Tip Tail

First of all, Merry Christmas. I hope everyone had a great weekend.

I’ve been taking it easy the last weeks, which is nice, no dog sports. Well, I did do some Cyber Rally-O with Jet that was pretty fun. I’ll have to post about that next time. Otherwise, I’ve been spending time with family and friends and taking the dogs to the park, going on some walks, and taking it easy. Been really nice. I wish I could have more time like this to just live. Oh I’ve been working, too, but that goes without saying. And in only another week, I’ll be able to say “I can retire next year…” oh that’ll be nice. I can retire in 2013, so I’m looking forward to that!

I haven’t been taking Levi to the park, though, just Jet and Tatum. I miss taking Levi. He still isn’t back to normal quite yet. I’ve been taking him on walks around the block, a mile or so, to work him back up to the park. But I think maybe next weekend he’ll be coming with again. His back still hurts. Maybe he needs a discectomy to help his back, but maybe not. He’s been getting a little better every day. And he’s being rather obnoxious at home which is a sign the’s feeling good. So that’s a good thing. I am realizing approaching EOL, which we say with software… (End Of Life), but as long as he’s happy and doing well, I’m happy with him too. He’s not going to keel over dead tomorrow or anything.

January will bring another agility trial. Maybe Jet and I can pick up another Double Q. We haven’t done agility in a couple months, now, but that’s okay. I think we will both remember how.

Yeah, I’m going to be taking a break from flyball for a while. Until I retire. Which is one year, 7 months, and some odd days away. I feel bad for Chase, because flyball is his most favorite thing. And while I do enjoy it, I just can’t do as much as I’ve been doing lately. So flyball is the thing that’s going to go.

I have 29 agility days planned with Jet in 2012. And he’s doing really well. I want to qualify him for AKC nationals, and go to AKC invitationals next December. So in order to do all that, lots of other things have to take a back seat. Mainly flyball.

I’ll miss the team and the fun. Hopefully none of them will end up in any heroin detox rehab treatment centers while I’m gone. But I can’t afford to travel to the tournaments. I wish we had some locally but we don’t. And I can’t take the time off work to travel, either. That’s the hardest thing, is getting the time off work. Oh I can get the time off work, my coworkers are really nice, but I only have a limited amount of leave every year, and this year I went way too low. I ended up with only 10 hours of annual at one point, and I need more of a buffer than that.

So until I retire in 2013, August, I won’t be doing flyball. Maybe I’ll do some agility with Chase again, to keep him active. I dunno. I don’t enjoy agility with him that much, I just can’t keep up, he’s too fast. But he likes it, so if I can afford it, I’ll try to enter him a little bit.

Fortunately Levi is doing a lot better. What a weight off my shoulders. I didn’t even realize how upset and worried and terrified I was last week, until now that I know he’s better.

I do worry that he is getting old. I know he’s going to get old. I know there’s nothing that can be done for it. No way to avoid it. I feel like Connor MacLeod on Highlander. He lives 1,000 years and the people he loves only live 100 years at best. But for me, I live 100 years and the dogs I love only live 10. Just less zeroes. Same concept.

Maybe there’s some type of dashboard scorecard out there for the length of a life. I dunno. But one quote always comes to mind from a book I read years ago. A Fantasy novel. “Death lasts so much longer than life.” It’s too true, and too depressing.

So anyway, Levi is doing better, which was the point of this post. He’s grumping at the other dogs, being fun police, guarding bones, and acting himself. I hope to take him for a short walk tomorrow to see how he does. Just maybe a half a mile or so. To make him happy and get him out. Hopefully by next weekend we’ll be back at the park again. The park is way too quiet without Levi. Tatum and Jet don’t bark at anyone. Levi has to talk to every person he sees. And I much prefer a little barking on our walks.

A while ago I posted that I went to a . And, well, I just have to post about me and agility seminars.

The format was okay, much like the Stacy Perdout-Goudy workshops I’ve been to here. She set up little course sequences then we all ran them and she’d tell us what she liked and didn’t like and gave us ideas to handle things differently.

For me and Jet, mostly she just told me to run with him more. Probably to speed him up. He’s not a speedy dog, because I didn’t train him to be fast. I trained him to be consistent, and getting 3DQs is first year of competition… I think we have the consistency I wanted.

So we went and we did what she said and we ran the courses, and I just wasn’t really that impressed. I think these types of seminars are more geared toward the fast border collies and other dogs that need some help. Me… I just can’t see the fraction of a second difference that it takes in cues to get a dog to go over an obstacle. I never could. That’s probably why I always had so much trouble running Chase, my border collie. I used to want speed… if you read back on this blog, there are many posts from 2004 and so that I said I wanted speed. But, I learned my lesson, because I know that I don’t have the timing for it, and so I no longer want speed. I want consistency and accuracy and that is what gets Qs.

So anyway, I think I’m not going to go to agility seminars anymore. For some reason obedience seminars make more sense to me. I can understand the training philosophy and see the differences in technique. And I prefer places with pa electricity that have heat. I’m tired of sitting in the cold all day watching agility seminars. Give me a comfy chair and a warm spot and I’m much more happy!

Last weekend my husband and I went to a friend’s house for a Holiday Party. It was fun, and since they have a couple of border collies, they like to have well mannered dogs come visit, too. So we piled Levi, Tatum and Jet into the van and we all went to the party together.

