the floor is made of lava

toothpastefordinner.com

How Babies Are Made 10/30/08 is a blog post by Natalie Dee that has significantly influenced my life. Hopefully the link gets you there. If not, I believe I have provided enough information for you to find it.

How Babies Are Made has cured me of my "baby wanting" for the time being. This is good, because the idea of babies seems very appealing when compared with the drudgery of my graduate program-- however, the Hell written about in How Babies Are Made is significantly worse than grad school.

In other news, Tino has requested that I post some pics of the pups. Previously, I have refrained from posting any photos of my dogs because it could be incriminating evidence of my true identity. But now, I say: Bah! I am taking the risk.

The first photo is of Herman; I have titled it: The Floor Is Made of Lava, because he is walking from the chair to the couch as a kid would if they were playing the game.

The next photo is of Diego. He is our little Red Headed Step Child.

And finally, we have them both together on the couch in Together On The Couch.


Training Success: A Review, Days 1-5

The book says that we are supposed to do 2 training sessions a day of 20 repetitions of click and treat for 3 days. That didn't quite happen. I do think that my dogs get the idea of their current training sessions now, though. Here is a review of our progress:

Wed (day 1): 1 session PM
Thurs (day 2): 2 total sessions: AM and PM
Friday (3): 1 session AM
Saturday (4): 1 session AM
Sunday (5, today): 1 session AM

Today I actually have time to do more sessions with them but I am going to try to move on at this point. So far we have had 6 sessions which is the same number we would have had in 3 days of twice a day.

In Chicken Liver news, I have decided to trash the remaining livers. The livers have a grainy texture that fragments in my fingers as I try to feed them to Diego. On top of that they smell horrible. Chicken Livers have been the bane of my training existence.

I am also looking forward to moving on to the next training exercise because Diego has a problem of being over-zealous about food so that he scrapes my fingers with his teeth every time I try to put a treat in his mouth. I have cut up longer strips of centimeter cheese to help with this, but the box game that comes next will solve the teeth scrape problem.

Herman the Foodie

Training Success: Day 2

I think I read on a dog training web site that the handler should vary the food rewards so the dog is expecting the unexpected. Will it be chicken or cheese? Hot dog or steak?

In this light, I purchased something new: Chicken Livers. They were actually recommended in the same line of the book as hot dogs. This was my first experience with chicken livers, and you can take my word for it: Chicken Livers Are Fowl! Um, I mean FOUL! Nasty as hell. But the book said dogs like them, so I took them out with me in a baggie.

I take Herman out training first, and click and stick a piece of chicken liver in his mouth.
Herman spits it out.
I try again.
He spits it out again.

At this point I determine that Herman does not enjoy the chicken livers. Luckily I also had some centimeter cheese with me, and he likes that. So we used the cheese and did the click training.

Diego on the other hand LOVES chicken livers. (Although I cannot differentiate his love for chicken livers from his love for any other food.)

What's cooler than a back pack?

A hip pack.

I don't know if I've blogged before about how much I love Amazon: Amazon and on-line shopping in general.

The book I ordered: When Pigs Fly: Training Success with Impossible Dogs, arrived last night. Not only is it hilarious, but it makes me think that maybe my dogs aren't so bad after all. The Pigs-Fly training method is based on 100% positive reinforcement which I agree with. My uncle started his own dog training and dog walking company and he uses negative reinforcement. Dominant downs etc. His method took the life out of his dogs. They seem depressed and I didn't want my dogs to be like that.

Luckily Pigs-Fly has the answer. It is a slow answer but I think it will work. And the best part is that training my Pigs-Fly dogs won't take the life out of them.


So here we are: Day one: Loading the Clicker.
The clicker concept is that dogs can process a click noise in their brain faster than a human word. In this fashion the click becomes an instinctive signal. This is important for training because studies have shown that you have 1/2 a second between the behavior and the reward for the dog to associate the two. Clicking is easy and fast.

But in order for the clicker to work you have to "load it." This is what the boys and I started on today.

Materials: clicker, dog, bag of treats.
Today our treats were hot dogs and cheese. Each treat consisted of 1/40th of a hot dog or a 1cm by 1cm square of sliced cheese.

Instructions: click and shove a treat into the dog's mouth within a half second. Pause, and repeat 20 times.

I took Herman out first. He was afraid of the clicker so I hid it behind my back and showed him the treat. Then I clicked and shoved it in his mouth. After I ran out of a handful of treats he ran away so I had to walk up to him with a new handful and start again. Then we went back inside. Herman seemed relieved that the training was over. In general he doesn't enjoy new activities that he cannot predict. Hopefully it will get better.

Next it was Diego's turn. Diego went crazy-eyed-bible-thumping-fanatical about the treats. I am not sure if he got the link between the click and the treat, but boy does he LOVE training!

In the Pigs-Fly book, she says to start training somewhere boring like in the kitchen. I had to improvise and do it outside because we have a small apartment and I think it would be way too chaotic if I was trying to train two dogs at the same time. So we went outside but stayed in my apartment complex.

So that's it for today. Click and treat. I am supposed to do this twice a day for three days to fully load the clicker.

