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Friday, August 9, 2013

Field Trip

Despite all the storms we were having this week we managed to get out on a field trip one day.
Here are a few photos that I took.
Where Shenandoah river meets Potomac


Jefferson Rock


This stairs were really creepy to walk on as you could see all the way down. Not as bad as walking on glass but still a bit challenging for those who prone to that kind of thing.

You can find the rest of the photos here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/97873218@N00/sets/72157634999526476/

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Rained out

We are supposedly on vacation this week and we are, but the weather has not been cooperating with our plans at all. We decided that this year we will not go anywhere but stay home, go to the pool and field trips.

Monday and Tuesday were quite miserable - rainy and cold for this time of the year for our area. On Tuesday girls had decided that they want to have a spa day.:-)

We made a facial mask out of Greek yogurt and egg whites. Girls put the bath robes on and pretended they are at the spa.



The mask recipe called for 2 tbs of yogurt and 2 egg whites, so I had doubled the recipe for the three of us. To my surprise we had a lot of it left over. That's when it comes handy to have dogs around the house. Mozart was very happy to help up with the leftovers, plus I think yogurt could be good for him as he is on antibiotics for two weeks.

After that we made sugar and peanut butter cookies. Mozart wanted to help us to clean the dishes after the cookies were done, but he wasn't allowed:-) Warm cookies and milk were perfect on the rainy day!

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Sunday Project

Before I tell you all about my Sunday project I am happy to announce that Mozart finally did pooped during our morning walk. He crawled under a pine tree and took care of his business and of course he was about to break down in his happy dance, when I had to put a end to it. I couldn't really blame him for wanting to dance, I was about to break down in a dance myself at this point, but doctors orders are doctors orders.  In addition, while crawling under the tree he completely shredded all that plastic defense I constructed to keep his foot dry so we had to head back home and take care of that foot.

On Sunday after I finished making gazillion of pancakes to feed an army of teenage girls I was starting to have a cabin fever. Here I was sitting on my sofa and twiddling my thumbs. The idea of me having nothing to was so strange that quite frankly it started to make me very irritable.

Just when Husband was about to kick me out of the house I told him that I am going to Home Depot to pick up a few things for my new project. Of course my loving husband said that he will go to the store and pick up all the supplies himself.

What I wanted to build was a wooden box that I can use for working on stays. Normally, I wold just use the PVC pipe for this purpose. However, Mozart is not really respectful of the PVC pipe boundary. I was suspecting that Moz is simply unaware of what his feet are doing on stays and hoping that if I raise him off the ground a bit and if the box is just big enough for him to sit in the correct position but any slight change in that position will make him fall of the box, he might actually notice.

I wanted to build a similar thing for teaching the stand as a tiny shift of his feet on the stand was causing me a great grief, plus I wanted to use it for teaching proper stacking for the breed ring. Now that Moz was on leash walking regiment, I've decided that  this is the best time to work on stays. The "stay" box idea was already cooking in my head when I came across a blog in which the owner of that blog did exactly the same and it seems she was seeing nice results with it.

The list of materials was simple a single 2x2 and 1/4" think MDF board. In addition Husband bought a miter box. Yey. I had been wanting a miter saw since about Christmas, but every time I ask for miter saw, I am told that in order to have all those tools we need to put a shed up in our back yard. Which means way more money than $200 I would spend on the saw, so I guess for now I should be happy with the miter box and I was.

my setup
Miter box is not nearly as exciting as a power tool, but it sure does the job it was designed to do - keeping nice clean cuts at 90 degree angle and even more importantly at 45 degree angle.


During Christmas shopping I came across a book by Ana White that has lots of cool wood working projects for the house. The best part - they were all done by women. I wanted to try my hands in the wood working for a while and the book was a great inspiration and I was about to start my first project!

Things got a little less exciting when I realize that it takes forever to make a single cut and I needed 12! Things turned to be quite frustrating when the time came for 45 degree angle cuts. The saw kept on popping out of the grooves and I figured that it was the person who was handling it. Husband came to the rescue and took over and then I saw that it wasn't the person but the damn saw. The saw was simply too short to use when cutting on an angle. As I was watching my husband struggling with the same things as I was just few min ago, I felt a bit better about my wood working skills. :-)  Husband had even less patience than I, so he turn around and headed back to the store to buy a longer saw.

