. That's full of farm equipment too. Where is that man's sense of priority!

About 100 years ago when I was in 4-H, I absolutely HATED sewing. Guess what? That hasn't changed. So there is no telling why I thought I needed to sew a crate cover for Phoenix. It must be caffeine-deprivation making me do stupid things. I'm using two beach towels so there is a minimum of sewing. Since I'm doing it by hand, that's a darn good thing! I want to get it done by next weekend. The Belgians and I and Michele and the Labby girls are going to an obedience seminar in KC. Jamie does fine with just the sides of his crate covered but Phoenix is a little higher maintenance. His cover will have a "crabby flap" on the front and back.

The dogs all got a pedicure and a good brushing out this afternoon. Connor gets a bath tomorrow. He's going to stay with Jen, Spencer, Katie and Bo next weekend while I am at the seminar. God help them, Katie and Connor in the same house, they are both Fun Police Control Freak I'm In Charge and Don't You Forget It shelties.

Places I train, Part 1

This is our hoop building where I train at home when it's too rainy or windy to be outdoors, which has been a lot this spring. It would be an awesome building if the Farmer didn't insist on filling it up with big round bales of hay and random pieces of equipment. Right now, it's only about half full of bales, leaving a perfect space to train.


Our cats hang out in the hoop building. That is Winnie in the foreground and Beauty in the background. Winnie is friendly, Beauty is a psycho cat. The cats make Phoenix a little crazy. They sit up on the bales and watch us train and are great distractions. Raccoons hang out there, too, although I never see them. They are always mucking up the cats' water bowl and/or carrying it off. Seriously, I never know where I'll find the water bowl. Apparently this is great fun if you are a raccoon.

During the winter, I train in this upstairs bedroom at our house. There's room to do lots of stuff. I use the plank and the cinder blocks along the wall to make a shelf for geraniums and any other flowers I bring in before it frosts in the fall. The bedroom isn't heated but the plants do great up there and its wonderful to train in February with a lot of blooming flowers.

The upstairs hallway works great for heeling as long as we "think thin." Believe me, I keep my elbows in! It's a good thing this photo doesn't show all the chips in the woodwork from having dumbbells bounced off it. At least I haven't bounced one off the hallway window. Yet.

People treats

As a friend of mine at work is fond of saying, “If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.” If you’re a fan of oatmeal cookies, these are delicious and a lot faster to make than individual cookies. And your house will smell wonderful while they’re baking. They’re great for breakfast, much better than those dry breakfast cookie-wannabees in the cereal aisle at the grocery store.

OATMEAL BARS
3 C. oatmeal
1 C. brown sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 C. milk
1/2 C. butter (can substitute peanut butter or apple sauce)
2 eggs

Combine all ingredients and place in 9-inch-square pan sprayed with non-stick spray. Bake at 350 for 40 to 45 minutes. Add dried fruits if you want. I added about 1 C. of chopped dried apricots because I LOVE dried apricots. Fresh apricots, not so much. Go figure.

I baked mine in an 8-inch-square pan for 45 minutes. I’m sure at some point in my life I owned a 9-inch-square pan but I have no idea where it is. The bars looked nice and brown on top when I took them out but were a little sticky on the bottom. If I’d put them in the right size of pan, they probably would have baked just fine.

When I make them again, I might experiment with using peanut butter in place of the butter to reduce the fat content. They’re slightly crumbly, very filling and would be awesome served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Oh yeah, that's got breakfast food written all over it.