Living green

Since we've actually gone three whole days without rain, the Farmer has been able to mow hay again. I took the dogs for a walk yesterday evening while he was mowing the bottom field. Not sure why it's called the bottom field. It just is.


Say what you will about living in the country. No high speed internet. No cable TV. Sometimes we're doing good to have electricity! Living on a gravel road means my van is never clean and sometimes it can be impossible to get to the highway in the winter.

But nothing compares to walking in a hay field that's just been mowed. You can't get that wonderful smell anywhere else.

I love the sunlight on summer evenings. Winter and spring sunlight is all fine and good but it's not the same. Mid to late summer and autumn have the best evening sunlight, like liquid gold poured over long green shadows.


Wish I could bottle up evenings like this to open up in January and February.

Raccons vs. recalls

Okay, time for a training post. Today’s topic: recalls. I'm always a little hesitant to start writing about training because there are so many other folks out there who have way more experience than I do but what the heck. I've had some successes and some disasters with my dogs and I'm happy to share what I've learned from both.

Building a reliable recall has been one of Phoenix’s and my biggest training issues. Everyone has a stumbling block and for us, it’s the recall. It seems like all my other dogs came with recalls imprinted in their little brains. Not Phoenix. He was just too busy. All through puppyhood and adolescence, I battled the, “Hey, yeah, I hear ya but I’m kinda busy right now so I’ll get back to you on that” attitude.

I’m not talking about his formal obedience ring recall. That’s been fine. I’m talking about the “Come back in the house because it’s time for bed and I don’t want to chase you around the yard in my pajamas!” kind of recall. In other words, the recall when there are more interesting options.

I started Phoenix’s recall training when he was a baby. We did all the silly puppy games. I gave him treats when he came to me. I ran and let him chase me. I let him catch me. I had the bloodied limbs and ripped clothes to prove it. I worked hard and — I thought — successfully to build a recall that was happy and reliable.

So it was doubly frustrating when I thought we’d come to an agreement on how this worked (I call, you come), only to have him change the rules this summer.

It started with the critters in the garage. I use the word “garage” loosely. It is a garage/machine shed, home to C3PO, the big grain truck and an incredible collection of farm junk. Until recently, it was home to at least one raccoon. Maybe there were more. I don’t know. They all look alike and quite frankly, the darned thing freaked me out when I happened to look up and there it was, hanging out in the rafters, staring back at me and thinking, “Is that the same human I saw earlier? They all look alike.” Phoenix made a point of going on raccoon patrol every time he could get out there. It wasn’t like he was ever going to catch the thing. He just liked to bark at it. The raccoon was not impressed.

The Farmer eventually dispatched the raccoon but Phoenix didn’t give up his critter patrol. In fact, he got so obsessed with it, I had to bodily haul him out of the machine shed when it was time for him to come back in the house. He just plain quit coming when he was called. This gradually bled over into the agility ring, which was a bad scene. Malinois amuck. (Actually, he had some great course design ideas.)

Okay, my bad for letting it get to that point. This didn’t happen over night. It was a progressive disintegration of a recall and I was firmly in denial about it until I realized while standing in the rain in the backyard one night at home, “That blankety-blank dog does NOT know how to come when he’s called.” Here’s what I’m doing to fix it.

No more standing on the patio, yelling at him to come “because he knows what I want.” Duh. And he knew how to ignore me, too. I’d been outranked by a raccoon that might or might not exist. Ouch.

No more getting mad when I had to go fetch him back to the house. That didn’t solve anything and probably made him even less likely to listen to me. (“Mom’s a scary freak.”)

No more using a cookie and trying to lure him to me.

Basically, what I did was go out to the machine shed and take hold of his collar. He wasn’t trying to run away, was just busy SNIFF SNIFF SNIFFING for the phantom critters. When he looked at me, I said “Come!” in happy, non-confrontational voice and ran out of the shed all the way back to the house. I had hold of his collar, so he HAD to come with me but I kept my hands gentle, no jerking or dragging, just insisting he come with. He loves to run and chase (and still occasionally nibble) so this was fun for him. When we were at the back door, he got a cookie and I turned him loose. If he stayed there, we went inside. If he went back to the machine shed, no big deal, I went after him and we did it again.

