There are days . . .

Every profession has its cross to bear. I think vets probably have it the worst when it comes to dealing with the public. Small town newspapers are a close second.

Our news deadline is noon on Monday, as our papers print very late Monday night/early Tuesday morning.

A woman called our office on a recent Tuesday afternoon.

Caller: I need to put something in the paper, it HAS to run this week.

Me: It’s too late for this week but I’d be happy to take it for next week.

Caller: No, it has to go in THIS week.

Me: I’m sorry, our deadline was noon yesterday.

Caller: But it’s just a little item, it won’t take much room.

Me: I’m sorry, this week’s paper has already been printed.

Caller: Oh. So if I give it to you right now, you can't get it in?

Ya think?!

Here's another winner:

Caller: I want to let you know about a community event so you can come take pictures.

Me: (this is a common sort of thing in small towns.) Okay.

Me: (still waiting) What is it?

Caller: Some high school kids are going to do a clean-up day at Gateway Park.

Me: (waiting, waiting, waiting)

Me: (apparently I am going to have to pry this information out of him, word by word) When is it?

Caller: When?

Me: Yes, when will it be held?

Caller: Um . . . I'm not sure, I think it’s tomorrow.

Me: (nothing like giving less than 24 hours notice on an event that’s probably been planned for a month) What time?

Caller: Um . . . 2 o’clock? Maybe? Or maybe 3 o’clock. No, it’s 2. Yeah, I think it's 2.

Me: You think it’s tomorrow at 2 p.m.?

Caller: Um . . . yeah . . . maybe. You should call the high school. They’d know.

Me: Yeah, I’ll do that. (It was at 1 p.m., BTW)

Our first prize winner of the week came in today. It was an elderly lady who stopped to place an ad. Our receptionist was making small talk and asked how she was.

“Oh, I’m okay,” the lady replied. “But I just had cataract surgery and I can’t see very well.”

Our receptionist took the ad, took the lady’s money and made change. Several times, the woman made reference to her cataract surgery and the fact she couldn’t see very well.

Then she left our office, got in her car and drove off.

Wherever you work, have a great day and be happy you’re more intelligent and have more common sense than a lot of people out there!

Uh-oh . . .

There are certain sounds you never want to hear - the pre-launch sounds of a dog getting ready to barf on the carpet at 2 a.m. . . . the sound of running water under the kitchen sink when the taps are turned off . . .

. . . and the sound of shattering glass at 5:25 a.m.

Yesterday my alarm went off, as usual. The dogs started cavorting about, as usual (it is just WRONG that they wake up so fast). I had just swung my legs out of bed when I heard the CRASH.

Someone's butt had smashed into one of the glass panels of my grandma's china cupboard in the dining room. It wasn't my butt. The Farmer's butt was still in bed. So it was a Belgian butt. And they aren't talkin'. But I have my suspicions.


This cupboard was a wedding gift from my grandpa to my grandma when they were married in the 1930s. It traveled from Colorado to Missouri to Iowa with nary a scratch. It traveled from my grandmother's house to our house last summer.

It lasted eight months before somebody smacked it with their fat butt. Sigh.

But no one got hurt. The glass all fell IN the cabinet. There wasn't any on the carpet. Which was good because I bolted out of bed, told the dogs to sit (they did, immediately, what good dogs), then walked around barefooted to assess the damage. Hey, it's hard to be totally functional at that hour.

Not having time to clean things up before work, I put a baby gate in front of the cupboard. The dogs could have cared less. It's not like there were cookies involved. When I got home from work, I put the dogs in the kitchen, put on a pair of leather gloves and got ready to carefully pull the shards of broken glass out of the frame.

I carefully gripped the piece that looked the easiest to remove, tugged gently . . . and the ENTIRE FREAKING BROKEN PANEL CAME CRASHING OUT IN ABOUT 500 PIECES!

I said a lot of very bad words, picked up the pieces and got the vacuum.

The Farmer inspected things and measured the empty frame. You've heard of "measure twice, cut once"? How about "measure 14 times — now assisted by Phoenix who was fascinated by the tape measure — scratch your head, make faces, shove the dog out of the way, scribble measurements on paper, scribble more measurements on paper, grumble a bit, take the tape measure way from the dog, take the paper away from the dog and finally give the wife a piece of paper with barely legible dog-slobbered measurements on it." I think the local hardware store can cut a piece of glass to fit, since this was just plain old glass, not fancy curved stuff or anything.

Today is a good day. Nothing has gotten broken. Of course, it's only 10 a.m.

Pics from Malinois nationals

Here's our hotel, the Courtyard by Marriott in Valparaiso, Indiana.
I took this pic during the brief window of sunny weather on Thursday.

Phoenix with his ball-on-a-rope.
He was trying to turn it into a ball and a rope.

