I'm still a Junior in high school, so I have some time to figure out what I want to do for college. But it doesn't feel like ENOUGH time. I'm constantly worrying about it, thinking about what I want to do because frankly I still have no idea what to do. This takes away from the time I should be doing the work that I have for school right now. I took on quite a class load this year (for some crazy reason) and although I've managed pretty well I always feel like I'm on the edge of completely blowing everything. I always lack the motivation for high school and the work. It's not like I'm a lazy person that sits around all day doing nothing. I love working and learning, but in reality all of that motivation is channeled towards dog training and NOT to school.

It is hard to balance the necessity of high school knowledge with the strong desire for an expansion of knowledge on the training/behavior/agility side of things. Any type of intensive learning is so exhaustive that I typically have to choose one or the other. For Thanksgiving break the agility side obviously won out, since I went to Wild Weavers Friday, but now I'm stuck with loads of important school work while I'm STILL not physically renewed from the eight hour round trip.

But my main concern still remains the college dilemma. I've been going back and forth on what I want to do. I am seriously considering getting a teaching degree at our local university. Among countless other pluses, my tuition will be paid for if I go there or any other in-state school. And I could still stay at home.

I like Louisville. I'm not sure I want to leave. Not only is all my family here, but on the dog side of things I have friends and a community and soon a job. I don't even like to travel all that much, I just like being...home. It's easy and familiar.

Of course there is the other side of me that wants to branch out. I've been thinking of a lot of different options for majors, and one that was brought up to me was a path in hollistic medicine, massage or chiropractics, all of which I would apply to dogs. I am really liking the sound of those. But it means a school much further away, WAY more expenses, WAY more time and effort, and what about Panic?

I have so much to think about and it is really overwhelming. I'm trying not to worry but I feel like time is rushing up on me. Until then I have to go back and do more homework.

Picabo is doing a little better this morning. Her coughing is much less, just a few throat clearing type coughs instead of the coughing fits that sounded like she was hacking up a lung. She was slow to come into breakfast this morning but she did eat well. The vet called to check in on her and decided to postpone her oral chemo treatments another day to give her a little more recovery time. We are also pre-treating her with stomach meds this time since she had tummy troubles last round so we started that this morning. She's still a little lethargic but she looks a little brighter this morning. She has such a funny odor now, her little muzzle is all black and hairless and her breath just smells awful- like a chemical spill. But her leg looks GREAT, and it's a really good sign that we've not seen any signs of tumor re-growth. After the chemo stops we'll have to keep a real close eye on it and hopefully we will be done with all this and she'll be able to get busy re-growing hair. My goal is that she'll be well enough to go on a little Christmas hike/snowshoe.

Kate is still pretty sleepy. She did get up with us this morning which is the first in weeks. Usually I have to go wake her up for breakfast. She has been pretty much sleeping 95% of the time these past couple weeks. It was so worrisome to see her do it on Thanksgiving day, usually she is a social butterfly, but she was crashed out most of the time. I'm feeding her all the food I can get into her without giving her digestive upset and she is holding her weight finally. Ricky had one sneezing spell last night and once this morning, but they were much less severe and much shorter. So it seems like he is on the mend.

I never went to Dream Park this weekend. My cold progressed into a really bad cough which brought on a migraine, and so I spent most of Thursday, all of Friday, and most of Saturday in bed. I can't say I've done a whole lot today either, although I definitely feel better and other than a hacking cough, don't really feel sick at all.

I'm going to segue from my usual blogging about the beasts into a short 'public service announcement' about migraines. If you don't give a rat's ass about migraines and don't have any friend or family member who suffers from migraines, you can skip to the bottom half of this post which will be about dog training.

A huge number of people, mostly women, suffer from migraines, and there's a huge range of suffering from the person who gets an occasional disabling headache, maybe a couple times a year or so, to chronic migraine suffers who have migraines for 15 or more days a month. There's also an ebb and flow to migraine suffering, for a variety of reasons, both understood and not understood, someone might start out with frequent migraines, abruptly go down to having no migraines or extremely infrequent migraines, then, a decade later, start having frequent migraines again.

