Magic of Hybrids

I walk out of Seasons Bistro where I had lunch with two of my high school girlfriends and use my automatic car door opener.  I try the door and it’s locked.  I push the button several more times, but nothing happens.  I open the car using the key and watch as one friend parked next to me takes off.  The other friend left by the front of the restaurant.  I insert the key and try to start the car and nothing happens.  I try a few more times.  It’s dead.  I panic.  I grab my cell phone, which fortunately still has some battery life and call Alan.  Thank god he answers.  He’s surprised the car is dead and asks if I left the lights on.  OMG, yes I did.

Now this is the real story – It was raining lightly on the way to Springfield so I had to use my wipers and turned on my lights.  I was feeling kind of self-righteous because I heard something on NPR about a law requiring folks to use lights when the wipers are on.  Really, we all should because it can be impossible to see an on-coming car or one you are catching up to in diminished visibility if it doesn’t have its lights on.

Alan said to wait a minute and try to start it again.  I did, but nothing happened.  He said he would borrow jumper cables and get there as soon as he could from Beavercreek.

My car, see photo above, is a yellow green 2000 Honda Insight hybrid.  I love it. I wanted a grey or red Insight.  Alan suggested that if I was getting a strange little hybrid, then I should have a strange color.  Yeah, but the green was so obvious and I couldn’t go unnoticed.  He said, “What do you plan to do, rob a bank or gas station?”  So I bought the green Insight.   I get 60 miles to the gallon.  I feel so environmentally righteous.  So this is the pay back for my self-righteous thoughts – a dead car.

But hybrids are magic.  I try again and it starts.  I call Alan’s office and they get him as he’s heading out the door.  I think it was the electric battery, which is fully charged, that got the car started.  Alan said probably trying to start the car began to recharge the battery.  Maybe, or maybe as I said hybrids are magic.  Oh, where’s my dog?  Magnum or Shadow ride in the hatch back or ride shotgun!

Agility, Tracking, and Dog Day Care

The Weave Poles

I come running out of the garage and grab a multi-colored tug toy along the way.  I wave it around at my side as if it is alive.  It captures Magnum’s attention and he runs after me trying to grab the toy.  We reach the weave poles, I take the toy away from him and say “Weave.”  He races through nailing them the first time.  I turn him around and say “Weave” again and he charges through completing them perfectly.  He’s been doing this for 3 days.  Wow!!  And, I thought he would never learn them.

Tracking

I stop with Magnum about 30 feet before the first flag that indicates the beginning of the track, which has aged for 25 minutes.  I put his harness on him and then we walk within a few feet of the flag.  I say, “Down.”  Magnum lies down so he can get a smell of the article at the flag and I snap the lead onto his harness.  I give the command, “Track!” and he takes off.  He is a fast and enthusiastic tracker.  There are no flags at corners or the end of the track, so I am completely dependent upon Magnum.  We should be working as a team.  My challenge is to be able to read the signals Magnum gives when he loses the track and then finds it. Alan noticed that at a turn, Magnum picked up the direction, but I didn’t immediately follow.  The lead line went taunt and Magnum thought I was holding him or signaling it wasn’t the correct direction.  He eventually went back to the correct direction and I read his body signs – nose to the ground almost being hooked and a strong pull on the lead.  I will have to be careful about letting the lead out and not restricting him.  I must be a better member of our team.

Day Care

Magnum and I visited Wags Inn, where he will stay while Alan and I are in Scotland.  He knew right away that it was a place dogs are left.  He refused to go into the building.  He is also shy when he first meets people, so he was leery of the staff.  Lori, the owner, had me bring him through a side yard with her dog Buster.  Magnum loved Buster and it made the process go smoother.  Lori suggested I bring him to dog day care once a week until we leave for Scotland to get him used to the facility.  Wags Inn is no ordinary kennel.  It is on 25 acres with a number of fenced yards for the dogs to play.  Dogs in day care run loose in the yards in supervised play.  After a couple of hours of play, the dogs nap for an hour or so.

When we arrived on Friday, he started to go up to the building, and then backed off.  Fortunately another dog arrived and of course he liked the dog and followed it.  Magnum was in the side yard playing with 6 other dogs when I arrived to take him home.  He had a great day.  He had a silly grin on his face with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.  I think it’s going to be okay. 

