In Which Our Heroine Scatters Here and There

3 August 2005

I am just a puppyssori rebel, I guess, because the trainer did some stuff I did not think would work in our household. She wanted to encourage the puppies to climb, for example. Umm. Ista can already get up on the sofa, and right now I'm not sure I want to get her thinking about learning to climb better than that. It's a good thing to have some things out of her reach. (The trainer was talking about getting the dogs to think about the world above their eye-level. No problem.) Also she wanted to work without commands, just guiding the dogs, but Ista knows some commands already, and if you label things differently, she has a much easier time with why she isn't getting rewarded if she hits an intermediate step that sometimes gets its own reward. If she knows she's supposed to be figuring out what "shake" means, she'll try; if she thinks she's sitting as instructed and not getting her treat, she gets frustrated.

So. She had fun playing with the other puppies, and I think it's good for her to play with the other puppies, but again, maybe not the optimal training stuff for our family.

Also I'm always surprised and a little taken aback at how much in one's personal space other humans get at these dog classes. The puppies I expect, but it definitely bleeds over to humans. In admiring my necklace, the trainer automatically put her hand out and touched it without asking. I did not nip her hand, but it was...it was...it was un-Minnesotan, is what.

I'm currently reading Walter Jon Williams's House of Shards, which is more fun than the other WJW stuff I've tried (except for its immediate predecessor in the series), and I'm doing revisions on Thermionic Night some more, and maybe on Sampo, and I've been poking bits of other projects as they strike me, and it's all been good bits, but very scattered. But sometimes I need to be a little scattered for awhile, and then the bits are there concretely when I need them. Or at least that's the theory, and it's worked so far.

Barring any large changes, Mark and I will be taking Ista to meet my grandparents this weekend, so if I don't seem to be around, that's where I'll be. Have a good one yourselves.

Back to Novel Gazing.

And the main page.

Or the last entry.

Or the next one.

Or even send me email.