A lot of people mistakenly believe that migraines are just really bad headaches, or are caused by stress, emotional upheavals, food allergies, etc. Any of those things can cause a migraine, as can a wide variety of other things, but migraines, once believed to be emotional in origin, and then believed to be vascular in origin, are now known to be an inherited neurological disorder caused by the repeated abnormal activation of certain networks in the brain which it is believed is caused by a genetic problem in the switch that normally controls these networks.

The first migraine I remember having was when I was around six or seven. I probably had migraines before, but that was the first time I remember having a visual aura. At any rate, I continued to have relatively infrequent migraines (maybe four to six a year) for another fifteen years before I was even diagnosed as having migraines, and it was not until I was forty two and suffering from migraines upward of two weeks a month that I was prescribed daily preventative medication and migraine specific pain medication. I am part of a very small segment, 3%, of the migraineur populations that suffers from chronic migraine. With daily preventative, adequate sleep, some dietary changes (I rarely eat processed meat, red wine, msg and certain cheeses) I have brought down the number of migraines I have to maybe four or five days a month, and mostly those days I can control the pain with prescription anti-migraine drugs.

This isn't about feeling sorry for me, I've got a disability, but so do lots of people, and frankly, mine is a lot easier than many because migraines are not constant like other disabilities. I'm just writing about this because over the years I've realized that most people are unaware of the other symptoms of migraines, and that people who suffer from migraines don't just have bad headaches. In my case I have speech problems, mostly related to names and other nouns. I can't say the names of my animals or even my kids, although if I'm writing I can write their names perfectly coherently. I confuse opposite things, calling a fire hydrant a parking meter. Sometimes the only way I can get something across clearly is to write it because verbally I just don't make sense. My kids will attest to this, their childhood has made them both wizards at guessing what I mean by watching me gesture and toss out a variety of almost nonsense words. For some reason for a couple of years whenever I had a migraine I called Stamp and Chance Mortimer and Snead. I have no idea why.

Physical coordination can be a problem too, I can look almost drunk sometimes because my balance is off. I don't have this as badly as some people who really can barely walk at all when they're having a migraine, and I also don't usually slur my words. People who have some types of debilitating migraines are often mistaken for slackers or druggies. Forgetfulness, partial paralysis, lethargy and depression are also symptoms that some migraineurs suffer from. A lot of these symptoms are similar to stroke symptoms which can really freak people out if they suddenly develop migraines later in life, a lot of people who have their first serious migraine when they're in their 30s or 40s think they're dying the first time they're struck.

WNYC ran an interesting program on migraines last spring that can be heard here:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2009/05/29/segments/133012

and the American Migraine Foundation has some interesting information here:

http://www.americanmigrainefoundation.org/whatismigraine.aspx

Whenever I start a new batch of students I explain to them that I might well at one point or another completely forget their dog's name or their name, and that I might call obstacles by the wrong word, and I explain to them that I have a migraine related problem that causes it. Most of the time I think my students expect that what I'm talking about is the same as anyone having a brain fart and forgetting someone's name, it's only the few times that it actually happens that I call their dog by the wrong name (There's a dog called Rain who I called Fire, and a Blossom who I called Buttercup) that they sort of see what I mean. Mostly, as long as I don't have to be clearly understood and I'm not in terrible pain, I can be sort of entertained by my inability to use the right words for hours at a stretch. I know that if it's important to be understood I can always write or type what I mean since I don't have the same problem with written words as I do with spoken ones. That's why people who only know my through my blog are blissfully unaware that I have sometimes have speech problems.

So, off my soap box, I feel like I've done my bit to enlighten the world to what chronic migraine sufferers go through in addition to having headaches.

Having stayed home instead of going to the trial this weekend, I did manage to get a little bit of dog training done. I worked with Boing! and Fleet on various jump skills with one jump in the living room. After Ali pointed out to me that Boing! unlike my other dogs, relies heavily on verbals (Oh, great, and I'm the one with speaking problems!) I have made a concerted effort to talk to her more and have also started teaching her verbal directionals and verbal cues for turning tightly to the left ('tight') and right ('wrap') so I worked on that a bit. I just worked with Fleet on keeping his feet up for spread jumps.

