Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.


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An afternoon on another lake

Yesterday I popped over to my other brother’s lake house.  It was a cloudy day, but when one is visiting a lake, one must take a boat ride!

We stopped at a friend of his who also lives on the lake (visiting by boat…how fun!) and got to meet her dog.  Such a cutie!

The clouds were dark and ominous, but it only sprinkled a little bit.

All in all, a refreshing afternoon out on the water!  Maybe the next time I visit I’ll take out his rowing scull.  But the lake would have to be a bit smoother for that!
Just another relaxing day in the south…


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Not in Michigan anymore

My trip south went well.   We loaded up the truck and off I went.

I took two days, stopped often and enjoyed the scenery.  First there were the flat farmlands of Ohio…

…then the hill country of Ohio’s southeastern edge. ..

…which is where I set up camp for the first night, on the banks of Lake Lowell in the Hocking Hills.

It was a peaceful and small private campground, and I was the only one there on the edge of the lake.  I enjoyed the sunset and watching a blue heron fishing in the lake.

I messed around with the camera some, for something to do…because it was way too early to go to bed in my little tent.

In the morning I enjoyed the quiet mist on the lake…

Then I packed up my tent, which looked  sad  before I folded it up.  I was sad too, this had been a lovely little campsite, and I hated to leave.

Then it was on into the mountains with lots of winding freeway in West Virginia and Virginia…

…until I finally arrived, load still in the back of the truck…at my brother’s house in North Carolina.

I knew I was in the South when I saw the crepe myrtle in bloom.

Today we walked into town to the farmer’s market and around Davidson College…if I get time I’ll share those pictures with you later!  Hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend!  It’s HOT here, but we’re sitting down to lunch of sweet corn and fresh tomatoes, purchased locally.  Can’t wait…gotta go!


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Just gotta get on the road again

I’ll be heading south later this week, hauling some stuff down for my siblings.  I’ll probably head for North Carolina first, drop off a dresser to a brother, then on to Georgia where I’ll drop off more things to my sister, then skip over to Alabama, visit another brother and finally get all the way over to the big lake and my parents’ cabin.

I have to find windows of good weather, and Thursday looks like my opportunity.

That will mean Katie misses her agility class..but I promise to take her again when the next class starts up.  She’s still a lucky girl, because her Dad is going to stay home with her so she doesn’t have to go to a kennel.  She’ll miss her mama, but not that much.  Silly girl.


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Another park

The advantage of not having a job (No I haven’t heard anything good or bad yet on the last set of interviews) is that I get to go to the park more often.  Today I told Katie that I was bored with our little local park, so we went out to my favorite park, the one I used to run in each week –  Kensington –  which is about 30 minutes away.  It has an 8 mile bike/walk trail around a big beautiful lake.  Katie and I didn’t walk all 8 miles, but we did do a total of 2.5!

The black raspberries are getting ripe, and in fact I got to taste one or two.  Yummy!

Mostly we just ambled along until we got to the boardwalk that runs above one piece of lake shore.  Katie wasn’t so sure she liked it, there wasn’t anything interesting to sniff on the edges, like there had been on the path.  And there wasn’t any shade either!  But on our outward trip she trotted right along after she checked the edge just to make sure everything was safe.

Since she was doing so well I planned on going about a mile and a half where I knew there was a bench overlooking the water.  But just before that bench is a bridge across a channel.  It has a wooden deck that moves and makes noise as people ride bikes across it.  And of course just as we got there a whole family of bike riders went by.  The noise spooked Katie a bit, that and being “inside” something.  Then a semi went by on the nearby freeway, running over a joint with multiple wheels, sounding like a nailgun.  She jumped and headed back the way we had come.  That’s OK sweetie, I don’t always like semi’s either!

On the way back to the car we moved slower.  She was getting hot, notice the sideways tongue.

Every time we stopped for a drink (often) I’d pour the remainder that she didn’t finish over her head and back and rub it in.  We sat in the shade at the bottom of our last long uphill and watched people go by, families, individuals, runners, people on bikes, people skating.  She didn’t bark at anyone.  Sometimes a tired doggie is a good doggie!

And she slept most of the way home.  No surprise there!


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Happy Father's Day

My Aunt (Dad’s sister) found some old family photos, and gave me this one of Dad.

What a serious little boy; wonder what he’s thinking about?

Maybe he’s considering what he’ll be when he grows up.  What choices he’ll make and how his life will turn out.  Maybe he’s imagining a long and satisfying career as an engineer.  Or thinking about all the exciting and interesting places around the world that he’ll explore, all the wonderful things he’ll learn, all the people he’ll meet, all the friends he’ll make, all the good he will do.  He can’t know yet the mark he’ll make in the world, but I bet he has an inkling of the family man he’ll become; a wife and four kids, two girls, two boys.

It was a wonderful and full life.  And those four kids?  They turned out all right too.

Celebrating you today Dad.


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Agility review

Another Thursday…another agility class for Katie and me.  Again this week I skipped the Rally class held on Thursday mornings so that I didn’t overtax the Sheltie brain.  Plus I had a ton of garden related stuff to do and it was a beautiful day.   But I’ll blame the Sheltie brain for the missed class just the same.

