36 days until spring

Spring is coming and it can't get here soon enough. Here are a few ways to tell it's been winter for TOO LONG!

You get out of bed in the middle of the night, not because you have to pee, but to let all the faucets run because you’re paranoid about the pipes freezing.

You don’t panic when you see your dogs running around the yard on three legs - it just means they have a case of cold “weenie feet” but don’t want to come back inside yet.

You don’t care if your gloves match. You’re just glad you can find a left and a right without holes in the fingers.

Your life seems to hinge on two words: weather permitting.

You worry about how you’re going to get to work. Once you get there, you worry about how you’re going to get home.

You’ve crammed two days of work into six hours to get home before an incoming storm, plus missed so much work because of inclement weather and impassable roads that working five whole days in a row on a normal schedule is a totally surreal experience.

Your car hasn’t been washed since November. No one wants to park next to you at work. You don’t care.

You have an emergency kit in your car with an extra blanket, flashlight, batteries and a package of Snickers.

You ate all the Snickers. In one day.

The first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do before going to bed is shovel snow.

You’ve shoveled the same snow drift 17 times. If you decide to give up and walk around it, that path will drift closed within 20 minutes.

You fondle your houseplants and think happy thoughts about gardening, warm soil, sunshine, flowers and weeds.

You put on long underwear, a turtleneck sweater, wool sweater and down vest . . . to sit around and watch TV.

You think about kicking your spouse out of bed and letting the dogs sleep with you instead because they're warmer, cuddlier and don't snore.

The thought of 40 degree temperatures is beyond exciting.

You know that yes, as a matter of fact, malinois CAN climb the walls.

By the time you put on your coveralls, extra socks, insulated boots, thermal jacket, scarf, stocking cap and wool gloves, you can’t remember why you were going outside in the first place.

You let the dogs out, they pee on the patio furniture two feet from the back door and run back inside before the door can swing shut.

You’ve slipped on a puddle of frozen dog pee.

You’ve invented new and creative combinations of swearwords while your vehicle’s front end and rear end are swapping places.

You’ve gotten stuck in your own lane.

Upon advice from your husband, you “punch it” to get through a drift in the lane and nearly end up doing a Wile E. Coyote into the side of the neighbor’s machine shed.

You prayed the neighbor was not looking out the window at the time.

You gaze at the sparkling white blanket of fresh snow covering everything and all you can think about are the three months of frozen dog poop underneath.

You’ve slipped on the ice and your first thought was, “Did anyone see that?”

Your second thought was, “I hope so because I’m going to need help getting up.”

You’ve used at least one gallon of hand and body lotion since November and there are six weeks of winter left to go.

You've witnessed 174 different canine behaviors that relieve boredom. At least 170 of them involve stealing articles of laundry and committing crimes upon them.

You can justify every last ounce of your “winter weight.”

You can calculate wind chill without looking at a chart, although once it gets to a certain point, it's just freaking cold and who cares.

You're in love with the guy who invented remote start on vehicles.

You realize you are spending an extra $20 a week on gas because you use the remote start so much.

You keep doing it because it honks off all your co-workers who have to go outside and get into a cold car.

For the love of dirt

My quest to build a dirt-colored wardrobe is progressing nicely. Here’s a pic of my latest acquisition, LLB’s Weather Challenger jacket, which is currently on clearance. Apparently dirt-colored jackets were not a big seller among the general population. I bought it to replace my current winter coat which is suffering from a number of issues, mainly the zipper has gone AWOL.



Unfortunately, the Weather Challenger, for all its dirt-colored glory is not heavy enough to be a true winter coat here in the Midwest, but it will make a wonderful 3-seasons coat so I’ll keep it. In spite of the catalog copy which might lead you to believe otherwise, it is basically a Goretex raincoat with a wind-block fleece liner.

Anyone who shows dogs knows the value and convenience of dirt-colored clothes. If you spend much time trialing in horse arenas, by the end of the weekend, everything is covered with a fine layer of brown dust. Having as much dirt-colored gear as possible maintains the illusion that things are not really as dirty as they actually are. This is helpful to those of us who are compulsive about cleaning and washing.

Over the last few years, I have collected a dirt-colored fleece jacket, dirt-colored wind pants, several dirt-colored sweatshirts and a dirt-colored sheet for a crate cover. I used to have a dirt-colored gear bag but Phoenix ate it. Well, part of it. He didn’t mean to. He was very young.

My current gear bag is from Doggone Good. It’s bright blue and it’s a great bag but alas, it does not hide dust. My current winter coat, the one with the dysfunctional zipper, is dark blue, also a bad color for hiding either dirt or dog fur.

Through the years I have progressed to dirt-colored dogs as well, no more pesky white paws to keep clean.

The quest continues.

Phoenix is an uncle

(photo courtesy Catherine Shields, www.Carouselmalinois.com)

Phoenix's sister Cayenne had her puppies Saturday night, 6 boys, 2 girls, everyone doing well. Hard to believe my crazy wild dog was ever a pudgy little guinea pig like that.

For more pics, go to: http://carouselmalinois.com/easylitter.html

Return of the psycho killer attack bunny

One of Phoenix's favorite indoor pastimes is sitting at the living room picture window and watching the farm. He watches the Farmer, the Farmer's dad, the Farmer's brother, cats and occasionally, errant raccoons or cows who are not where they belong. He reacts to these with a variety of behaviors ranging from excited woofs to window rattling crazed yodeling.