I often talk about how I train my dogs from day one with lots of distractions, and they get used to it, but I haven't often mentioned that my kids, who were both homeschooled until college, were taught the same way. Here's a short video of Julian studying with distractions, I think he does quite a good job



I don't get to post a lot of video of Julian, so here's another clip of him saying hello to the dogs



I worked with Toggle yesterday - first up I decided to work with her running across a DW board flat on the ground. I just used half the board, so it was 6 feet long, and positioned the Manners Minder at the far end.
Dawn and I had already done this one time at K9, calling her back and forth between us, but that was the day we'd both forgotten our video cameras, so no video. I found out a couple of interesting things, one of which was that because the board was quite short and also somewhat elevated (just the metal supports on the bottom, but it still was about three inches tall), and because Toggle just loves to bounce, she offered a good number of 'bounce across the board' attempts before coming to the realization that only striding across would get rewarded. She also tried a couple of 'stride next to the board' and 'stride diagonally partly across the board' runs. She is definitely still quite intimidated by Pistachio!



Next thing on the agenda was teaching Toggle the meaning of 'lie down'. This video shows the entire process from start to finish. She had never heard the cue 'lie down' before yesterday, nor had she ever been rewarded for lying down. However, I had already spent a fair amount of time watching her play and knew what sort of play would encourage her to bounce into a play bow, and from their into a quick down. I like teaching down before sit because that way there's not much chance that the dog learn that he should first sit, then go from sit to down, which produced a pretty slow down that then has to be sped up later in training. I want the dog to learn to drop into a down front end first which is quick and also discourages creeping forward into a down. I started by playing with Toggle in a way that encouraged her to bounce into a down, and clicked and rewarded for that. As soon as I felt that I could fairly reliably predict when she's drop, I added the verbal cue, then got rid of the click. At first the hand I will eventually use for the down signal had treats in it, and was also the hand I played with her with. As soon as she seemed to have an inkling of what I wanted, I switched the treats to the other hand, then quickly started to make a more stylized play motion with my left hand, and when she caught on to that, I got taller and started to shape the motion into something more closely resembling a down signal. By the end of the session the signal was no longer within touching distance of her and looked pretty much like a regular down signal, although not yet starting as high as it eventually will, and I was standing up and had started to introduce a tiny bit of distance. The video is the entire lesson from start to finish, the only cut in the film is when I went to get more treats.



Lastly, I did some targeting and pedestal work. I taught her to put her front feet on a plastic container a couple weeks ago when I took the dogs to the park in NJ. I was alone with no video camera, so I don't have footage of her first lesson, but she caught on quickly, in a couple of minutes at most, which is what my experience has been with virtually all dogs learning to do a front foot target on an elevated object. It's not a hard concept to grasp. I wanted to move on from there, so I had her pivot around it a bit, first with my entire body guiding her, then just using a treat in my hand to turn her head. After that I worked a bit on alternately asking her to do a nose touch to my hand and a foot touch to the plastic container. She got a little sloppy and tried to offer a variety of positions other than two front feet on, but pulled herself together pretty quickly, I think at least part of the confusion was just that she was a bit mentally tired as this was at the end of a fairly long lesson. At the very end I gave her a cue to down to see if she had retained that while working on other material.



Just for laughs, here's a video of Pistachio falling off the cat tree. I know, it's mean to laugh, but he didn't get hurt and it was pretty funny -

I'v been wanting to switch the cats over to raw for a very long time, but the last few times I tried it didn't work. At the times I tried Bubbs was a dry food junky, I couldn't get him to eat anything but dry food no matter how hard I tried and him being such a big chubby cat I was always too afraid of fatty liver syndrom to try letting him go hungry for long enough to switch. Well gradually over the years I have been able to transition him over to more and more canned food and less and less dry food- which really helped him lose weight and over the summer we switched entirely to canned for his pooing issues- canned food with pumpkin & flax oil seemed to help with his issues quite a bit. Being on a diet and with Midder being sick suddenly Bubbs became very interested in all this stuff Midder was eating and now I have a kitty that will try new things. I've been adding supplements to his food in prep for the switch- green food, pro-biotics, flax meal, vit/min powder and digestive enzymes to help pump up his digestive system to handle the new things coming it's way. Today I started by adding 1/2 ground chicken (muscle, bones, organs all ground together) to 1/2 canned food- he ate it all happily! Yay.