I started this post professing my love for Amazon. It is true. Who has time to physically shop? I don't, especially in my city's traffic. And so my next Amazon purchase is this excellent multi-pocket fanny pack to hold training treats, keys, and poop bags for my future Pigs-Fly training sessions. I am going to look rad with my hip pack. Can you tell that I am getting old?

Dog-possible: Diego the Impossible dog

It all happened too fast and too early in the morning. At least that's what Diego thought. He's the one who took a bite out of the guy's leg. Yes, I'm being serious. My dog bit someone. Fuck.

7 am. I roll out of bed and put on my signature giant black robe.
-Right, so it isn't even mine, it belongs to Jips, and because it is designed for a man it is large and it engulfs me in fluffiness. -
I hook up the dogs: Diego, a 25 lb pure beagle, and Herman, a 55 lb brown dog, and open the door of my apartment to go outside.

Now, in front of my door there is a narrow walkway, (about 4 feet wide) and there was a blond 22 year old coming back from a run walking into us. I pull the dogs back and the guy keeps walking past.

Please note: my dogs are harnessed and on leashes: nylon leashes with loop handles, not that pull and click kind. We are standing in the doorway of my apartment which opens into this 4 ft wide walkway, and this guy deliberately walks into us. The physical closeness would mean nothing for someone walking along crowded New York City sidewalks, but it meant something to Diego. He freaked out - lunged - and bit the guy in the leg.

The wound was less than one square inch-positioned on the side of his leg- between his shin and his calf. But remember, he was coming back from a run? His heart rate was up- and he had great circulation--the wound bled all over the place.

He asks if he can come into my apartment to clean up. (His apartment is just upstairs- but I say sure.) I wipe the blood off of his leg with a Puffs Plus with Lotion. He wants peroxide- I look around and we have almost no first aid supplies. Awesome. We have gauze and Target brand neosporin.

He says he loves dogs, he isn't going to report anything, etc. He says not to be too hard on Diego. We introduce ourselves. He lives upstairs. He leaves.

But my dog bit a person! Sure, I bet Diego felt cornered and scared. Add that to the four year mystery of his upbringing and you get a dog bite. Keep in mind that Herman was in the exact same situation, and he just stood there. Herman we raised from a puppy- we properly socialized him and he knows his place in our house.

I looked up dog bites on the Internet and it says that it is the owners fault for not raising the dog properly. I do take responsibility for my dog-- but I got him from the pound when he was four years old and pretty fucked up.

Diego is cute and affectionate, and that sums up all of his redeeming qualities.
When we got him, he had a collapsing trachea, heart worms, and ear infections. I had to hold him if he woke up at night until his second dose of cough medicine took effect and he went back to sleep. Jips holding him didn't cut it for Diego- it had to be me.

He wouldn't walk on a leash. He would just stand outside and freeze up like a dear in headlights. So I picked him up and carried him on walks with Herman. In interesting places I put him down and let him smell. After about a month, he learned how to walk the whole way by himself.

One day I was picking up dog toys from the carpet because I was about to vacuum. I found a tooth- a large canine tooth. I checked the boys' mouths and sure enough it was Diego whose tooth broke off. He had surgery to remove the rest of it because it was hurting him to eat. The vet said that years of rocking metal with his teeth had caused them to wear down. Someone must have left him in a crate for a long time when he didn't want to be in one.

Then what else? He has seizures on occasion, and he has a back problem- he can't handle steep stairs or the disks in his lower back get inflamed. So now we walk around the slope hill in the back of my apartment, and his back is doing fine.

Add to that the fact that he likes to pee on the TV stand and my computer chair and you have our special dog. And he likes to attempt to "hunt" every other dog in our apartment complex. He gets the scent- nose down tail up- and lifts his snout to give that loud trumpet beagle bay that his breed is known for.

I say all of this, but he HAS made tons of progress. He is a much healthier and happier dog now that we have had him for 2 years. Except for the fact that he is still a little bit neurotic and scared of everything. We understand that he likes to hide in the bedroom during a thunder storm, and he understands that we prefer him to pee outside rather than on the TV.

So now what do I do? He bit someone, and I have to change something. I ordered this book off of amazon: When Pigs Fly: Training Success with Impossible Dogs, because I think Diego qualifies. I will let you know how the training success goes when the book comes in.

Alone

I haven't been quite sure what to write about, mainly because I didn't want to write about the most significant thing in my life lately: being alone.

I am not totally alone, I still have Herman and Diego with me, but Jips is gone visiting his family for five days. So for five days I am living alone. I've never actually lived alone before. I don't think it would be good for me. I need people around me, even if we just coexist in an overlapping space. With that being said: maybe I am the difficult roommate. ;) I certainly am the messy roommate!

My mom asked me if I had trouble sleeping. I don't have trouble at all, and that is probably because I always go to bed by myself and Jips stays up. The good thing about sleeping alone is that there is more room in the bed. And Herman will sleep the whole night with me since Jips doesn't come to bed taking Herman's spot.

The funny thing is that normally I feel like I can't get enough time for myself. But this weekend I feel so alone that time by myself feels unnaturally empty. I had planned on studying alot -which I need to do- but the aloneness makes it hard for me to concentrate.