I think the key was that I took the big scary “correction” element out of the correction. It might not even be perceived as a correction by some but it’s making my point and neither one of us are angry, scared or demoralized by it. Some trainers will tell you your recall correction should “show your dog who’s boss,” but that’s just not my style. Don’t use a sledge hammer when a fly swatter will do.

We’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks now. Ninety percent of the time, I still go to him, take his collar, call him and run. He’s getting better. About 10 percent of the time I stand a few feet away and call him and he’ll pull off his critter pursuit. (I swear there is NOTHING out there but he insists otherwise.) He gets cookies for this and I’ll turn him loose again.

That was probably the biggest mistake I made with his recalls: I effectively taught him that coming when called meant the end of the fun. Too often, I called him and then took away his toy or put him in a crate or made him go back in the house. Somebody just shoot me. Even though he wasn’t being specifically punished for anything, he still viewed coming to me as the End Of The Fun. Lesson learned! So now I do a lot of “catch and release” recalls and let him go back to whatever he was doing before.

Will this method fix everybody’s recall problems? Maybe, maybe not. Every dog is an individual.

The journey continues.

The boys of summer

I was going to title this "Boys and their balls" but had second thoughts.

I got the dogs one of those squishable Jolly Balls. The thing is blueberry scented. It makes the back porch smell kinda weird but the dogs don't seem to care (believe me, this is NOT an indoor toy). I got it from Sitstay.com and they didn't give me a choice of colors, which is really no big deal until I started trying to take pictures of dogs playing with a blue ball in a blue pool.

A new ball! A hot day! A full pool! This is awesome.

Okay, how do you get the d*mn thing out of the water?
My mouth's not big enough.
(I felt sorry for him and gave him a smaller ball to play with.)

Ooooh, ooooh, lemme try!

I will bite it like a snake. See, my jaws don't hinge.

Score! Got it!

Phoenix: Mine's bigger than yours.
Jamie: Dude, hasn't anyone ever told you, size doesn't matter?

Priceless!

Entry fee: $25.00

Gas to drive to trial: $2.69/gallon

Returning after group exercises and finding your dog exactly where you left him: PRICELESS!

Phoenix did a lovely job at the Hawkeye Kennel Club trial today for his first CDX leg. His individual exercises were okay and the thing I'm most proud of were his sits and downs. He didn't scoot on the sit and had minimal paw fidgeting. He was solid on his down, which was our big sticking point earlier this year. 

The icing on the cake was our 195.5 was good enough for 4th place. The silly boy hit ALL of his finishes, which is unheard of for us. Fronts are now apparently a mystery. 

Overall, a splendid day and I'm VERY proud of my skinny little dog. 

Odds and ends on a Friday

Wow, where has the week gone? All of a sudden it’s Friday, not that I’m complaining!

Tonight Phoenix and I are going to an obedience match at Muscatine. I’ll use our Open run as a dress rehearsal for Sunday’s trial, but with some strategically planned jackpots. I’m still working on moving the jackpot away from the immediate ring but we’re not quite there yet. Our Utility run will be purely training.

Tomorrow morning, I’m going to Iowa City to drop my crate off at the show site, then out to Kay’s to teach a lesson and run some errands around town. It’s supposed to be super hot again. The National Weather Service is predicting a heat index of 100 to 105 for the area. I’m not going to train Phoenix at all tomorrow. He can have the day off. I’m just not a big fan of training a lot the day before a trial. Too many times I’ve tried to “fix” something at the last minute and ended up making it worse.

Sunday, we’re jumping back into the AKC Open ring, first time since our ill-fated Open debut in April. It’s a small trial and a quiet two-ring site. I’m feeling much more confident about his stays. We’ve put in three months of training time on them since April, now it’s time to test and see what's working.

Have a great weekend!

Shh . . . it happens!

Ain’t no rhyme or reason
No complicated meaning
Ain’t no need to overthink it
Let go laughing
Life don’t go quite like ya plan it
We try so hard to understand it
The irrefutable, indisputable, fact is
Shh . . . it happens

— Sugarland —

That pretty much sums up our agility runs last weekend. After showing steady improvement in handling and teamwork over the last year, Phoenix and I had an absolute trainwreck of a weekend on the agility course.

