Tired of winter.

Over the weekend it was gorgeous. Warm, sunny, lovely and as always this winter, it preceded a freezing mess.I decided to think positive thoughts. I opened all the window, put away all the coats, breaking the cats heart because he now sees my winter vest as his bed. I got all gungho and washed all the dog blankets, it is possible to forget what he looks like when not wearing his sweater and generally swathed in blankets - with the coats all hung up and the blankets being washed it was easy to think that the warm up was really spring.

While sitting in front of an open window in short sleeves perusing one of my seed catalogs, I took another step towards Garden 2014:

Its a variety that as quick trip to the Ag site assured me grows well in North Carolina. Its a white corn which I like better than yellow. Its a "sweet" but its no so sweet that it won't hold for a couple of days. This year its going to be planted in the ground, like its neighbors the potatoes. I am going for a retro feel this year, garden-wise. Not so much that I'm getting tricked into weak, bug fostering, disease ready "heirloom" varieties, but I'm using the ground for more than something to walk on.

I want to get some coffee grounds to ad to the compost and the soil, but so far I haven't been able to find a donor.  There is work to be done, good thing its still winter. By Monday afternoon the temperature had dropped precipitously, ice was forming on bridges and over passes and it was sleeting and it was not spring.

When it was still spring I took Rocket to Dix campus and we worked on his agility skills. We did most of our work on his long jump skills. On Saturday he needed me to run beside him as he jumped but on Sunday, he was able to make the leap on his own. I would really like to practice jumps but there isn't anything at the police dog course to do that within reason. There are jumps but they are way, way too high for him and much higher than the jumps for agility. I think in this weeks class we get a take-home agility skill set to practice with. I am really looking forward to this, we can buy them if we want to and for $40, I'm going to buy it at the end of the class.

Rocket is doing very well with his spins and his bowing and walking backwards, and following me and a handful of treats around in a circle, first in one direction and then the other- this is not the same as spinning. getting better at his "downs". He still doesn't like the act of "down" but he'll do it if he is tempted with enough treats. He also won't spin without treats. He won't do much without treats. Sigh

As soon as it was winter again almost all the coats came out of hiding.

Monday, Monday.

Stayed up way too late Sunday night, suffered mightily Monday morning. Went to work.

Work
Work
Work

Storm blew through.

Work
Work

Every left work at the same time so they wouldn't get stuck in traffic. Logic not at work today. A single co-worker and myself stayed at work a little longer.

Work

Something solid begain to hit the windows. Co-worker and self  left office. It is 3:15.

I come home, take the dog out, change clothes and settle in front of the TV with dog. Fall asleep. Wake up three hours later, feed dog, feed self. Watch more TV.

Best Monday Ever.

Oscar Results 2014

8:43 -  Best Supporting Actor - Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club

8:51 - Best Song Nominee Number 1  "Happy" Despicable Me II

Ad break 8:54

8:57 - Best Costume Design, The Great Gatsby

So far two backgrounds,  hundreds of tiny, glowing Oscars and then hundreds of giant roses. I prefer the roses.

9:00 - Best Make up and Hair Styling -  Dallas Buyers Club

9:02 - Harrison Ford, intro to Best Movie Nominees Clips

9:05 - Oscar college movie maker contest

Ad Break 2 9:06

9:10 - Best Animated  Short Film - Mr. Hublot

9:15 - Best Animated Feature - Frozen

New Back ground, Hundreds of large tubes with lights in them.

9:17 -  Oscar salute to heroes.

9:20 - Best Visual Effects - Gravity

Best  Song Nominee 2 - "The Moon Song", Her

Ad Break 3 9:26

9:30 - Best Live Action Short -  Helium

9:33 - Best Documentary Short -The Lady in Number 6, Music Saved my Life

9:37 - Best Documentary Feature - 20 Feet from Stardom

9:40 - Governors Awards  (Honorary Oscars, Steve Martin and Angela Landsbury) Gene Hurshold Award (Angelina Jolie)


Ad Break 4 9:44

9:48 - Viola Davis is a young woman, why is she wearing a dress Angela Landsbury dismissed as being "too old"?!

9:48 -Best Foreign Language Film  Italy, The Great Beauty

9:51 - Best Movie Clips

9:54 -  Best Song Nominee 3  "Ordinary Love", Long Walk to Freedom

Ad Break 5 9:58

10:04 - Highlights of the Science and Technology Awards

10:06 - Best Sound Mixing - Gravity

The hundreds of  tiny, glowing Oscars are back and sharing space with the lit tubes

10:09 - Best Sound Editing - Gravity

10:12 - Best Supporting Actress - Lupita Nyong'o , 12 Years a Slave

I am annoyed by Ellen

10:25- Best Cinematography - Gravity

The houndeds of giant roses are back.

10:30 - Best Editing - Gravity

10:33 - 75 anniversary of  The Wizard of Oz

10:43 -Production Design -  The Great Gatsby

New Background, very large tubes, fewer lights.

10:46 - Hero Clips

Ad Break 6 10:49

In Memoriam -  Sarah Jones, the poor girl who was killed by the train on the job didn't get a mention. She deserved it. Young people have to OD or die in a crash to get mentioned. Die working in the industry, on the job and you get nada.