Again our class was split into two groups, those with more experience (not us!) went over to the other side and worked on contacts.  The rest of us got to start with teeter first.  UGH.  Last time we started with teeter Katie got tired of the game and shut down.  Of course the Sheltie brain had forgotten that, while the human brain tends to dwell on the potential negative outcomes.  So I looked at my dog and decided to assume she’d do whatever I asked.  And when it was our turn she trotted right up that teeter, instructor holding her leash, right out to the end as it gently landed on a couple of stacked up milk crates and got her “Good GIRL!” and treat, then stayed there while I walked a step or two and then jumped off when I released her.  YEA KATIE!!  And it was like that every time, she was pulling on her leash to head up that teeter whenever it was our turn.

But the chute?  What the heck is that Mom?  I’m not going in there!  It’s RED!  MY chute is BLUE!  This is an EVIL CHUTE!  OK.  I’ll go in the tunnel part, but as soon as you’re not looking I’m getting back out of it!  Yes siree!  I am NOT GOING IN THERE AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!

In fact when we tried to put together a string of stuff, double jump, send to tunnel, weaves, chute, she bypassed the chute and as I was talking to the instructor about how to get her to do the chute she ran off and did the teeter by herself, with NO MILK CRATES to break the teeter’s fall!!  Behind my back!    I ran over there and rewarded her, she was standing 2o2o looking over her shoulder wondering where the heck I was.  Silly girl, you wear me out!

Then we switched sides and our group did contacts.  We started with them jumping on the table to get to the downside of the dogwalk, then tossed a treat onto a paper plate at the bottoms so the dogs would pause, eat the treat, and then get released.  She did it perfectly every time.  “Don’t need no stinking table mom, I LOVE the dogwalk!”  When we finally got to run the whole dogwalk she was thrilled, charging up and over it, and even stopping at the bottom for her praise and treat!  I was so proud of her.

Her reward, at least in her mind, was that we did A-Frame next and she LOOOOOVES the A-Frame!  Though it wasn’t always this way, now whenever she sees it she tugs to run up and over it, so when we got to actually run it a couple of times she was in heaven.  Contacts?  No problem as long as she got a treat.

So at the end we put the two sides together.  Tire, dogwalk, weaves, curved tunnel, A-Frame, jump, double jump, tunnel, weaves, chute, teeter.  Piece of cake, right?  Well, we haven’t practiced tire in a long time.  It was hot.  We’d been there almost an hour.  Katie was getting squirrely.  We had to wait for all the big dogs to go first.  Enough excuses.  She refused to do tire.  It was already after the class hour, and the next class was waiting to start, so after three attempts I just kept going.  She charged for the dogwalk, ran through the weaves, shot through the tunnel, flung herself up and over the A-frame, stopped at the bottom, I said good girl! and kept running, yelling “JUMP.!”  She did not.   I turned to see where she was and she was SITTING at the bottom of the A-Frame looking at me.  “Treat Mom?  Where’s my TREAT!?!?!  I am NOT MOVING until you give me my TREAT!”  So I did (probably the wrong thing to do) and we moved on to jumps and tunnel and weaves and were running full tilt at the chute!  She ran into it!  She got 3/4 of the way through it, I’m yelling “CHUTE!  GOOD GIRL KATIE!  CHUTE!” and she turns around and runs out of it, runs all the way across the ring and out the ring and into the kitchen.

SIGH.

I went and got her and told her she was a good girl and we tried chute once more, no go, then we did teeter for the treats and that was the end of class.

For the most part she had a really good time and so did I.  In the end that’s all that matters.  The fact that she has a chute at home that she runs through with no problem is something I won’t think about right now.


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Katie and the little tent

The weather here yesterday was beautiful, cool and dry.  As evening descended I suddenly wanted to be camping, but it seemed like too much work to drag the tent up from the basement and accumulate all the pillows and blankets.  But husband said he’d help, so in the last few minutes of light we popped the tent up and loaded it with everything I needed to make it through the night.

Katie watched us put the tent up;  she was very excited because she loves to camp.  But she’s never camped in the little tent, not really enough room, and no little doggie window near the floor for her to keep track of the night’s comings and goings.  A couple of nights ago I slept in the little tent all by myself and had a wonderfully relaxing time sans dog.  This time I wasn’t going to get away with sneaking out the front door and creeping around the house so that she wouldn’t know.  She knew.

So Katie and I trooped out to the tent.  As usual she was in first, claiming the biggest pile of pillows for herself.  She’s such a pillow hog.  As we settled in she was restless, moving around and around the tent, plopping down, getting up, sighing, trying to see out the windows that were still zipped up.

Then I had a brilliant idea.  How about if I unzipped one of the windows so she could see out?

Turns out that is a WONDERFUL idea for both of us.  Suddenly we were sleeping in front of what seemed like a big picture window.  We both watched it get darker and listened to the birds heading home for the night.  The fireflies started to dance, the freeway noises lowered, and the frogs began to sing.  Katie curled up in a ball on her (two) pillows, let out a big sigh and fell asleep.  I drifted off too.

She was such a good girl all night.  While I had trouble getting comfortable she slept on, upside down, curled up against my side, or flat out by the wall.  She didn’t even bark when the guy with the noisy van drove by and threw the newspaper onto the driveway.

And this morning?   She didn’t want to go back inside!