Posts Tagged ‘Asher’
Home Happy
I’m still thoroughly enjoying being home again but last night’s dinner of grilled pork chops left over from one of our fantastic meals up at the lake gave me a moment of hesitation as I mentally revisited the greatness of those days.
It’s a rough comparison since my day yesterday was spent sweating over pulling weeds, running the power trimmer, and mowing grass in the tropical heat wave of the hottest July on record. Who wouldn’t prefer to be back up at the lake?
Well, I’m pretty happy being able to sleep in our usual bed with the conveniences of a bedside table. I really like our shower. I’m spoiled by how much room there is, allowing for soaping up just beyond the spray of water. My regular routine of charging my phone and laptop works best with my home setup.
I like having the manure compost under daily control. Once every week or week and a half is just too much work all at once to get piles cooking efficiently again. Getting grass mowed before it gets too long is also a preference.
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After dinner, we walked the trash and recycle bins down to the road with Asher at our sides, making it back with time to spare before the first wave of thunderstorms arrived overhead. That weather came in with an ominous-looking cloud line and a dramatic burst of tree-bending wind.
The brief duration of the heavy downpour was a bit anti-climatic when that ended up being all that happened.
Not that I was looking for weather trouble. Quite the contrary. We already have the makings of a small canyon in the paddocks where draining rainfall has washed away the lime screenings into the main drainage swale. The battle against gravity and moving water is never ending in my quest to best manage runoff.
I’m afraid it’s time to extricate the back blade from the depths of the shop garage for attaching to the diesel tractor to scrape gravel back “upstream.” I was relatively successful the last time I tried doing that but the exercise remains on the fringe of skills I have acquired on the big tractor. It always feels like I am on the verge of making things a lot worse instead of better.
Regardless, we are home and that is making me as happy as it always does.
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Great Greeting
When you haven’t seen your dog for a week, it’s hard to contain your excitement when you arrive home and see his sweet face again. If we get too amped up, so will he, and that’s not a behavior we want to encourage.
It was lucky timing that Cyndie walked in the door in the middle of Asher eating his serving of dinner because that made for a perfect distraction. He stopped eating long enough to check on Cyndie and then got right back to finish his food.
No overexcited jumping involved.
After he finished eating there was plenty of time for Asher to say hello to Cyndie’s mom and lean up against me for a massive dose of scratching, but he was perfectly well-behaved throughout all the greetings to a degree that has us feeling really pleased.
We took him for a short walk in the heat to check on the horses and found things in satisfactory order and the herd calmly spread out around the fence under the overhang.
They were spaced apart as if in an attempt to keep away from each other’s body heat. Their reaction to our return wasn’t so much a greeting as an acceptance of the realization their caregivers were changing back to the usual people.
When we stopped in Hayward to fill Marie’s car with gas before the drive home, Cyndie spontaneously hustled into our favorite pizza place right next door (Coop’s [though under new management]) and quickly grabbed a couple of frozen ones to go.
The pepperoni pizza dinner last night at home felt a little like we were still up at the lake, despite the lack of a lake.
Gee, but it’s great to be back home.
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Heat Remedies
Does anyone know when the climate crisis will become a crisis? I have no idea. Be careful to not fall down in places where the pavement is so hot it will burn flesh this week. I am very thankful we were able to spend the beginning of the week at the lake.
A breeze across the water is a wonderful gift of natural air conditioning. I spent a fair amount of time floating in the lake yesterday but I have no photos of those glorious hours. Cyndie sent me a picture from the pontoon cruise we took with some Wildwood folks and guests on Monday.
Her mom took a picture of Cyndie, Mike, Barb, and me on the deck with fancy appetizers before dinner yesterday.
I didn’t stop eating in time to offer my usual smile. Figs and Brie on toasted French bread slices. Can you blame me?
A week free of training Asher to behave has been a welcome respite. It was an unplanned bonus to have the weather be so hot the lake was the best place we could ask to be. I’m trying hard to hold a positive attitude about the fact we are leaving here today and heading home just as the heat is expected to max out for a couple of days.
I saw a headline last night that reported the seawater of South Florida was reaching hot-tub temperatures. I suspect the coral considers this a crisis already.