I'm really hoping the diet change will help with some of his "issues". He has so much trouble at times with his poo habits. It's supposedly because of his crunched vertebres at his tail base, which caused nerve damage issues. But I am hoping a better diet will at least make his poos easier to pass. Also his pica is such a problem. He has taken now to standing up and eating the rim of plastic bag around the kitchen trash can lid. I keep thinking I have found a place to put it but he somehow manages to get to it anyway. We can't have plastic in his reach anywhere or he will eat all of it. He is also eating the ash out of the wood stove! All this stuff has got to be terrible for him to be digesting- I can't imagine all the chemicals he is processing with that plastic. Doesn't make pooing easier when half of it is plastic!

MerrMurr has always preferred raw so she is in heaven with the changes. I have always fed her a little when I fed the dogs but have never wanted to take the time to have her eating a different diet than the other kitties were- it's not as easy to juggle the kitties as they pretty much pick which bowl they want and are not as easy to convince which bowl they should eat out of as the dogs are.

So once the kitties are transitioned over we will pretty much be a processed food free household! It's funny to see how our cupboards have changed, I used to want a pantry to store all our food and now all our non-perishables fit on one little shelf- and half of that is filled with tea. Pretty much all of our food is in the fridge or fruit stand, which I think now I need to buy a couple new fruit stands as ours is getting pretty overcrowded.
Bubbs enjoying a snooze on the dog bed.
MerrMurr says yum, I prefer my food raw & wriggling.

has been a growing experience. sigh. It's sad when a dog can show one the inadequacies of oneself. And be gracious about it. League was interesting, though considering we had just drove 250+ miles from Baker City, we did okay. There were many many subs. Mayzie hung in there, but the game was really more than I could ask her to do. I liked the concept, but not much flow to the course I chose, though I tried hard to not call my dogs off of any obstacles. Mayzie slid through a couple of contacts and missed her weave entries several times, so I went back today to get a clearer handle on them. She did outstanding. Regular practice is essential with her, I am figuring out. Yelling and hollering and getting frustrated is not, so she says in her ever positive way. Zorro was fantastic, hit all but one of his contacts (a tricky discrimination with a tunnel) and knocked the double (which he never sees in USDAA Perf.). He missed one entry, but got the other. I practiced the same weave entry with Mayzie today, and noticed that I needed to just stop and let her wrap around me to the entry. I also worked on turning using a verbal command coming out of the chute. After going left several times, I tried right and she needed several reps to switch to that side. I am finding that if I give her the obstacle/direction a whole obstacle ahead, with motion or lack there of, she is pretty smooth and quick.

Roper got introduced to the chute and the tire today. He played with his toy in the chute, and got to the point where he was willing to go into the barrel to get his toy. It's one of the only obstacles I can't do by myself. I could probably do it with a ball versus a squirrel, as it rolls. Same with the tire, though I was able to ask him to stay, go around the tire, and call him through. His stay has been kind of a natural process, he just gets it, now I need to build in some low level distractions. He continues to enjoy the teeter way too much, I will need to work on calling him off of it. I need to lower the aframe and just have him run back and forth over it. Again, a great thing to be doing with some help of someone else.

Hope the weather holds out tomorrow, I'd like to get back on my bike and ride the Tideland loop with Zorro. He stayed home today, so it's his turn with the mama. ML

I couldn't figure out what to do with all these photos, so I made a little iMovie. It's mostly of Beep, Boss and Max with a family picture at the end. I hope and pray everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I know I did!!

Tess is still not in season. I really can't believe it. She doesn't even look much closer than she did a few days ago. No way did I think she'd hold out this long!

Now I want her to hurry up and come in. She's pretty much guaranteed that she's going to CA with me. I'll run the progesterone testing, but I think she's pretty unlikely to ovulate before I leave. Or not soon enough to get the semen shipped up, anyway. A few more days waiting wouldn't hurt (except that I have an appointment for progesterone testing Monday AM, and I'll have to call and cancel if if she's not in yet), but if she waits too long, then we might be down there too early. Not something I'd really considered, and it makes the timing awkward, unless I can just leave her down there.