Not only did we go 0 for 4, we weren’t missing the Q by just one little thing. Oh no. It was many, many things. BIG things. Multiple big things. It was a flashback to the days when we first started running in Excellent and were all over the place. He did multiple tunnels in spite of clear instruction to do otherwise, had a spectacular teeter fly off, biffed weave entries, sent bars flying, ignored me in general and quite honestly ran amuck.

After ranting and raving for awhile, I realized a couple of things:

1) I have gotten sloppy with maintaining his 2o/2o contacts. I work heeling 4-5 times a week but the only time I really worked contacts was once a week at class, in spite of having a lovely contact trainer sitting in my back yard. The result: fly-offs, run-throughs, self-releasing and the let’s-stop-half-way-down-the-dog-walk-and-act-like-I-don’t-have-a-clue-where-bottom-is behavior.

2) I have allowed him to ignore me when I call him at home, which undoubtedly fueled the fire for his 48 tunnel-sucking off courses. Okay, maybe there weren’t that many. Maybe there were only 28. If I have given him permission to ignore me at home, why should he listen during an agility run?

3) You mean we need to practice weaves?

In other words, BAD HANDLER! As our teamwork had improved, I made the mistake of getting over confident and not backing it up with training to maintain obstacle performance. I would never do this with obedience, where I work to maintain every exercise no matter how sure I am that he’s “got it.” But obviously I didn’t transfer this to agility. Duh!

In order to reduce the chances of having another amuck-amuck episode at our next trial in two weeks (over the 4th of July weekend in a non-air conditioned livestock area, so it may be too hot to be naughty, we’ll see) here’s the solution:

Train the dog.

No, wait, it’s never that simple. Problem solving requires a specific plan.

1) I drug my contact trainer around the house to the back gate where it is easily accessible from the dogs’ yard. That way, I’ll actually use it, not just look out the window at it.

2) Phoenix is on a modified “work for your meals” plan. Contacts and/or weaves for breakfast (this is new). Obedience for supper (this isn’t). There’s power in food if the handler has the dedication to use it.

3) Recall boot camp: Phoenix WILL come when he’s called. Every time. No second chances. Ever since the Farmer has been trapping critters in the machine shed, Nix has been obsessed with critter hunting in there. Never mind that he hasn’t caught anything, he’s still hunting. And when he’s hunting, he’s “deaf.” So I need to fix my recall in real life before I can expect to have a good one in agility.

I love training dogs. There’s always something to do.

Weirdness at the cardiologist's office

Last spring when I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, I got the pleasure of becoming the patient of two different cardiologists. One is your garden variety cardiologist (if there is such a thing). We’ll call him Dr. A. The other is an electrophysiologist, a cardiologist who specializes in heart rhythm problems. We’ll call him Dr. B. Over the last 15 months, I have seen Dr. B probably seven times to adjust the meds that keep my heart from doing the funky chicken and beating 180 beats per minute, give or take a beat here or there.

Both Dr. A and Dr. B agree that some people have this condition without ever realizing it. I do not know how that is possible. Every time I had a “spell,” I was very much aware of it. Believe me, the only thing weirder than your heart beating too fast is when you start counting the beats and realize sometimes it’s not beating at all.

Doctors may be brilliant in their field of medicine but that is not a guarantee that they have a personality. The first time I met Dr. A, I was laying in a bed in the cardiac critical care unit, hooked up to a heart monitor and wondering what the hell was going to happen next. He walked in, introduced himself, looked at my chart, asked me a couple of questions and told me I was a Type A personality and was having a panic attack.

Yeah.

Right.

That’s me, the ol’ Type A personality. Although I’ve had my share of “Oh, sh*t!” moments, I’ve never had what I would call a panic attack. I wasn’t having one then and I told him so.

That was a year ago and I hadn’t seen him since, as he’d foisted me off on Dr. B to figure out what exactly was going on with my ticker and how to make it stop. Well, not stop. Not entirely. That would be bad.