It won’t surprise me if Asher starts begging us to take him back up to the lake real soon. In the past, we filled a kiddie pool with water for Delilah when it got really hot but it’s not proving to be an attraction for Asher. We tried hard to coax him in there last week to wash off the fresh horse poop he smushed all over his vest and body. He chose to stand beside it instead.
Maybe today’s high temperatures will change his mind.
If not, I will probably end up being the one laying in it to experience a vague reminder of the big lake we’ve been enjoying up in Hayward for the past week.
It’s been a wonderful time but I won’t deny there’s also a part of me that will be happy to get back to my familiar routine, sweaty chores and all.
Our house has a great geothermal air conditioning feature that will be serving us well as our heat remedy in Beldenville.
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Different Showroom
On Wednesday, the asphalt crew showed up promptly to work on sealing the surface of our year-old driveway pavement. Since we wouldn’t want to drive on it for at least 24 hours, we moved both cars out of the garage. I parked mine down beside the barn and Cyndie put hers by the road, knowing she would be leaving right in the middle of the time they were working.
I hadn’t considered the fact she would be returning home with a car full of groceries. That wasn’t a big problem because we always have the ability to drive through our fields if need be. While the horses were up by the barn, I opened the hay field gate by the road, pulled inside the fence, and closed the gate behind me.
As I crested the hill in the middle of the field, I watched for a reaction from the horses to a car approaching in the middle of their grazing territory. For whatever possible reason, they were surprisingly unfazed. I had Cyndie open a paddock gate so I could drive right through and the horses didn’t even look at us.
That should have been it for the night. By early yesterday afternoon, we could drive the cars up to the house. However, stormy weather showed up. Threats of big wind and large hail loomed large. We pondered the situation while constantly updating weather radar images.
If we did nothing, we feared the one day both of our cars were parked outside would be the day it would hail something awful.
The best way to make sure it wouldn’t hail was to move both cars into the barn. I wish I knew what the horses thought of us turning the place into an automobile showroom for a day.
Of course, the move worked wonders. Not a single hailstone fell from the clouds while the cars were protected. It did, however, provide us with ease of mind as multiple waves of cloudbursts passed overhead throughout the evening.
On a completely unrelated note, we have recently given Asher several opportunities to be outside with us without tethering him to a leash, mostly without incident. He dashes away into the surrounding woods on occasion but returns soon enough.
“Mostly without incident” indicates there was one situation that I will call an ‘incident.’ While he was off on his own, Asher took unwelcome liberties with the freshest composting manure pile, rubbing his chest, the vest we make him wear outdoors, and his collar thoroughly in the stinkiest green horse shit dumped on the pile earlier that morning.
Seems to me he is making a statement that he wants to be a full-time outdoor dog.
I didn’t expect this would become one of the problems with wanting him to be able to roam untethered on our property.
Just yuck. Really, really yuck.
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Flexible Scheduling
One hard and fast rule that is good to keep in mind is that scheduled events aren’t necessarily hard and fast or guaranteed to play out as planned. It pays to be flexible. Yesterday, Cyndie and I got out of bed a little earlier than usual because we were expecting a visit from a veterinarian who was going to check the horse’s teeth and give them required rabies vaccination shots.
We closed gates to confine the horses and put halters on all four of them in preparation and then headed up to the house for breakfast. It wasn’t long until Cyndie received a text that the vet would need to reschedule due to an unplanned emergency call.
I headed back out to open gates and remove halters.
Later, as I was filling a wheelbarrow with composted manure for our driveway landscaping project, I got a call from our asphalt company asking if they could reschedule sealing the driveway from July 27th to tomorrow (now, today!). That call was soon followed by news of a plan for the vet to come at 1:00.
Shortly after noon, Cyndie received a text that the vet had another emergency call and wouldn’t make it until some future day to be determined. I don’t know if that will be soon because there was a month-long wait to get the first appointment.
Asher had a pretty good day of testing his off-leash limits. Cyndie decided to use a lot of bribing with high-value treats to entice him to stay close to home and that seemed to pay off. I didn’t like him having free access to the compost area where I witnessed him eating manure from the freshest pile on two different occasions.
Cyndie let Asher help her out where she was pulling weeds.
I’m not sure if he got that one by the roots or not. Can’t see to the bottom of the resulting hole.