Now's the time, Tessie!

Good day at Trails end, hear it may be the last time there since its in foreclosure or something drastic!

Kitt had a smokin run in standard for a q. She is so hard to run other than all out. Pulled her off a jump in JWW but beautiful jumping she or they both did.
Called very hard over a jump on Gems run, and she couldn't keep it up. Anxious to see Gems time tomorrow on the sheets, she was moving pretty good. Gem broke her start line in Std and went off course. Then AFrame that I thought I would pay for I did. She got the yellow but may need to actually train running contacts to make me feel comfortable with them:-)

One more day this year for the girls to get their last DQ's for 2010 AKC......

We're going to put up the Christmas tree tomorrow - which means no more 'puppy playland' (Haku's x-pen in the living room). I think Haku is ready for prime time, though admittedly he's actually been naughtier than ever this weekend. Clever boy went into my bathroom, pulled down all my jackets off the hook and went through all the pockets, looking for treats and toys.

He's pretty good with the housebreaking thing, number accidents since September is less than 10 anyway. Once again, okay, he had an accident inside on Thanksgiving - but he was having such a party he was just too excited when I let him out to go, apparently. Hey, no one is perfect. He really is such a good boy, he can be out most of the time without too much issue. Of course, whether or not he eats the Christmas tree is a whole different issue.

Speaking of Christmas, I'm looking for good cookie recipes if anyone has any to share!

Some personal favorites from when I was a kid:

Gun Cookies (because you use a 'cookie gun')

1c margarine (not butter!)
3/4c sugar
3 large egg yolks
1tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond flavoring
2 3/4c regular flour

Cream margarine and sugar for 5 minutes. Add egg, vanilla, almond flavoring. Add flour in three additions. (add food coloring if desired) Shape into 2 rolls, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 1 hour (if needed). Bake for 5-6 minutes at 400 degrees. Decorate with red hots, chocolate chips, sprinkles,etc.

English No Nuts Bars

1 1/2 sticks of butter
3/4c white sugar
1 egg yolk
1tsp vanilla
1/2tsp salt
1 1/2c flour
1 egg white (on top)
Colored sugar

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg yolk and vanilla, then add dry ingredients. Pat evenly into 9x13 pan, brush with foamy egg white (slightly beaten), sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 20-30 minutes at 325. Cool slightly in pan, cut into diamonds. Cool completly before removing from pan.

Fudgy Cocoa No-Bake Treats (from the back of an old Hershey's cocoa container)

3c quick-cooking rolled oats
2/3c creamy or chunky peanut butter
2c sugar
1/2c butter
1/2c milk
1/3c cocoa
2tsp vanilla extract

Line cookie sheet with wax paper or foil. Combine sugar, butter, milk and cocoa in medium saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture comes to a rolling boil. Remove from heat. Add oats, peanut butter and vanilla - stir quickly, mixing well. Immediately drop mixture by heaping tsp not wax paper/tinfoil. Cool. Store in cool, dry place.

This is why I still kinda think Haku might end up with a prick ear or two, here are some rare 'was napping before he somehow magically heard me point a camera at him' pictures from tonight. Why they stick up when he's sleeping, I have no idea.


They certainly let him hear cameras focusing on him REALLY WELL


He WAS napping under my chair ... and soundly, or so I thought!

I got a big envelope in the mail today from the AKC. It was Ava's PAL registration. They approved it. After I talked to the people who denied the original application, I wrote a letter, submitted info from the ASCA web site and info from Ava's breeder's web site. At the end of my letter I offered to submit whatever they might need to prove she is an Australian Shepherd...DNA...whatever. I hope that helped. I'll be darned if I get screwed because of other people's dishonesty. I said this in my letter( a little more nicely)!

Anyway, glad that's over!!

I just finished applying to Harvard. I feel so smart.

Ive really dropped the ball as far as updates go. Blitz is in desperate need of a video. I got all the stuff but I dont really feel like editting it... or picking a song... lol. I think my senioritis has spread to like every aspect of my life.

