Home Improvement

Despite the traveling I do to attend agility trials, and all of the teaching I do on the weekends, I'm basically a house mouse. I prefer the food that I cook myself and I rarely eat out (1 or 2 times a year). I don't like leaving the house once I'm home for the day. I work on lists of supplies and food that I need, usually only going out once or twice a month to restock or get things for home projects. I feed my sock and shoe fetish entirely online (Darn Tough Vermont and Altra are the only socks and shoes that I wear both to work and to agility, and I have way more pairs of them than I am going to admit to here). 

My job is stressful on many levels--physical, intellectual, emotional. Agility is a passion and is fraught with emotional and physical investment too. My house is the place where I can hang out and recharge. Where I can do what I want when I want. 

The house I'm in now was refurbed by flippers, and not very well. They made cosmetic upgrades but left a lot of important infrastructure untouched. I knew the house was horribly inefficient with its 30-year-old water heater, HVAC, blinds, windows, etc. The flippers put in cheap laminate flooring downstairs and cheap carpet upstairs, and cheap doors to the front of the house and from kitchen to garage. I decided to just live in the space for a while before I made any big changes. That "awhile" turned into years but at last the need for changes was forced on me.

I had the deck replaced two winters ago. It had become a bit of a crisis as I was falling through the rotting boards when I walked out there. As a large section of it is 15 feet off the ground, this was a serious safety issue that needed to be fixed quickly.

The water heater developed a leak this fall. Not a surprise. It worked for decades beyond its original expiration date. I had it replaced. I called an HVAC company out to do a winter check on my unit. They found some serious damage due to ... failed past repairs? Animals? Gremlins? I had it replaced.

And I finally got tired of looking at the hideous aluminum-framed windows that couldn't be opened, with trails of mold around the edges that no caulk could hide, and condensation between the panes due to long-failed seals. I had every window in the house replaced. Sounds so simple to type it out but it was a massive job.

Not that I replaced the windows myself. Hell no. I got three bids, did my research. I paid someone to do it. It took two and a half days, which is really fast from one perspective but an eternity when I had to take time off from work and be here all of that time. 

I also had them replace the stupid fucking French doors from the kitchen to the deck. French doors look nice until you actually have to live in a house with them. Can't put a screen on the darned things. The locking mechanism of one was broken and I could only open one of the doors. They leaked water around the bottom. They never sealed well and cold air whistled in around them, despite the Frankenstein monster layers of sticky-backed rubber seals I kept adding around them. And when I had the window company come out to measure for the windows and the new sliding glass door, they pulled off the trim and we discovered there was literally 3 inches of open, unfilled space on either side of the doors. Just air and a thin layer of siding between that trim and the outdoor world. No wonder the kitchen was so hot in summer and cold in winter. There was no insulation at all around the damned things.

I went with vinyl windows, of course. Not double hung because that's a marketing gimmick. The lower panes in the single hung windows still rotate into the room and can even be removed if needed. The basic functionality is still there. The difference in price between single hung and double hung windows was the cost of my lovely new sliding glass door. 

After the installers were gone, I spent hours (my entire Saturday) cleaning the floors and putting the furniture and carpets back in place. I still need to clean up the window frames here and there. There's still plenty of dust and vinyl curls to wipe up inside and nails and pieces of caulk and glass to pick up outside. 

But the windows are so nice. I came home today after 7 hours outside teaching and training at the club to a cool, quiet den. Ahh.

But these projects never really end, do they? As they were installing the new windows, I realized that I couldn't put the horrible 30-year-old blinds back up. I just couldn't do it. So I measured everything and ran to Home Depot to order nice faux wood blinds in a warm maple color. Too bad I didn't realize this two weeks ago. But I can limp along with temporary window coverings until the new blinds come in. Deliver to the store for free? Why yes, I can pick them up. I'm still debating whether I will put the blinds up myself or pay someone else to do it. I took all the old blinds to Habitat for Humanity ReStore.

I'm fortunate that I can afford to replace these important parts of my home when I need to. The dogs and I will benefit from a cleaner, quieter, more comfortable living space. 

 

Leash! Leash!