It will be interesting trying to keep his paws off the driveway while the seal coat is fresh. Hopefully, Asher is flexible about our schedule of off-leash practice because it will be on hold for at least a day starting this afternoon… if all goes as planned.
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Unfortunate Crashes
This year’s Tour de France bike race has been entertaining but I do not enjoy the added drama of nasty crashes. The worst is when an incident is triggered by the carelessness of a fan as happened this morning.
I love having access to watch from home but it is sad when the motorcycles with the camera operators get in the way of a racer trying to break away from a competitor.
I’m soaking up the race while enjoying fresh-picked wild black raspberries on my yogurt with eggs and toast spread with Cyndie’s blackcap jam.
We are enduring the latest onslaught of dangerous air quality from Canadian wildfires that turns the splashes of color in the woods to an eery shade of orange.
You can see speckles of it on the fresh dirt Asher has thrown as he created a new canyon in a matter of seconds yesterday. He and I spent much of the day alone together while Cyndie attended a funeral in the Cities and then met with a group of her gang of high school friends who got together for lunch to celebrate a series of birthdays.
When Asher wasn’t napping, he demanded constant attention that had me kicking him a ball to chase and then I would need to retrieve it from beneath furniture where he pretended to “bury” it.
He’s almost a year and a half old and shows little indication of growing out of puppy energy any time soon. During this phase, I find I am much more inclined to ‘crash’ long before he does throughout each day.
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We’re Learning
“I’m not there yet.”
“But you don’t know where you’re going.”
“At least I am going.”
Cyndie has a tee shirt with the phrase, “Not all who wander are lost.” Well, not all who are lost, wander, so there.
That reversal of thinking reminds me of a cartoon I saw that showed two birds with binoculars sitting on a branch in a tree, exclaiming, “Ooh! A khaki-vested paunch belly!” The panel was titled: The Birdwatcherwatchers.
Yesterday we had our final of two private sessions with the trainer from our 6-session dog obedience class. All things considered, Asher is doing great for his age and the relatively short amount of time he has been living with us. It gives me hope for future progress potential.
The amount of success won’t be limited by his ability to learn but by our ability to improve our skills of consistently delivering timely commands, acknowledgments, and rewards. One clear example of what Cyndie and I need to work on is our goal of teaching a “Leave it!” command.
We now know we have been forgetting this is a two-part command. If Asher ‘leaves it’ we are happy to go on our way but since all the things we are working on involve our dog checking back with us, we need to teach Asher to look back at our eyes for confirmation of ‘leaving it.’
He gets rewarded for looking back at us after obeying the command, not for simply ignoring a particular object of interest.
We walked through an exercise several times where our common mistakes were repeating commands (he will learn to ignore repetitive words out of our mouths), tugging the leash for compliance (what if he’s off-leash? He will learn to wait for the tug, and if it doesn’t come, compliance must not be required), and failing to notice when he looked up at us for confirmation/reward.
What worked best for us was to have the trainer talk us through the routine as it was happening. Could she just follow us around all the time?
I was so tired driving home after the session I struggled mightily to stay alert. Cyndie served a mid-afternoon snack while I read in my recliner and then sleep overcame me. That’s one way to lose track of a day.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ll get there eventually.
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A Destroyer
Before I get to tales of Asher’s skills as a destroyer of dog toys I would like to self-report my successful destruction of the largest walleye fillet I have ever been served.
I made sure to put my fork on the plate for reference. Had I known it was going to be that massive I would have ordered the broiled option instead of batter-fried. I made it through half the serving at dinner Thursday night and enjoyed the rest for lunch yesterday. That was a BIG fish. Oh, and delicious, as well.
Now, Asher’s destructive skills extend well beyond his ability to annihilate bowls of his food at meal times. We have been happy to employ the trick of tossing old toys in the tub with a scattering of treat pellets but it has led to him choosing to reduce the number of toys getting in his way.
Yesterday he pulled the stuffing out of three different items. The challenge for us is that his escapades in this realm require constant supervision. When he gets wound up/bored/anxious/hangry/frustrated his behavior often drops down to biting pillows, cushions, or furniture corners.
We need to quickly steer his teeth toward sanctioned chew toys. Then we have to studiously watch for the threads and fabric shards Asher tries to eject off his tongue without pause between fresh attacks of the object of his attention.
