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- #961
- Nov 17, 2010
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Happy Thanksgiving...almost! DH and I are staying home. It’s weird, I never liked traveling anywhere, eating a bunch of food and then trying not to fall asleep at the wheel on the way home. So this year, when no one invited us, we were just as happy to stay here! I have my mom’s entire family over for Christmas every year, close to 40 people. Maybe somebody else would be peeved that not one of them thought of us this year, but not me. My dad always said that some people are doers and some are takers and there is nothing wrong with being the doer. Be proud of it. So I’ll cook my little turkey here and then make buckets of turkey soup with the leftovers and be happy to have my DH and my babies around me. And at Christmas I’ll work like a slave for three days cooking a giant ham and all the fixings and I’ll be proud of it!
The chicken enclosure is almost finished! Just in time as today it was cold! The rats did try to come it, but so far no chicken feed is missing and the one rat I saw Mimi scared the life out of him and he’s gone! We’ll put plywood around the structure as needed as it gets colder. Probably just on the north side until we get some snow. I don’t know if Crazy Lady is peeved! Oh boy though… we have ANOTHER rooster. That makes four. Turns out that BOTH of the Blue Americauna chickens are roosters. At 6 months the second one started crowing. How does that happen? He is so much smaller. I wondered why he wasn’t hanging with Ted Baxter. So instead of Mary and Rhoda I have Ted Baxter and Gordy the Weatherman. DH is ridiculous sometimes!
I think I’m in a new stage of grief. I just keep thinking that I’m going to die young. I know it’s silly and there’s no reason for it. But because of that nagging feeling, I have been trying lots of different things with my dog Mimi. It’s like I just want to do everything before I can’t do anything anymore. We have shown in multiple local conformation (breed) shows, an obedience trial and even went to a fun field trial…all in 4 months! And she is only 20 months old! All this with no significant instruction...just watched some YouTube videos, trained at home and went out and did it. My dad always told me that you never know what you can do unless you try. And Mimi will try anything. Who am I to hold her back?
Mimi did very well at the local breed shows. So I wanted to try something harder. But I don’t like crowds and I have a terrible sense of direction. I’m one of those people who can’t find their car in the parking lot. So attending a HUGE AKC breed show all alone was frightening to me. Plus I was told that the people at the breed shows are very snotty and don’t welcome outsiders. But I decided that I needed to grow and do something out of my comfort zone. So I went to an AKC show with 1500 other dogs in GIANT building with over 20 rings! I set attainable goals: manage to find the ring on-time and participate. Mimi does not look like a typical show dog…she’s a field hunting dog. Her coat is flat and water repellent. She has big paws with thick pads and a strong hind end for swimming. She’s a working dog. She stood out and so did I! The dog show was a sea of men in suits, women in skirts and dogs that had been fluffed and trimmed and moussed to within an inch of their life. I gave Mimi a bath and trimmed up the hair on her ears that made her look like “Beaker” from the Muppets and I figured we were good to go. I wore nice black pants and a conservative shirt. It was the best dressed I had been in years! I am for sure an “Amateur” and being the friendly, energetic person I talked to anyone who would listen. I got a small lecture from a grey haired woman who told me that “pants made her feel like a slob”. I told her it must be a “generational” thing. She didn’t have much to say to me about that.
Something I’ve learned about dog shows is that very rarely do competitors talk about how many people were in the class they showed in after the class is over. So in my class with Mimi it was just the two of us! So we got first place!! And it really was first place. If your dog stinks then the judge doesn’t have to give you a ribbon at all. As my other dog friends say…the rest of your competition was home on the couch. I got that first place ribbon because I was the only one with the courage to be here.
But I have to say that the show I just attended was not nearly as hard as the obedience trial. People train for those competitions for years. I gave myself two weeks. And I almost pulled off a qualifying score were it not for the rats! Mimi is an excellent hunter. She hunts the rats and mice on the farm almost continuously when she is outside. It is her obsession and a good one to have in a farm dog! I signed up for “Novice A” level. Turns out the competition was in the “rat room”- the room in the building that they use for “barn hunting” where they put actual live rats in PVC tubes around bales of hay and the dogs have to find them. So as soon as I took off Mimi’s leash for the off-leash heeling exercise she put her nose to the ground and she tried to find the rats. I just had to laugh. Amidst all the competitors who were mad at the judge or at their dog because they didn’t get a qualifying score…I was happy just to participate. My dog did what she was trained to do…find the rats!