Heat and Tracking

The last few weeks have been really hot.  The heat impacts not only some dogs desire to work but actually impacts their ability to track.  A dry track is harder for a dog to follow than a track with moisture.  Even though a dog’s sense of smell is 100,000 times better than a human’s, it can still be difficult in the heat.  I get up early most days, but these hot days I’ve been even more motivated to get out early to track with Magnum.  I either try to ride my bike at 6:00 AM and track right after or go tracking and then ride my bike. 

Although I talk about the heat affecting a dog’s ability to smell, heat doesn’t seem to affect Magnum’s enthusiasm.  He is excited and continues to be a fast tracker.  The heat has probably made it a little more difficult for him to find the new acute turns we are working on.   He is following a human scent we lay by walking.  I am now aging the track so that the human body odor has dissipated.  The track is on the ground now and not in the air.

We went to northern Michigan for 5 days and it was about 10 degrees cooler, but still hot.  Magnum got to track in sandy soil, high grass and woods.  He also got to smell a deer’s skeleton and skull, which were near one of the tracks.  He stopped to smell them, but when I said “Back to work.” he continued on the track.  I am tracking with him 6 days a week with one day off following a lesson plan from Glen Johnson.  We have 3 weeks left to complete all the work.  I have already scheduled a day to have Magnum certified by an AKC Tracking Judge in Indiana.  Hopefully he will qualify and then I can enter Magnum in a tracking test at the end of September held at the English Springer Spaniel Field Trial Association’s Nationals.  Springers with no title are given first preference, so I will keep my fingers crossed that he gets certified and entered in the test.

I also work most days with him on agility.  He is doing well.  I am still in the process of teaching him the weave poles.  I have used channels with him running down the middle, and then gradually close the distance between the poles so he is forced to weave in and out of the poles.  The poles are now about 1 inch a part and he weaves great, but I have not been able to close the gap and still have him weave.  I think the biggest challenge is teaching this skill with the dog running as fast as he can.  Shadow was a very accurate and reliable weaver, but was never really fast.  So, I am working with the channels to keep the speed up for Magnum.  It’s a different training method.  I have entered him in his first agility trial, also at the Springers’ Nationals, so he has to weave perfectly before the end of September.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Memorial Day

Last Memorial Day I talked about the dogs I had as a child.  This year I want to remember a current dog – Shadow.  Whenever you look at my blog, it opens with Shadow jumping.  It has been almost two years since Shadow has been totally blind.  I imagine by the end of her life, she will have lived as many years in darkness as she lived in light.  Having my puppy Magnum has helped me to remember so many sweet and cute things that Shadow did when she was younger.  Blindness has changed her life in so many ways.  I can’t say it has changed the quality, but it has limited what she can do.  The other day Alan and I were walking the dogs outside with Shadow in the shade and the way the light hit her eyes, I could see her brown colored eyes that are usually hidden by blue colored cataracts.  It was so wonderful to see her brown eyes.  She is most comfortable walking around the yard on a leash and is then confident walking because she knows we will keep her from running into things.  On her own, she walks carefully and uses bumping into things as a way to guide her. 

The three sister cats I have spend a lot of time laying next to Shadow licking her and being licked by Shadow.  Perhaps due to loss of sight, the tactile experiences seem more important than ever to her.  A few months ago when we had just started training Magnum on the electric fence, I left him in the very back of the yard on a retractable leash attached to a tree while I went outside the dog area to work in the garden.  Shadow was laying in the shade near the house.  After about 15 minutes, I checked on Magnum.  There lying next to him was Shadow.  She had found her way about 100 feet to be next to him.  

Shadow’s life has changed, but she is still healthy and seems happy.  I will continue to rejoice in the years I have ahead with her.

Spring

My garden is growing – several lettuce mixes, radishes, kale, spinach, and peas are up so far.  Three weeks ago I planted in my new raised bed gardens Alan made me.  In the house I have tomatoes, peppers, basil, and various flowers growing from seed in the houses waiting until it is warm enough to plant outside.  I will wait at least until May 1^st for them.  I spent time yesterday and this morning weeding flower gardens.  My yard is gorgeous with 12 redbud trees in bloom, several types of fruit trees, and the lilacs just coming out.  I feel so fortunate to be able to enjoy them. 