 Although Frankie's overall agility skills have dramatically improved in the past few months, we still have one training issue that I can't seem to make progress on. 

At the end of runs in trials, she won't come to me. She knows it is the end of the run. After the last obstacle, she takes off, zooming around the ring. She sometimes visits ring crew or the judge, and she runs really close to me but won't let me catch her. 

I have to tell people coming in the ring after us to not come in the gate until I have her on lead. Which can sometimes take a minute or two, an eternity in agility when the actual run may have only been 30 seconds long. 

She's not aggressive. She doesn't attempt any obstacles. She just runs around the ring at top speed. 

My interpretation of this behavior is that she is too full of emotion and energy and doesn't know what to do with it. She doesn't want the fun to end. I mean, she comes in the ring so high she's levitating. The actual running of the course doesn't do much to calm her down.

I've spent almost 3 months working on a routine to get her to go to her leash at the end of a run. In this part of the world, most AKC clubs have plastic buckets near the exit gate into which the leash runner will drop your leash. You must enter and exit the ring with the dog on lead. You can carry the dog in and out but they still have to have a leash on. 

 First I built value for a plastic bucket. I added the leash in the bucket. I switched to different buckets. I added a second bucket for a delayed reward. I moved the buckets around. She was doing well with this routine at home and in class but it fell apart at the last trial. On her very first run of that trial, I made a beeline to the bucket, yelling "Leash! Leash!" She turned and rammed into me behind my knees. I ended up flat on my back looking up at the ceiling. She weighs all of 18 lb and she took me down. She had six runs and ran around the ring at the end of five of them. 

 The only exception was her last run of the second day. I ran this one For Exhibition Only. The handler can bring a toy into the ring and can take obstacles in any order they want for their 45 seconds. It doesn't count towards a qualifying leg. At the end, I whipped out the toy from the back of my pants. She grabbed it and I grabbed her collar. Since her reputation was already firmly established, everyone clapped. Sigh. I'm glad to entertain but I'd rather be celebrated for a nice, clean run and not successfully grabbing my dog.

I still think this routine can work but we aren't quite there. So I added having her put her head into her martingale collar before I would reward her. I hold it out and she shoves her head into it then I shove a treat in her mouth. I take it off and repeat 2 or 3 times. 

 I do this every time she goes outside to potty. I have one of my students put the leash in a bucket somewhere on the field and I do this in class after she runs. Months I've been at this. So many repetitions.

I managed to convince her to do stopped contacts by repeating and rewarding over and over. I have to trust the method and hope that I can convince her that the end of a run is not the end of the fun. 

Bah! Humbug!

 I don't celebrate holidays. I don't put up decorations or make special food. I don't wear costumes or specially colored or bedazzled clothing. I don't do gift exchanges. I'm not a monster. If invited to a friend's house for a shared meal on a designated holiday, I go, eat, and be appropriately merry. I just don't do anything for holidays on my own.

I don't celebrate birthdays either. I don't buy the dogs special toys or give them special treats. If I want something for myself, I save up money and buy it when I am ready. I don't need to wait for a special day for that.  

In vet school, my classmates had an annoying habit of singing "Happy Birthday" whenever they found out it was someone's birthday. For four years, I lied and told them my birthday was January 1. I chose that day because it reliably fell during the holiday break, so there were no classes, thus avoiding the matter entirely. 

For most holidays, I waver between anger at the false veneer of religion that is slapped on as if that was sufficient excuse, dismay at the empty commercialism, and just not seeing the point. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to have paid holidays from work. I'm like my job but I have plenty of things to keep me occupied when not at work. It would be nice to choose which Monday or Friday I can take off in, say, June, rather than being told, it's this one day. But that's hardly a substantial complaint.

I think that hyping up events that "must" happen on a specific day ends up excluding too many people. In this hyping, the same events are deemed lesser or meaningless if they happen on any other day. People are pressured to participate by peers, family, and corporate overlords. Maybe they can't afford decorations or special food or themed clothing. Maybe they have to work that day. Maybe they aren't Christian. I can't drum up much positive feeling as a result.

Still, I don't make a crusade out of crushing holiday cheer. I just opt out. 

LEFT! I Mean, RIGHT!