Jamie, wondering why there are
so many pillows on the bed.
Seriously, we had 8 pillows for 2 people.

Here's the ribbon table, the rescue raffle
and vendors at the agility site.

The specialty catalog was in a 3-ring binder.
Kinda neat and very easy to keep open to read.
I'm one of those people who never buys catalogs
but I had to know who everyone was!

This was the conclusion of a rally class.
Thought it was a fun pic because
the dogs are all doing different things.
(Click to enlarge and you'll see what I mean.)

Team Bite Me,
Love the theme.

Rescue raffle at the obedience site.
I bought a lot of tickets.
I won nothing.
(Their "wingspan" of tickets was 36 for $20,
Michele, what is the ICDOC record?)

Phoenix's 1st place ribbon for Versatility,
love the national logo in place of the standard AKC logo.
Is that legal? Who cares, it's cute.

Home again, home again,
daffodils still blooming in cold, wet weather.

Random thoughts

Here they are, in no particular order. They might not even make much sense. They're just my thoughts, which frequently lack any kind of sense.

• Three weeks until Phoenix and I have another obedience trial. Lots of good time to train.

• Looking at the forecast, I should probably forget training and start building an ark.

• I will build a training room in my ark.

• Why is there 3 weeks worth of laundry in the basement when I was only gone 4 days?

• I need to make a serious effort to help Phoenix understand the importance of making effort. When he does, he's brilliant. Our Utility run at nationals had a marked lack of effort. Six hours later, our Versatility run had a fair amount of effort. Why does it come and go?

• I will have some pics from nationals to post if I ever get them off my camera.

• I got a new camera, a Nikon D3000. It's an upgrade from my little point and shoot, which I'll still use for video.

• I don't have a clue about downloading pics from the Nikon. That is my project for tomorrow. I can justify doing it at work because I will be using this camera for work, too, so need to learn how to use it.

• We put down grub control stuff on the lawn. Now I have to keep the dogs off the treated area for 3 days or until we get a good rain. Which we are getting now. Good thing, because the Belgians took a dim view of being leash-walked in their own yard.

• Between the lawn grubs and the moles eating the grubs and the dogs trying to dig up the moles, our lawn was a trainwreck last year. I'm going to re-seed it soon. Honestly, why am I trying to grow grass that is only going to make more work? At least you don't have to mow bare dirt!

• People often say dogs don't like obedience but after working at the all-breed agility trials at nationals for two days, there are a lot of dogs who don't really like agility either. Probably from the same reasons: confusion, fear, stress, boredom.

• Getting back to "effort": I need to make obedience training more challenging and creative. (Thought I was, but maybe not so much.) If you're bored with doing something, do you put a lot of effort into it?

• Jamie is down to 2.5 mg of prednisone every other day. Fingers crossed, after two weeks I can take him off of it completely and control his IBD with a restricted diet alone. After living with the Prednisone Drama King for four months, this would be awesome.

• After having trials and/or other dog stuff the last 5 weekends in a row, I'm really looking forward to being home this weekend.

• I am going to clean out the garage this weekend. It's a filthy mess and that psycho black cat has too many places to hide in all the junk.

• Phoenix would like to help me clean the cats out of the garage.

• Not a chance buddy.

Home!

Got home from Valparaiso around midnight last night. Or was it this morning? Hauled some stuff out of R2 and fell into bed. The Farmer pretended to be asleep but I'm pretty sure there's no way he could have slept through Phoenix telling his papa how HAPPY HE WAS TO BE HOME!

Obedience yesterday had its ups and down. Rally and obedience judging started at 8 a.m. There were two judges but only one ring. With practically dozens of classes, the schedule went south in a hurry. By the time we got into Utility, they were two hours behind. 

Utility didn't go so well. Nix missed a signal (lights were on, no one was home) and that pretty much described the rest of the run. Although he did LOVELY go-outs to wire ring stanchions which he's never seen before so it wasn't a total loss. Generalizing go-outs in new places is a gigantic leap for a green Utility dog.

As the day wore on, I debated about staying for Versatility, which was the second to last class of the day. We had a 5 hour drive ahead of us and looking at the judging schedule, I had (stupidly) calculated we could be on the road by 3 p.m. By 3 p.m., there were still about six classes left to judge. 

None of these classes were very big but being a national specialty, people entered every crazy class they could to show off their dogs. Who wouldn't? 

By 5 p.m., I thought about just cutting my losses and hitting the road. Then I figured it would be REALLY stupid (as opposed to only slightly stupid) to leave now since I'd already been waiting nearly six hours for Versatility. Might as well wait the final hour.

It was worth it. Phoenix worked like our morning Utility run had never happened and won the class with a 199 (a very generous 199, thank you Edree!) to finish his Versatility title. I have NO IDEA what the abbreviation is for that. Please tell me my dog does not have VD now.