Anyways Buc and I had a trial last weekend (gotta get that into a video too... crap) and he did amazing. I was expecting a complete blowout considering he has stopped going to class and he hasnt had a show since September, but my old man has still got it. Missed a Double Q on Saturday from a down panel in Standard, and missed it again on Sunday with a complete handler fail in Jumpers. Oh well. He has 6 Double Qs to go for a MACH (I think...) but I dont really care if he gets it or not. I just want my boy to be happy and healthy.

So videos coming soon. Maybe.

Today has been a mellow day at the biggmellon household. We went into the clinic this morning with Picabo. She is holding steady but she started having coughing fits this morning and since her chemo drug is cardio toxic we have to be very careful. They ran an EKG on her and so far it looks ok, she isn't throwing whatever it is that her heart will start throwing if it's in trouble. Her lungs sound clear. So we are under strict orders to keep her VERY quiet and keep her heart rate steady, so we are working on being very boring. She is resting comfortably now. So glad this is the last treatment and that they were not all like this.

Kate has been sleeping all day. I so worry about my girl, all she has been thru, such a fighter. It will probably take a couple days before we'd see an improvement from her new antibiotics so hopefully by tomorrow she'll be feeling better. I sure hope so. The good news is Ricky is already on the mend. Hasn't snorted, sneezed or snuffled since last night.

Yesterday I spent a little time in the afternoon with a student who's 7 year old Golden was just diagnosed with Lymphoma. So very sad to watch friends go thru this:-( It's just terrible how goldens are hit so hard by cancer and so young. I feel so badly for her as she wades thru that awful place of trying to decide what to do, feeling so scared, so worried.

The positive thing is with all this time in the house it is getting quite clean and very organized.

So I was laying on the bed cuddling with puppy and talking on the phone this morning when London decides that while he doesn't see the point of cuddling, it's obviously something valuable and he wants in on the action. So I had a London/Haku cuddlefest, which was absurdly cute - especially the faces that London makes. He doesn't actually enjoy cuddling so he always has this look about him like, "I hope someone is enjoying this, because I'm certainly not." Then add in a puppy snuggling up to him and you'd think I was torturing him, like it was my idea that he stay there. He kept at it though, he's no quitter. Though to be fair, London does like a good ear rub and nose scritches.

Then the two very cautiously started tugging on a toy together - off the cuteness scale! Haku really is a VERY polite boy, which is funny, because London is an even MORE polite boy - the two together is quite comical. So a very cute moment this morning, London is such a sweetie in his own way, I know that obviously the whole event was not his idea of a good time, but he tries so hard. He sleeps in his crate beside my bed at night and he watches Haku and me, we usually play and cuddle before bed every night and while London has very clear 'rules' about sleeping at night (MUST ... BE ... IN ... CRATE), he wanted to see what the fuss is about.

I love my London, he cracks me up, and because I do know him so well I know how hard it is for him to do something as simple as 'cuddle on the bed'. I remember so clearly that I felt completely lost with London at this age, he was so independent, it was so difficult to feel connected to him in any way. Not that he wasn't a fun dog, he really was, but he just wasn't 'mine'. And he's still not, actually! London is very much his own dog, but I adore him, can't imagine life without him. He almost went back to the breeder at 5 months old though, I just didn't 'get' him at all. I'm so glad that I stuck with him though and learned to get to know him. It wasn't easy, but it makes our relationship that much more valuable to me.

Then there's Haku, good lord, I can't even imagine sending him back now, much less in another month. He's so 'my' dog, I feel very close to him - probably more so than any of my other dogs when I had had them for this amount of time. Well, except maybe Poco, she is similar in that she's been 'my dog' very much from the start. Fenwick was just so MUCH dog that it took quite the adjustment period to appreciate his overwhelming personality, and Brisbee ... well, Brisbee was just bizarre (and very much 'Bruce's dog'!). I have to say, so much easier to feel connected to your puppy when they actually want to be around you.