I figured that I'd keep on working while waiting for the new saw.  The small kiddo came over curious to see what I was doing  and  wanted to help. After working on it she told me that she wants her own tool set - a tiny saw and a tiny hammer!:-)


Husband came back not only with a longer saw but also with a jigsaw. Yippee! A power tool! I used jigsaw to cut the piece out of MDF board.

I wasn't crazy about attempting to put the screws on an angle to fasten the corners together, so to make the screwing job easier on myself I used metal brackets to reinforce the corners. Even that now I had to screw straight down, I still struggled with keeping the screws straight, apparently I will need a lot more practice with the screw driver. On the other hand the jigsaw was very simple and exciting to operate.

Here is the box I had constructed. This is the upside down view of it.
















Here is the Mozzie testing it out. It turned out a tid bit too big, but I think it will work just fine. To prevent Moz from sliding on shiny MDF surface I went over it with a sand paper. Worked perfectly!













Monday, August 5, 2013

Bloody Saturday and Much Better Sunday

The past weekend started on a pretty crappy note. Originally we were going to take the older kiddo and her friends camping as a birthday party for a 13 years old. When we woke up the sky was grey and before I even had a chance to take the dogs out it started to rain.

Husband said that the forecast was promising rain all day with thunder storm overnight and suggested that taking bunch of girls camping in this kind of weather was a bad idea. Grumpily I had to agree, but we needed to come up with a new plan. I took the dogs out saying that I will think it over while walking.

When I came back to the house, I noticed that Mozart had bloody foot prints. At first, I wasn't really concerned as he wasn't limping on the way back from the woods and I thought it was probably just his nail, however, the amount of blood I saw when I picked up his foot was telling me otherwise. 

I ran inside the house and brought a bowl of warm water  with Epsom salt  to rinse his foot and see what is going on. On the examination it was apparent that it wasn't a nail but his paw pad and I couldn't really stop the blood to be able to really see how bad it was. Unfortunately, this called for a visit to a vet. In mean time we still had to make up our mind about the birthday party. Finally it was decided that we will try to reschedule the camping trip and invite the girls who cannot make it on the newly set date, tonight for a sleepover.

The whole reason why we decided on the camping trip in the first place as we couldnt imaging having 12 thirteen year old girls in our tiny house for a slumber party.  I quickly wrapped Moz's foot so that he doesn't bleed all over my car, jumped in the car and headed to the vet,  at the same time I was trying to call half the parents and let them know about the change of plan. Husband was going to call the other half.

I managed to get a hold of two parents before I reached the office, so all other calls had to wait till I was finished. While sitting in the exam room I kept on getting texts from Husband saying that pretty much all the girls were coming both weekends, well except the two I had called myself of course. Silly me was actually sticking to the agreed plan. I was really trying to focus on the vet while fighting the panic trying to set in at the idea of having 10  teenage girls at our house.

The bandage I made did absorbed enough blood that when it was taking off we could see what was going on with poor Mozzie's foot. His large paw pad was practically slashed in half and the cut was going really deep. Yep, it had to be stitched.

The biggest problem I have with the vets is that they do not like to do things to my dog right in front of me. they always desperately want to take the dog back where technician can do her work.  This really bothers me, I do not have the kind of dog I can feel comfortable to just handing over to someone.  It also appeared to me that the vet was a bit afraid of Moz - very bad sign, in my opinion.

We had finally agreed that they sedate him in the room where I was present and then they can take him in the back area and stitch him up. I had to leave as it was going to take about hour and a half as they were nice enough to squeeze us in without an appointment.  I left the vet and went back home to figure out the party situation.

The last bad surprise of the day was the $700 bill I had to pay when I picked Moz up! I need to find a cheaper vet.

He is doing fine, I think he is only limping a little bit because the bandage makes the walking uncomfortable. Other than that, the biggest problem we are facing is the "no running"  regiment for two weeks. First of all, Moz is not the kind of dog that can be a couch potato, I am seriously concerned that by the end of two weeks he will take the house down brick by brick.