The fun field trial was very hard. I trained for-you guessed it-two weeks! I had a frozen duck that someone gave me and I did my best to teach Mimi to run and find it…and then pick it up? Well, she didn’t really want to. But I decided to go to the competition anyway. Why not? On land she raced full speed away after the flying dead duck….found it quickly, sniffed it and then she ran all the way back to me, duckless. So I ran back and picked up the duck and said, “Come on Mimi, you can do it!” Nope, she was not touching that duck! So I ended up carrying it back with Mimi dancing alongside me, happy as a clam that she had found it for me. And the judge said, “You realize the point of this is to get the dog to retrieve, right?”
Almost done!
The chicken enclosure is almost finished! Just in time as today it was cold! The rats did try to come it, but so far no chicken feed is missing and the one rat I saw Mimi scared the life out of him and he’s gone! We’ll put plywood around the structure as needed as it gets colder. Probably just on the north side until we get some snow. I don’t know if Crazy Lady is peeved! Oh boy though… we have ANOTHER rooster. That makes four. Turns out that BOTH of the Blue Americauna chickens are roosters. At 6 months the second one started crowing. How does that happen? He is so much smaller. I wondered why he wasn’t hanging with Ted Baxter. So instead of Mary and Rhoda I have Ted Baxter and Gordy the Weatherman. DH is ridiculous sometimes!
I think I’m in a new stage of grief. I just keep thinking that I’m going to die young. I know it’s silly and there’s no reason for it. But because of that nagging feeling, I have been trying lots of different things with my dog Mimi. It’s like I just want to do everything before I can’t do anything anymore. We have shown in multiple local conformation (breed) shows, an obedience trial and even went to a fun field trial…all in 4 months! And she is only 20 months old! All this with no significant instruction...just watched some YouTube videos, trained at home and went out and did it. My dad always told me that you never know what you can do unless you try. And Mimi will try anything. Who am I to hold her back?
Mimi did very well at the local breed shows. So I wanted to try something harder. But I don’t like crowds and I have a terrible sense of direction. I’m one of those people who can’t find their car in the parking lot. So attending a HUGE AKC breed show all alone was frightening to me. Plus I was told that the people at the breed shows are very snotty and don’t welcome outsiders. But I decided that I needed to grow and do something out of my comfort zone. So I went to an AKC show with 1500 other dogs in GIANT building with over 20 rings! I set attainable goals: manage to find the ring on-time and participate. Mimi does not look like a typical show dog…she’s a field hunting dog. Her coat is flat and water repellent. She has big paws with thick pads and a strong hind end for swimming. She’s a working dog. She stood out and so did I! The dog show was a sea of men in suits, women in skirts and dogs that had been fluffed and trimmed and moussed to within an inch of their life. I gave Mimi a bath and trimmed up the hair on her ears that made her look like “Beaker” from the Muppets and I figured we were good to go. I wore nice black pants and a conservative shirt. It was the best dressed I had been in years! I am for sure an “Amateur” and being the friendly, energetic person I talked to anyone who would listen. I got a small lecture from a grey haired woman who told me that “pants made her feel like a slob”. I told her it must be a “generational” thing. She didn’t have much to say to me about that.
Something I’ve learned about dog shows is that very rarely do competitors talk about how many people were in the class they showed in after the class is over. So in my class with Mimi it was just the two of us! So we got first place!! And it really was first place. If your dog stinks then the judge doesn’t have to give you a ribbon at all. As my other dog friends say…the rest of your competition was home on the couch. I got that first place ribbon because I was the only one with the courage to be here.
But I have to say that the show I just attended was not nearly as hard as the obedience trial. People train for those competitions for years. I gave myself two weeks. And I almost pulled off a qualifying score were it not for the rats! Mimi is an excellent hunter. She hunts the rats and mice on the farm almost continuously when she is outside. It is her obsession and a good one to have in a farm dog! I signed up for “Novice A” level. Turns out the competition was in the “rat room”- the room in the building that they use for “barn hunting” where they put actual live rats in PVC tubes around bales of hay and the dogs have to find them. So as soon as I took off Mimi’s leash for the off-leash heeling exercise she put her nose to the ground and she tried to find the rats. I just had to laugh. Amidst all the competitors who were mad at the judge or at their dog because they didn’t get a qualifying score…I was happy just to participate. My dog did what she was trained to do…find the rats!
The fun field trial was very hard. I trained for-you guessed it-two weeks! I had a frozen duck that someone gave me and I did my best to teach Mimi to run and find it…and then pick it up? Well, she didn’t really want to. But I decided to go to the competition anyway. Why not? On land she raced full speed away after the flying dead duck….found it quickly, sniffed it and then she ran all the way back to me, duckless. So I ran back and picked up the duck and said, “Come on Mimi, you can do it!” Nope, she was not touching that duck! So I ended up carrying it back with Mimi dancing alongside me, happy as a clam that she had found it for me. And the judge said, “You realize the point of this is to get the dog to retrieve, right?”
Almost done!