My parents said that they feel that Haku is going to be BIGGER than London (22 inches). That's pretty darn big! Tammy is currently putting her money on 21 inches, while I'm going to go with closer to 20 inches. There is also quite the debate about the ears, will they come back up after teething? I just don't know, London's ears went through periods where one or the other was prick, but never for long, and he certainly never had weeks of prick ears as a puppy like Haku. London's ears didn't really settle down into their 'finished' state until maybe 8 months old.

After their dramatic (and rather comical) fall, Haku's ears have been consistent with their new rose state for the last couple weeks, the last couple days they're coming back up again sometimes. So now when he's excited he gets a prick ear again, but then they go back to their normal resting state. I think I'm going to put my money on at least one prick ear when he's grown. I could be wrong, but I'm going with it. Obviously I don't care how they end up (I've never met a pair of ears I didn't like), but it's ever so interesting to guess what might happen. I love ever changing puppy ears!

As for the teeth, what's actually pretty funny is that because Haku is missing so many teeth at the moment, including his canine he had removed when he was younger, sometimes his tongue falls out of the side of his mouth. His other bottom canine is on the way out, and a lot of his adult teeth are just little nubbins. I have yet to actually find any teeth and he still tugs like crazy. Still lots of teeth to go!

So, yesterday I brushed Link. He hates the hair brush. It is so funny because he hates it more than getting his nails clipped. I guess you can tell which one I really worked on early. So, we are going to start working on getting brushed every day. After I was done torturing Link by brushing him, Sparrow came over and laid down to get his brushing. Ah, that was so cute. He was saying "what about me?" (And yes, my dogs talk). But I discovered my little Linky has a streak of course hair on his back. It looks like his puppy fluff is going to be fading quickly.

Then this morning I got up to let the little piranha out. I watched him through the window walk past the artificial turf and to the designated potty area (good boy). And to my surprise he lifted his leg. It was his first leg lift. Man, this little pupster is growing up.

I must take more pictures to document my little Link. So, as promised I"ll post pictures this evening. :)

Enjoy your Saturday and hug your pups.

Since mom dosen't celebrate holidays but like me she does like food. So I kept us home alone (At Lisas for another 3 weeks) and made or should I saw bought a ham from Trader Joes. Got one before a few years ago and still has a nice taste to it. They have the orange cranberry sauce and good pumpkin pie.
Mom made turkey sandwiches for the dog show today...we ate them for dinner instead.

After the trial in Olympia, of which Gem got dq #5 and some nice placements to boot. Poor Kitt think I will need to stop trialing Gem to make those last 3 dq's we need to happen. Will contemplate that one. Kitt had a great std run going when the 2nd bar of the 180 came down. I think she actually stumbled and couldn't get her self lifted high enough. The soil was loose just too loose right there. Her JWW was great take out the beginning and ending. The jumping in between was lovely I don't usually push her like that but she did lovely.
Gem did great, released earl on the AFrame, probably won't pay for that. But she is running like a little trooper and just barely 3 she is:-)

Back Sat & Sun, mom sat there all day today. Reminded me of my horse show days as a teenager. Mom near by. She does not get around very good at all. Uses a cane and is hunched over a bit. Runs very cold and yet she still comes along.

I asked her to go on a short hike near my office with the dogs Thursday, she did. I told her now I can tell you "I went on the hike again today, you remember the one:-)

I worked really hard on a LOT of physics tonight. Still have some book work, and I need to memorize a *ton* of equations. But I think I can confidently say the homework situation is now *manageable*. Maybe. Bio book work, including lots of notes and vocab to do, finish that physics, review MacBeth (hah, I probably won't end up doing that at all...), copy notes/print study guides for film class, work on a calc worksheet.

The real fun stuff will be coming back this week and attempting to understand all of the material that I'm supposed to know right now. :( At least there won't be another calc test for a while...but we do have a physics test Thursday/Friday.

Only a few more weeks until Christmas break...then a dog show where we get to meet Rev's sister (entering that might be a good idea...), lot's of good food, The Nutcracker with some family. That's what I'm working towards. I'm not worried about the next couple of weeks dragging on, but rather, I'm worried about them going by too fast...with the way things are going, there just doesn't seem to be enough time.

Oh. And totally just realized yesterday that one of the colleges I'm applying too (application due December 1st) has a lot more writing than I originally thought. Hah.