 All of my fox terriers advanced through the levels of AKC agility in a relatively normal fashion: Novice, Open (ah, the purgatory of Open), Excellent, and in the case of Archie, Masters. But of course that isn't the case for Frankie. We can throw the rule book out for Frankie. She's following her own agenda.

 Last weekend, she ran an amazing Open Standard course with a single off-course error. She held her start line stay (barely--she's a creeper, but she did wait for my release), she blazed through the weaves (her signature obstacle), and she hit all the contacts including the table. However, I didn't realize she qualified until later that day, and then didn't realize until the next morning that she had earned her Open Standard title with that run! So she's now in Excellent Standard.

If Frankie were any of my other dogs, I'd be telling you that she was in Excellent or just a leg away from moving up to Excellent in the other courses too. But no, no, that's not Frankie's plan. 

A month ago, she set a FAST course on fire, earning 78 out of a possible 80 points and doing the Excellent/Master distance challenge as well as her own required Novice distance challenge. FAST is a game with two objectives: complete a distance handling challenge and accumulate points. Oh, and you have to do all of this within about 35 seconds. Obstacles are assigned point values on the map and handlers choose their own courses. The distance challenges are harder and the number of points required to qualify increase as you move up the ranks. You can't qualify without successfully completing the distance challenge.

Frankie has amazing distance performance so I wasn't surprised that she successfully navigated the more difficult Excellent/Master distance challenge. But even if I tried, even if that had been my plan, I could not have earned 78 points on that course with Archie. And he's an accomplished agility dog and a solid partner! That turned out to also be a titling run for Frankie, but I didn't realize it until I got the certificate in the mail from AKC a couple of weeks later. She's now in Open FAST.

Obviously there's a pattern here. With Frankie, it's more about the journey than the actual details of the runs. 

I haven't yet mentioned Jumpers With Weaves, also just called Jumpers. Sigh. That's Frankie's nemesis. She has one, just one, Jumpers leg, and many NQs. She is stuck quite firmly in Novice Jumpers. 

Something needs to change for us to succeed in Jumpers. 

Frankie has a skill that I never taught any of my other dogs: directionals. That means if I say (yell, repeatedly) LEFT, she will turn left over the jump in front of her. I use directionals with her all the time in practice at home but not too often in class. I certainly didn't think this skill was solid enough to use in an actual trial. But last weekend, I needed her to take a jump straight off the Aframe then turn right into a tunnel. With Archie, I would have handled that with a rear cross on the flat, which is a rear cross done after an interruption in the dog's flow, like stopping at the bottom of the Aframe. Frankie doesn't like that particular handling move and often jumps and crashes into me when I try it in class. Out of desperation, I decided to use her RIGHT directional. And it worked!

Directionals are tricky. They are always (always) relative to the dog's left and right and independent of the relative position and motion of dog and handler. It's easy to mix them up. It takes many repetitions to ensure they are a solid, learned behavior for both dog and handler. They are not a skill taught in a weekend. Frankie has a black head, a white body, and a large black patch on her left shoulder. That black patch is a great visual marker! So I put in the time and effort to train directionals with her. 

Now that I know she can perform them in a trial setting, I decided they were the missing piece of our Jumpers puzzle.  

This weekend, I set up two Jumper courses to test Frankie's directionals. The first one was relatively straightforward. RIGHT RIGHT out of the weaves worked very well to turn her to jump 3. She has such wonderful distance that I was able to send her to jumps 5 through 8 while I stayed in the middle of the course. I called her to me over 8 then told her RIGHT RIGHT again to turn her over 9. This is a rear cross on the flat. To turn her over 13 and keep her off that off course jump 5, I told her RIGHT RIGHT TUNNEL. Then one more rear cross on the flat with RIGHT RIGHT to turn her over 17 to the last jump at 18. She had several clean runs on this course. Archie did too although I handled him in a more traditional way.

Today, I set up this more challenging Jumpers course. Yeah, that crowded bit in the middle was really tricky. Frankie only had a single clean run, our last run of the morning after almost hours of practice. But what a clean run it was! My verbal timing was good, she listened and responded and kept all the bars up, and even had a beautiful GO ON at the end to finish the last two jumps way ahead of me. 