Dr. B was better in the personality department although I suppose when you’re busy saving people’s lives you can’t be expected to have a charming bedside manner, too. He is relatively personable, however, and has found the chemical cocktail that keeps my heart beating the appropriate 68 beats per minute with lovely blood pressure.

But Monday morning found me back at Dr. A’s office for a one-year check up. This appointment had been scheduled and re-scheduled three times, all at the whim of the office where Drs. A and B practice. I would come home to find a letter in the mail announcing my appointment was June 4, no, wait, now it’s June 15, no, wait, we’ve changed our mind again, now it’s June 21. Okay, whatever. I also had an appointment with Dr. B scheduled for June 23.

The weirdness started at the check-in desk.

“Who is your family doctor?” the receptionist asked, filling out paperwork.

Aww, geez, here we go with this again.

“I don’t have one.”

Seriously, I don’t.

“You don’t have a family doctor?” the receptionist looked at me like I was denying the existence of baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet.

“Um. No.”

“Where do you go when you get sick?” she asked, determined to fill in something on the form.

It sounds totally arrogant to say I don’t get sick. I do. But I don’t run to the doctor every time I get a cold and I’ve been blessed to enjoy basically good health.

“I go to the local family clinic,” I said, “but I just see whoever is available, it’s not like I have one specific family doctor.”

She looked very disapproving but filled in the name of the clinic, sans name of doctor. I got the feeling that my failure to possess a family doctor somehow labeled me as unsatisfactory.

It continued when the nurse took me back to the room to get blood pressure and pulse.

“Did you have a good Father’s Day?” she asked, all cheerful and chatty.

Hmmm. Awkward pause. Was that a holiday I was supposed to celebrate?

Let’s see, I’m not a father. My father died six months ago. Yeah, actually, I had a great Father’s Day at an agility trial but it certainly didn’t have anything to do with fathers. What the heck do you say? I’m never good at lying just to make small talk with strangers.

“My dad died recently,” I managed.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the nurse said. “Did you have a good day with your husband and kids?”

Awkward pause number two.

“I don’t have kids.” Not even going to try explaining the dogs.

She gave me a pitying look and left.

When Dr. A appeared, he shook my hand and spent the next 15 minutes checking my treatment records with Dr. B on the computer. Yep, Mr. Personality was true to form. Apparently actually TALKING to the patient is no longer a good way to gain information.

When he said he wanted to do an EKG, I mentioned that I had an appointment with Dr. B the day after tomorrow and Dr. B does an EKG every time I go there so did he want to double up on the EKGs.

“Why do you have two appointments scheduled in the same week?” he demanded.

Because your freaking office scheduled them that way! Okay, I didn’t quite say that. But close.

He looked at me like I was an irresponsible idiot (let’s not go there) and told me insurance would not pay for two appointments on the same week for essentially the same condition.

Okay . . . so knowing that, why did your office schedule them that way? And, Point Two, why did I need to continue to see two doctors who were treating me for the very same thing? I wouldn't even say Dr. A was actually treating me for anything, all he did was review Dr. B's records. There's another $50 specialist's co-pay I won't get back.

Seriously, the problem with health care in this country is not entirely the fault of the insurance companies.

Having finally determined that the appointment with Dr. B could be rescheduled, Dr. A’s parting advice to me was, “You need to cut out the caffeine and alcohol.”

I sat and stared at him with my mouth open. Did I look like a buzzed-up lush? The irony of this is I don’t drink caffeine. I essentially decaffeinated myself about two years ago. And alcohol? Maybe two drinks a month. Maybe. I told him that. He told me to cut out chocolate.

Okay, that’s NOT going to happen. Besides, I did some research on the amounts of caffeine in your average chocolate candy bars and you’d have to eat something like 12 Hershey bars to equal the caffeine in one cup of coffee. If I’m eating THAT much chocolate every day, I’ve got a bigger problem than just caffeine intake.

The EKG was done and my heart rhythms were totally normal. I love it when someone tells me I’m normal. I could have hugged the nurse in spite of her earlier determination that I celebrate Father’s Day with the same fervor some people reserve for Christmas and New Year’s.