Then comes the stuffing. He appears to feel great pleasure in pulling out massive wads of the cottony padding. Thankfully, he shows no interest in consuming the stuff. It leads to some comical gyrations as he works to push it out of his mouth as fast as he is pulling in the next bite he can get his teeth on.
Our hands are kept busy trying to grasp the sloppy clouds of stuffing that show up –some sticking to his chin or getting caught on a tooth– while staying clear of his busy canines.
We are not there to interrupt his project, just safely facilitate his progress and keep the disaster scene from becoming overly gruesome.
With Asher’s penchant for the total destruction of purchased toys, we have added an incentive to employ the advice we received in the obedience classes about alternatives that didn’t come from a store.
He is not allowed to take things out of the recycle bin but we are allowed to give them to him if we so choose. A few morsels of his food slipped into an empty box will provide several seconds of entertainment for us and a distraction from his urge for chewing on unauthorized items.
It feels a lot like an exercise in reverse psychology to me. Allow him to shred some trash before he surreptitiously sneaks off and does it on his own. Instead of getting in trouble for it, he finds out he is behaving as expected?
Whatever it takes to keep his mind busy solving entertaining challenges that don’t consume our life savings is worth a try in my view. We don’t want this dog to destroy our financial future. [I’m exaggerating, I hope you’ll know…]
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Plenty Attention
Today will mark the completion of Asher’s first week at the lake. It’s fair to say he has adjusted pretty well to all the combinations of people and other animals that swirl around the Wildwood property in general and Friswold’s “cabin” in particular.
He is getting big love from all of Cyndie’s family and learning how to not bark at every movement of other people he can see from his lofty vantage point out on the second-story deck.
Cyndie and I have experimented with different attention exercises for Asher that we learned about in the obedience classes.
Tossing morsels of his dog food into a tub filled with toys requires that he push around items that may have fallen from his interest to find the snacks he can smell.
That tends to renew his liking for some items he had begun to ignore.
Asher has a remarkable inclination to push his squeaking tennis-style balls underneath furniture. When he tries that game out on the deck, the ball tends to roll off and fall to the ground one level below. Yesterday, I went down below and initiated a game of catch where I would throw the ball back up over the railing.
It proved to be an exception to the norm of so many other games where he tends to be the only one really enjoying it. I was having a blast trying to catch the balls he was nudging over the edge and then tossing them back up in a manner that gave him a fair chance of catching it with his mouth.
Beck devised a modified chew toy combination that has become my favorite. He forced one of the larger Kong balls in the middle of a hard chew ring.
It makes it harder for Asher to pick up but he seems interested in the challenge because he can almost get his teeth on the half of felt-covered ball that sticks out of each side.
Asher was flipping and kicking it around with great fervor yesterday. It seemed almost too hard for him to separate the two toys at first but now it is getting easier with practice.
With all the fun and attention Asher has been enjoying up at the lake this week, I’m starting to wonder if his eventual return home will become a disappointment for him.
Not that I’m projecting how we feel when we get home onto him or anything…
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Swimming Deeper
While I was watching the third stage of the Tour de France bike race, Cyndie was outside walking Asher. I spotted them down at the beach and was happy she had him playing in the water again. Soon after, I heard Cyndie calling for him. Then I heard her calling for me to go after him from above.
Asher had decided to take off down the shoreline to our west. I had just started into the woods between our place and the next property over when I heard shouting from the island out in our bay. People there had seen our dog run up from the lake toward the house above.
Eventually, I was able to nab Asher and get him home in time to watch the finish of the day’s bike race. Later in the afternoon, at a time when the beach was sparsely populated, Cyndie and I took Asher back to the water with a 30-foot leash to keep him from running off.
It had become a very hot day and I was happy to immerse myself in the water where I could coax our pup to do the same. Asher showed great interest in coming out to meet me but quickly turned around after just a few paddles in the deep water. It was interesting to witness the look of apprehension on his face as he experimented with the new adventure.
We got him to swim further and longer with each invitation but he always wanted to turn as soon as possible to get back where he could stand again. The funniest behavior he displayed was his urge to do the classic doggy body shake to get the water off his coat even though he was still standing almost to his neck in the lake.
After a busy day of new activities, Asher showed more interest than usual in doing some power lounging on the couch in the porch.
I think he is adjusting well to the pace of life up at the lake.
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Relative Something 