They had a great time. Levi spent most of the evening going from person to person begging like a goof. Then guarding the chew toys from the other dogs. All his favorite things. Jet and Tatum also had fun. Levi, however, well, Sunday, he was miserable. His back hurt a lot again. He was walking with a roach back and a limp. And at night he was in so much pain he was shaking. My heart just broke that I caused him so much pain. It was my fault, since it’s my responsibility to keep him safe and healthy.

Over the next few days he did better only slowly. I worried like crazy. Fortunately, today, Friday, six days later, he’s better. He was getting better yesterday, too. He’s been on Tramadol for the pain. We stopped the rimadyl on Tuesday, thinking we may have to go to the big guns and use steroids. Today we took him into the vet and they gave him a steroid shot, which should help him feel better. He’s 12, it’s a balance between keeping him healthy and keeping him comfortable. He’s also on adequan, duralactin, glucosamine, and he’s going to start acupuncture next Monday. I’m doing everything I can think of for my boy.

So no more parties for Levi. Just a week ago he was going to the park with me, Jet and Tatum and we’d walk for a mile and three quarters. So we just have to work back up to that slowly. I worry about my old by. I know I have to be happy he’s 12 and has had a good long life, but Levi is my heart dog, and loosing him… I just don’t even want to think about it.

Well it’s time for the holidays again. Today is Thanksgiving. This picture was from last week. I’m on the left, my sister is on the right. We were making Marzipan with our family. We do it every year, it’s a family tradition. We have a good time and I love getting together with the family… the human family. The dogs are not allowed to come, unfortunately. But the dogs get to do lots of fun things even if they don’t involve marzipan. Which is probably good since marzipan has so many calories.

The dogs got to go to the dog park this morning. I took Levi, Tatum, Jet, and even Chase. Though Chase is grumpy around other dogs so he doesn’t get to go much. Actually, I probably won’t take him again anytime soon. He thinks he wants to see other dogs, so he runs up to them, then after five seconds he growls at them and acts like he’s going to attack. So he got to be on the leash most of the walk. I wish he was more dog friendly but he’s just not. So he gets to do things that do not involve any other dogs.

I didn’t find any guitar chords at the park… no one was playing. It was kinda dreary today. The fall colors are all gone, and there’s no snow yet, so it’s in limbo. I’ll try to get some pictures up. But I am full of Thanksgiving Dinner (without the turkey since I’m vegetarian). And I think it’s time for bed!

Well, I took a risk and went out and got a chair. It’s not a new chair. In fact it’s about 20 years old. The lady said it’s be re-upholstered a couple of times, too.

I’ve been wanting a recliner since we moved our TV room upstairs. The room is too small for a couch, but we’ve really needed someplace else to sit. There are two of us humans in the house and sometimes we both like to sit on a chair instead of the mattress on the floor (yes there’s a mattress on the floor for the dogs, not a biggie. LOL).

Used furniture is always scary. Do you watch Big Bang Theory? Where they found the chair on the curb and something was moving in it? LOL that was a funny episode. So the chair is a bit dirty, hopefully I’ll get the gumption to find our little carpet cleaner and clean it up. But it’s in good shape and it’s comfy. It’s really pretty, too. The dogs were very interested in it when it came to our house. And it reclines, which I really super like! But it looks like it’s been well taken care of and it’s nice to have another chair in the TV room again. I’ve covered it with a sheet so that the dogs don’t ruin it.

We can’t really afford a $500 recliner, so this will be it for a while. I could always wear some nursing scrubs when I sit in it. The dogs don’t care. It smells different but I’m sure it’ll take on our own house smell pretty quickly. Hopefully not by being peed on by Muffit.

When I got Tatum from Houston Collie Rescue back in 2007, I knew she was special. Though when I say special, I don’t mean she was exceptionally smart (though she is very smart) or would go far in dog sports, or would excel in anything I was going to do with her. No.. not in that way. Because she came from rescue, a hoarder with 70 collies running amok in her back yard. So right from the get-go Tatum had issues, and I also knew that in a way, they made her special.

She’s special because she is very timid when I take her outside, but she recovers really fast when she’s at home. She bosses the boys around, but what girl doesn’t? She growls at the other dogs if they get too close to her on the bed or on the couch. She’s a bit full of herself sometimes, and at other times she likes to be on her own.

Tatum is hard to quantify, really. She loves to do agility training, though at trials she’s not so sure. She doesn’t like people all that much, but she likes us okay, and will nip at us in her herding collie way to get us to play. And the louder we squeal, the more she likes it. I couldn’t place her in a home where, if she nipped, they would punish her or think she was doing a bad thing. Her nipping is for play, and she needs people who understand that, even it hurts!

She needs someone who understands her growling, too. It’s not aggression at all, it’s just that ‘stop touching me’ thing that even human kids do. She’s very picky with food, but she loves Tuna! She needed someone to build up her confidence and help her to accept people as good things, and as part of her life.

She’s not a dog that could be put in just any old home and be expected to adapt. She needed to understand people rules, in a good way, to build her confidence and help her live a happy life.

Some dogs are special and need special homes. When I met Tatum, I fell in love with her. I was afraid no one else would really understand her. And so we kept her. And we understand her. And we just adore her to pieces.