Secondly, keeping his bandage dry is big pain in the butt. The grass in the morning is wet, the grass in the evening is wet. So every time I take him out I need to put bag on top of the bag on top of the bag. I finally ran out of bags, but the best construction I came up with so far is:  saran wrap over the bandage covered by one of my kids sock, covered by a plastic bag.

And finally, just to aggravate the situation even more, Mozart cannot poop. No, not because he is constipated, but because this crazy dog has his pooping ritual. The ritual consist of crazy zoomies before and after pooping. I can see that he wants to go potty and I see he is gearing up to take off which I put an end to, in response he forgets about what he wanted to do! I took him out twice tonight with the same outcome - no poop. If he does it in the house while I am asleep I will be livid!   

Well, this turned to be a  post on it's own, so I will have to write about the Sunday tomorrow.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Thursday night class

The biggest problem I have with keeping up the blog is that the only time I can write something is when it's way past my bed time and I can barely connect two words together no matter what language I use. Writing a coherent sentence - forget about it! Some people could argue though that  I have a problem with coherent sentences no matter what time of the day it is:-)

Thursday night is the night when we go to the group class. We usually have two classes - 6pm open class and 7pm "continuing education" class. Both classes are fun and I try to get to both, that way I can work one dog in one class and another dog in another class. Getting to class that is 45 min away by 6 pm is not an easy thing to do, though. Tonight I was running really late so I had decided to only bring Mozart with me, which turn out to be a right decision as every one was just doing open run thrus.

It is very easy to see the exercises I like to work on and those that I don't. Drop on recall is not my favorite and it was quite apparent tonight. I do find DOR to be pretty boring. It requires a lot of molding of the dog from the stand into a fold back down. Developing muscle memory in the dog requires hundreds of repetitions and I cannot possibly do more than five in a row before we are both bored out of our mind. I did try to focus on DOR daily during the last month and I think there is definitely a progress, but I only yesterday started putting it together with the recall. (Mental note to myself, that next time I have a puppy I should just teach down from the stand while the puppy is still young, I think it will make things whole lot easier)

The blasted broad jumps is another exercise that takes enormous amount of repetitions. As my friend Laura would say - "Blah!". And lets not forget the figure 8. I am not really a big fan of teaching heeling in general. I don't hate heeling, I just don't like teaching it to the dog:-) when all moving pieces are in place heeling is quite enjoyable. You are probably wondering what do I like to teach? Well, I am a big fan of utility. It's just so much more fun than anything else, but here is the bummer - you cannot get to utility until there is a good foundation in place.

Starting the beginning of July I went back to keeping a training log. This had been a great help in tracking what I had worked on and what I hadn't worked on. I finally had decided that I should wrap up our novice work so we don't have to worry about it anymore, that meant that heeling and figure 8 needed a good amount of work, but pretty much all novice work needs polishing and proofing.

Tonight I was very impressed that the work I put into figure 8 last week was really showing! If we could make that much progress in just one week, maybe things are not too bad. He almost didn't bumped me on the inside and almost didn't lag on the outside. It wasn't perfect but it actually looked like a figure 8! His straight line heeling was pretty good too and no bumping, but his halts had fell apart again. Darn it! I did spend a good amount of time straitening out those sits. Tonight he was sitting perpendicular to me. I think it's probably due to him being so worried about all those dogs sitting around the room and watching him. The class was packed and I could see his concern with all those dogs around. His lack of speed on both of the retrieves were another proof of that.

Overall I was pretty happy with his run and I am pretty sure as he will become more confident he will pick up the speed. Bottom line, we'd better hit some matches and I probably should start thinking about setting up a date for our novice debut.

Our instructor definitely pushing us in to the ring, but I am dragging my feet. From my experience showing Brandy I had concluded that if you put your dog in the ring, you'd better keep her there, otherwise by the time you are ready to go into open, you have to start almost from scratch in acclimating a dog to the trial environment.   

Knowing that showing in novice past our title is not something I want to do and can't really afford time wise or money wise, I think I'd wait going into novice till we are almost ready for open, although originally I wasn't planning on going to novice with him till we are almost ready in Utility, which is not going to happen before the next summer the earliest and that probably is very optimistic.