It was the latter that brought me running from the kitchen one morning, thinking all the cows must be loose and stampeding toward the road, pursued by rabid raccoons and half the cats in the township. When I got to the living room, Phoenix was bouncing up and down, hackles standing straight up, tail stiff, screaming malinois obscenities.

I scanned the scene outside the window.

Nothing.

No humans. No cats. No cows. No raccoons. Nothing.

No, wait.

There was a bunny rabbit, hopping around by some shrubbery on the other side of the fence. It was just a fluffy little bunny.

But Phoenix was obsessed. He was crazed. The bunny was clearly evil. It was more evil than cats, which is considerably evil if you know how Phoenix feels about cats.

I peeled him off the windowsill and we had a heart-to-heart talk about appropriate in-house behavior. I'm pretty sure he ignored most of it because when I released him, he raced back to the window and looked for the bunny, who fortunately for all involved, had disappeared from the scene.

That was months and months ago.

It happened again this morning.

I don't know what it is about rabbits that pushes that dog's buttons. He seriously comes unglued when he sees one. Right now, brown bunnies show up really well against white show. Yet another reason for wishing spring would hurry up and get here. Forget having a house cat, guess I need to get a pet bunny. Or maybe not.

Rabbits aside and weather permitting, Phoenix and I are road tripping to Des Moines both Saturday and Sunday this weekend for matches. It will be two early mornings of driving but I'm looking forward to getting some away-from-home training time, plus I can stop at the new Bass Pro Shop at Altoona on the way home.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Today, I am thankful we've gained an hour of daylight since Dec. 21.

Treadmill update

My co-workers at the newspaper office are fascinated by the fact Phoenix will run on a treadmill. I think it’s the same kind of fascination that makes people stare at car crashes on the interstate and gawk at the two-headed calf at the state fair. The things I do with my dogs are so far removed from their casual relationships with their family pets (not that they don’t love their family dog, but you KNOW it’s different for people who train and trial like we do) that they can’t wait to hear what bizarre thing my dogs are doing now. Running on a treadmill falls into that category.

I promise to post video soon but we aren’t quite there yet. I say “we” because this is very much a team event. Phoenix is not quite skilled enough that he can run independently while I move around the room. I may have to recruit the Farmer to either run the camera or be Phoenix’s “spotter” in order to get video.

The biggest thing both Phoenix and I have learned about the treadmill in the last week is that walking on a moving surface is perhaps more of a challenge than the speed itself. I was able to easily increase my own walking speed once I got used to keeping my balance on a moving surface and so has he.

His first several treadmill lessons were done at a very low speed, about 2 mph. This included lots of treats just for staying on the belt. At that point, Phoenix could eat and walk at the same time.

As I started to raise the speed, he clearly had to concentrate on his feet and could not eat and walk at the same time. If I offered a treat, he stopped walking, with predictable results. At that point, I kept cookies in the picture but didn’t offer them until the belt had slowed at the end of each session.

Initially, Phoenix paced. Several friends had told me their dogs did that, too, and while it is not intrinsically bad, it’s not a gait you want your dog to practice, nor is it one that offers optimal conditioning. My goal was to find the speed at which Phoenix would trot and I’m happy to report after a week of daily sessions of just a few minutes of gradually increasing the speed, he starts trotting at about 3.5 mph. It was cool to realize I could tell the second his gait changed from pacing to trotting even though I was standing right next to him, looking down on his back, not at his legs.

This is a relatively slow and effortless speed for him, so I will start increasing both speed and the amount of time I ask him to stay on. I want this to be a very pleasant (and yes, tiring!) activity for him, not work him into total exhaustion. And yes, he gets a warm up and cool down period, just like I do.

The Internet information I have found abut treadmill work with dogs advises against setting the treadmill facing a solid wall. I advise against setting it up facing an open doorway or window! Our treadmill is in the back room of our house, which wasn’t ever intended to be a bedroom but is anyway. A set of double doors opens into the living room and we placed the treadmill so we could open those doors and watch TV while walking, as well as see out the big picture window.

A few days ago, Phoenix was walking along, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, when he looked out the window and spotted a cat. He stopped walking, again with predictable results. Fortunately, he wasn’t going very fast because he flew right off the treadmill. Now when he runs on it, the double doors are shut. Boring but safe.

I’d love to hear from other people whose dogs run on treadmills, especially relating to speed, duration and frequency of workouts.

Happy Imbolc!

What? You’re not celebrating Imbolc today? Well get out there and light a candle and celebrate “the coming of the light.” Haven’t you noticed? The days are getting longer!

Need more enlightenment?

From Wikipedia: “Imbolc is one of the four principal festivals of the Celtic calendar, celebrated among Gaelic peoples and some other Celtic cultures, either at the beginning of February or at the first local signs of spring. (Editor's note: No signs of spring here yet, we got 3 more freaking inches of snow last night.)

“Most commonly it is celebrated on February 2 . . . which falls halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere . . . Imbolc is traditionally a time of weather prognostication, and the old tradition of watching to see if serpents or badgers came from their winter dens is perhaps a precursor to the North American Groundhog Day.” (Editor's note: if there are serpents coming out of their dens I am never going outside again.)

From Witchvox.com: “As a time of the year associated with beginning growth, Imbolc is an initiatory period for many. Here we plant the “seeds” of our hopes and dreams for the coming summer months.”

Kind of nice to think about, huh?

It’s sunny here today, which means any groundhog who peeks outside his burrow will see his shadow, get scared and dive back in, indicating six more weeks of winter weather. Sigh. But I’ll take the sunshine anyway.

Today, I am definitely thankful for the daylight hours growing longer.

Scott County agility