We got on the road by 7 p.m. and were home by midnight.

I enjoyed watching 11 hours of obedience and rally. It was entertaining and enlightening to watch so many different malinois work. I've got some new ideas to try and met some fun new people.

Now if that stupid house elf would just show up and finishing unpacking so I can go back to bed.

Live from Valparaiso!

Our hotel has "business center," so I am using it. For business. Obviously.

Here's how Mal Nationals are going to far. Hard to believe we'll be coming home tomorrow already.

Day 1: Cold and cloudy. I met Mom and Karene at the West Branch McDonald's to pick up Karene. I'd made it very clear we were meeting at West BRANCH. They were late. They'd gone to West LIBERTY, just a few miles down the road. Obviously I share this DNA. That goes a long way to explaining why Tammy and I ended up in Effingham a number of years ago. Karene and I made the rest of the 4 1/2 hour drive without getting lost once.

Day 2: Cold and sunny. Agility at Soccerville. Phoenix had an INCREDIBLE JWW run, it was amazingly awesome . . . but he dropped a bar. Got a Q in Std. on a very wild and reckless course. Still, only .5 second off 4th place in a big class so was very proud of the wild child.

Shopping is okay, not a lot of vendors but some fun stuff. Took both dogs for a long walk and worked a little obedience in the hotel parking lot.

Day 3: Cold and pouring rain. Agility at Soccerville. Again, Nix had an absolutely GORGEOUS JWW run with one bar down. Sigh. Who cares. It was still lovely and I ran it exactly as I planned and he was totally connected and responsive. Std. was . . . um . . . let's just say the wheels fell off early . . . and often . . . how many off-course tunnels can one dog take?!?!?!

I was crated next to a gal with labs - all 3 flavors. She had her hand in a cast so of course I had to ask what happened. OMG, this is even better than Michele and Jeff's dual trip to the ER. She was throwing a stick (I think it was a big bumper) and when the dog brought it back, it tried to run between her legs. The stick/bumper was too long and the dog was holding it crossways, so obviously this wasn't going to work. She reached down and tried to grab it but the dog kept on going and long story short, when she tried to grab the stick, the dog's forward momentum stripped all the ligaments off her thumb. If the immobilizer doesn't help it heal, she'll have surgery to reattach the ligaments.

Those doggone labs are dangerous critters. Makes my malinois-inflicted bumps and bruises look pretty tame.

We packed up from the agility trial this afternoon and drove to the site where all the remaining nationals juding will be held, including tomorrow's obedience, to set up crate and chairs. It's at a very nice county fairgrounds. I THINK the building is heated but not holding my breath. Did I mention I can SEE my breath outdoors? April is truly masquerading as November.

We'll do Utility tomorrow morning and Versatility in the afternoon and hopefully be on the road for home by 3 or 4 p.m.

My "business" session is about to time out so that's all for now.

Pre-national stuff

This is the logo for Malinois nationals this year. It's kind of funny, when I think of Indiana I don't think "corn" but it's cute anyway. Beauty of the Beasts always does wonderful designs.

I love this year's theme: Spending Time Together. Isn't that the coolest part of dog sports - spending time with your dog(s) and your friends?

I'm no more packed than I was on Friday. I just have more piles and more lists. Lists of things to pack. Lists of things that need to get done before I leave. Lists of things to buy. At some point, I'm hoping these lists and piles magically morph into a vehicle that is packed and dogs that are groomed and ready to go.

Okay, Phoenix is groomed. Phoenix is always groomed. He got his semi-annual bath two weeks ago. I'll do nails, give him a cursory brushing and he's good to go.

Jamie got a bath last week. Could you hear the howls of protest? He got his paws trimmed over the weekend so he doesn't look homeless. His fur is growing back on his front legs and belly. It's about half grown back, at least no more bare skin. He looks good. Which is good, because he's probably not going to get any more grooming between now and Wednesday morning.

The JoAnne Brettschneider seminar over the weekend was very insightful. I got some new ideas to play with AFTER nationals - with 2 UD legs under our belt, changing things up all of a sudden is the last thing I want to do.

Our host hotel sent me a confirmation of my confirmation to confirm that I was still confirmed. Kinda silly but they had a link to the weather channel for Valparaiso weather this week: cool and wet. No surprise, since that's exactly what's forecast for here, too. Except there's no snow in the Valpo forecast, TG! And we're indoors for all venues this year. I think I'm still scraping mud off things after last year at Purina Farms.

Tomorrow I'm off work at noon and am taking R2 for his first oil change. Phoenix is coming with me and has already been cleared to hang out in the service lounge with me. Then we're going to train and do some shopping. Hopefully I can start checking things off lists!