Magnum is trained on the electric fence and doing well although he did test the fence last night and got a correction.  He’s the 5^th dog we’ve trained and the only one that hasn’t cried when corrected – he jumps.  He has also received more corrections than the other dogs totaled.  Kinsey and Shadow only got one correction and refused to ever get close enough for another correction.  He’s our second male trained, so the difference is not female versus male.  He continues to do really well in agility.  He will be an awesome competitor.  He really has the sweetest personality and still a little shy around some strangers.  I walked him on the bike path last week and almost everyone had a comment on how handsome he was.  I had a car stop on the road and the driver yelled that he was a gorgeous dog.  It’s fun to hear so many comments confirming my very biased opinion about him.  So many things he does remind me of Shadow, but then he has other aspects that are different.  Shadow continues to well. 

I tracked early Sunday morning with M and beagles.  It’s the first spring of tracking for Vinnie and Magnum and they were challenged by all of the scents.  Shadow and Hank showed the two beginners just how two master trackers do it.  Magnum barks while Shadow tracks.  I yelled at him that he needed to watch Shadow to see how it is done.

Plans for our walking trip to Scotland are going well.  We have decided to stay in Scotland for the entire visit and do England and London next year.  We’ll spend some time in Glasgow and Edinburgh after the walk in the Scottish Highlands.

I attended a writer’s workshop on Saturday and have decided to spend a concentrated effort on writing a fiction story and redoing a children’s story I wrote a while ago.  One of those activities I have wanted to do but needed to make time for it.  The challenge is scheduling a couple of hours several days a week to write.

Picture is of Magnum at 11 months with me.

Canine Good Citizen

Almost 2 weeks before his 10-month birthday, Magnum passed his Canine Good Citizen test.  I think he is the youngest of my dogs to have earned it.  It’s really not hard, but I know many dogs that have to try several times.  There are about 10 areas the dog is graded on – walking next to you and turning, sitting, downing, coming when called, having a friendly stranger examine their teeth, ears, feet, and pet them, meet a stranger with a dog and sit while humans shake hands and talk, and then be left with a stranger in another room for 3 minutes.  The being left does in many dogs.  They can’t jump up or bark/whine while waiting for their owner to return.

It is a challenge to arrange my days to accomplish personnel goals, which are outside of my fun activities by myself and with friends and my commitments to several boards.  It has made me think about Steve Jobs statement “…for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' “ 

It’s not that I am doing things I don’t want to do, but that there are some things I want to accomplish and find my days are busy.  I think this may be the great challenge in retirement for me.  I still have some personal goals I want to accomplish.  So, how do I structure my days and time so that I have blocks of time for my personal goals.  I’m not there yet, but I am thinking about it.

I haven’t been good about writing this blog and was going to quit, but decided I would continue until my one-year anniversary.  Then I will either stop or create a new blog.

Whitney Houston

Twenty-five or twenty-six years ago, I sat around a table in the family violence center’s shelter with a group of women who taught me to French braid my hair.  While we braided, we sang along to Whitney Houston’s song “The Greatest Love of All.”  I remember us all singing “You can’t take away my dignity.”  It seemed like such an appropriate song for all women and especially for this group of women who had been beaten down, but weren’t ready to give up.  I was the director of the Family Violence Prevention Center of Greene County.  It was when the shelter was in a lovely old house on West Second Street.  My office had a door that opened into the living room for families staying there.  That day, in the summer, the women were gathered in the dining room discussing their plans for the day.

When I could, I sat in on the meeting and shared my plans for the day.  It was a great way to model that we all have to plan our time and we are all accountable for establishing goals.  After the goal setting, someone turned on the radio and the group continued in a friendly discussion.   They decided to French braid their hair looking at my head of long hair and offered to help me.  Within a very short period of time, I learned to French braid my own hair.  What a wonderful gift.  And then, Whitney Houston came on singing and we all joined in. It was such a lovely moment of companionship and sisterhood.   

Hearing about Whitney Houston’s death brought these memories back to me.  Whitney was a brilliant star in our universe.  And like Judy Garland’s bright star, she was troubled with addictions that dimmed her star and led to her death.  There are so many women who aren’t stars who suffer the same addictions.  May we fill our hearts with hope that they will conquer their demons.