As you can see from the labels, both of these are Excellent/Masters level courses. 

We may not be in Novice Jumpers for too much longer!

Immunity

I had been thinking about getting some of the recommended old people vaccines for a year or so now. The alarming chaos that the Trump administration is creating accelerated those decisions. I'm really worried that some of the vaccines won't even be available in a year or two. 

 As an aside, with no research being done in the U.S. to pin down the strain of this fall's influenza virus, and avian influenza misbehaving all over the place, we are going to be royally fucked anyway. 

As another aside, I absolutely trust science. Vaccines have saved millions of lives across the globe for decades. Dismissing vaccines as a public health necessity clearly shows how little you value those lives. Notice I said I don't "believe" in science. Science doesn't require faith or belief. 

Back to those old people vaccines. I decided to start with the shingles vax. A friend went through about 8 weeks of painful hell when she developed shingles. She couldn't lift one of her arms above her waist for weeks. I'm busy at work, busy with teaching dog classes, busy with my dogs--I don't want to sit out 8 weeks of any of that. 

 My local Kroger offers a wide array of vaccines on a walk-in basis. I got a COVID booster and my influenza shot there last fall. Since I get a couple of minor medications from that Kroger pharmacy, all my info is in the system. I walk in, say "I want this vaccine" and in minutes it is done. My insurance covers 100% of the cost. It is so stupidly easy to take care of this. 

I knew the shingles vaccine required two shots. I was surprised to learn that the second shot isn't given until at least 2 months from the first. That's a long time to wait for the second booster. But the chickenpox virus is a weird one anyway. 

As usual, I got my shot in my right arm. I'm one of the special 10% of the world that is left-handed. 

 That was three days ago. That shot spanked me hard. 

It took a solid 24 hours before my immune system decided to kick into gear, but I have a low-grade fever, raised, red wheals on my arm extending 2-3 cm around the injection site, sore arm, malaise, etc. None of these are adverse events as they are an expected response to the shot. But that is one spicy vaccine! Yikes!

But all of these things are so much less horrible than actually getting shingles. 

Measles booster is coming up next month! I can't wait!

Return of CircusK9

 Hi. I'm back. It's been a while. I didn't post too often when I was in school, because I didn't have the mental bandwidth to think or write about anything else. And the past three years? I've been settling into my new career. Lots of things have happened in my little world and in the bigger world outside in that time. 

I decided it was time to dust the blog off and put some more effort into it. CircusK9, by title and design, is supposed to be about my dogs. But I'm sure some interesting veterinary stories will creep in now and then.

Let's start the restart with some thoughts about teaching. For the past several years, I've been teaching classes at the local dog club. I gravitated to intermediate agility quickly, and have stayed put there. I don't like teaching rank beginners (I honestly don't have the patience for it, although that is what I did in Saudi with Mimi), and there is already a solid instructor who teaches advanced agility. 

Intermediate level handlers and dogs can see very quick growth in skills if they apply themselves. I get a lot of satisfaction from teaching them--who doesn't like to be successful? Some of my students have been with me for over 2 years and I have gradually pushed them to handling and training at an advanced level. Frankie is in my class and there are plenty of weeks when the material is too advanced for her right now. But it's the level of challenge that several of the other students need. 

I read books. I listen to podcasts. I sign up for online seminars and webinars. I subscribe to two (expensive) training programs (Bad Dog Agility and Agility Nation) so I can keep up with new training protocols and get ideas for classes. I even keep a Facebook account solely to get access to course maps. I put a lot of my own time and money into making sure I am delivering useful and current agility training information. 

I also teach a class that I created back in 2020 that I call Teamwork. I saw a big gap between the formal, old-school obedience classes that formed the bulk of the club's class offerings and introductory rally and agility classes. Handlers were coming into those dog sport tracks without any understanding of how to train a dog. Teamwork is all about training the handler and teaching them how to communicate consistently with their canine partner. The dogs come along for the ride, and they just love it. In contrast to the old-school obedience training offered at the club, I only use positive training methods and high rates of reward/reinforcement. No pinch collars. No electric shocks. No leash yanking. No verbal corrections. Sounds reasonable to you? I can assure you, Teamwork is still viewed as subversive and radical, even after five years. I also upset the old guard by insisting that I teach it on Sunday mornings inside the building. Wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments ensued. What if someone decided they needed to train at 10am on a Sunday? How could they possibly do that if I was teaching a class? Turns out all those folks who said Teamwork would cut into their training time don't actually come to the club on weekends. I collected the data to prove it. That space was viewed as sacred, only to be used to punish, er, train dogs for formal obedience competition. Here I was, jumping around, treats flying, clickers clicking, dogs and handlers happy as clams. Subversive indeed. 

I teach Teamwork 5 or 6 times a year in 8-week sessions. It is one of the most popular classes offered at the club. The class fills every session with club members and non-members both. I get rave instructor reviews.

I love teaching agility. I find it exciting and challenging. But I really love teaching Teamwork. Usually around week 4, the shift in the relationship between dogs and handlers becomes obvious. I love seeing that. 

Four of the old guard are taking Teamwork from me this coming session with their young dogs. I think they know, in their dark, cold hearts, that I am right, that positive training is the correct and ethical way to train. I've alerted my assistant instructor that we are in for a wild ride. I absolutely will call them out if they revert to their punishment-based training methods in my class. But I have to give them a tiny bit of credit for being willing to brave me and sign up for it.

 Teaching revives me. It is an important social activity as well as one that gives me emotional and intellectual satisfaction. I teach because I like to learn. I succeed when my students succeed. I guess that's why they keep signing up.

 

Go, Speedracer! Go!

 Frankie had a pretty good weekend at our last trial. She got her first FAST Q and earned her Novice Standard title. She also had five out of six very good start line stays. She's holding her position until I release her, and looking forward at the obstacle, not at me.

Her failed start line on the sixth attempt was entirely my fault. 

AKC requires dogs to enter and exit the ring on lead. Archie wears a very loose martingale on a nylon leash. It is mostly decorative as he doesn't need it for restraint when we enter. Even when I slip the collar over his head and toss the leash to the leash runner, I know Archie will stick by my side until I put him in position, and he will stay there until I release him. He's a good boy that wants to please me. 

Frankie wears a martingale attached to a braided fleece tugging leash on top of the buckle collar she wears all the time. She does need that leash for restraint. I guess I got overconfident. We entered the ring for her first run in Open Standard (I of course moved her up after she earned her Novice title). She was over-aroused, as usual, and I was a bit tired and distracted. The first obstacle was the tire, with a straight approach to the dogwalk, which she could see through the tire. I slipped the collar off her head and started to stuff the leash into my pocket. My mistake was not holding on to her when I did this. I thought she'd stay by me, like my good boy Archie. Nope.

She took off, slamming into the tire and heading up the dogwalk. Hitting the tire like that was a fatal error, equivalent to knocking a bar from a jump. So the run was already lost. AKC has a new feature called Fix-N-Go in which you can go back and fix an error. You still lose the Q, and you can't go back to the beginning if the error occurred in the middle of the course, and you can't attempt the fix anything more than once. But we hadn't even started the run, so my Fix-N-Go could start at the tire.

I called her back to me. She came right back! I made her sit and led out only a few feet away from her to the tire. I knew I couldn't get any more distance than that. She was so excited that she was nearly levitating out of her skin. I released her and off we went. 

And she had a really great run! She didn't make the Aframe contact, and she missed a jump near the end of the course, but that didn't matter because we weren't running for the Q anyway. Her performance was better than I expected. She smoked the weaves! People were applauding!

The effort and time I put into her start lines did pay off. I saw a lot more control and focus from her throughout the weekend. She's right on the cusp of understanding that agility is a team sport. 

Our next training goal: running contacts. Even though I have taught and used stopped contacts with every other fox terrier I have done agility with, I don't think I can realistically and reliably get stopped contacts from Frankie in a competition setting. Rather than fight her, I want to use her natural talents to make our teamwork smoother. Top competitors train running contacts to shave precious hundredths and thousandths of seconds off their time. That's not my goal. We are not world team material, and she's plenty fast to earn top placements in her classes once we work out the teamwork thing. I think that running contacts will feel more natural to her, and that will improve our communication on the course.