11:05 -Best Move Clips

11:08 -  Best song nominee 4, Frozen

11:12 - Best Original Score- Gravity

11:16 - Best Orginal Song - "Let it Go" , Frozen

11:24 - Best Adapted Screenplay - 12 Years a Slave

New Back drop, stacks of old fashioned type writers.

11:25 - Best Original Screenplay - Spike Jonze, Her

Ad Break 7 11:29

11:32 - Best Director - Alphonso Cuaron, Gravity

Ad Break 8 11:38

11:41- Best Actress - Cate Blanchet Blue Jasmine

11:48 - Best Actor - Mathew McConaughey , Dallas Buyers Club

11:55 - Best Picture 12 Years a Slave

Friday Cat Blogging

Cats don't need agility classes

Friday

I haven't made my lunch yet but I did take the trash to the curb and  then I emptied and then filled the dishwasher. I only did it because it took more energy to keep screaming at the dog to stop  licking the dirty dishes I had stacked up in there. It was really taking my enjoyment out of stretching out under the electric blanket watching three night old Jimmy Fallen . Also, while the dog is a good dishwasher ( another class we took last spring, it was a seminar) he sucks at putting the clean dishes away and I get tired of trying to figure out where he put everything. It was fun the first couple of times he put the dishes away, because for months I had to stand there and give him a  treat everytimne he picked up a glass, but now he does it for Good Boy!

As proud as I am of his new skills, I think he puts things away in the wrong places because he's commenting on my housekeeping. He tells me he isn't puting them away in the "wrong" places, he is just applying Logic to the cabnets and I should try it some time, everything would be easier to find. Blah, blah, blah. Judgy Dog.

The Oscars (tm) are Sunday night. You can tell how important they are because Entertinment Weekly includes complete  ballots in two issues. The last one only arrives a week before the show so its still handy. If you accidentally get rid of  the Emmy ballot in  The Special Emmy issue that hits the stands approximately two months before they are presented, you are SOL, you are left trying to keep track of who won best supporting actor in Mini-Series/Comedy/ Made for TV Movie/Variety or Musical/Clip Show you are now seeing presented and to whom. Blink and you miss it or as it happens,straighten up you coffee table and you miss it. The Globes don't even get a Special Issue.

The Oscars (tm) are more important, more important than like just about anything in the whole world. The pre-show has all ready started on E!, This year their goal was six hours more than ESPN dedicated to the Super Bowl  -  A good goal, attainable and a massive filler of airtime that would normally be dedicated to Kardiashian  reruns.

I don't have much to say so here is a picture of Rocket.

He had been sacked out on the couch but he wanted to see why I went outside without him and if I was going to force him to go outside too. - He made it from the couch to the livingroom still draped in his blanket,  and then once he felt he was safe from an unrequested potty break, he went back to the couch. Please note he is totally secure in his manhood.

Pre-Agility Class 2

Things we learned in class this week :

1. Rocket is a "natural" at making figure eights around poles. He gets right againts the pole without touching it, very difficult for a large dog.

2.Rocket needs work on his long jump. We will figure out a way to work this, the command for the long jump is "Fly!"

Long Jump

3. Rocket will learn the command "easy", so that he can stop at the end of a agility thing. He will go over the bridge, but at the end he needs to stop and have two feet on the ramp and two feet off. We will work on this skill this week. He can walk up the tiny ramp and cross the tiny bridge but at the end, but instead of just rushing off the end to get the treat,  he needs to perform the skill, and then pause and then get treat. We're supposed to practice on stairs. It was no explained on how we are going to achieve this.

4. We will work on walking through a ladder without walking on top the ladder. We do this so he will be aware of where his feet are.

5. Rocket has much, much better coordination than I do. Much.  So much better coordinated than I that next week I might have to use the disability card with the teacher.

6. We also need to work on walking backwards.

7. Rocket did much, much better than I would have thought navigating a baby version of the weave poles. The instructor was floored. We haven't worked our way up to weaving but he was very good at walking through the pole set up through an increasing narrow path.

Dog going through weave pole

8. Rocket had no problem making two inch leaps and going through a hoop or tire.

The Tire  . In real agility it is all about jumping

Jumping  . Rocket knows about jumping up and onto a fixed point but not so much about jumping over said point.

9.While Rocket loves  running through long cloth tunnels he is less excited about  short metal ones.

The Tunnel

The spins

Rocket and I have been hard at work on our homework for class. Rocket can spin right and left very well although he seems to prefer spinning to his left. He can spin like a top actually, as long as he doesn't spin himself into a corner or suddenly decides that he has spun quite enough thank you and he wants his treat now. Or maybe he gets dizzy, he doesn't say.

I have tried to get footage of his spinning skilz but the results have been disappointing from a an  production value  place or from the audiences stand point. I  would need a camera phone operator to get really good footage. Maybe the cat?

He is also making short strides in "down" and "stay" for a ten count . "Down" has always been a problem for him and it is still a struggle. It is hard to teach "down" as a command for weims in general as a breed, as they seem to see down  as too submissive or another theory is that "down" means "floor" and floors are hard on their delicate bellys . I vote myself for the "too dominate to down" theory.

He is doing very well with "bow", he can do that even without a treat. It is is only skill he will perform without a treat. My handy  book of dog tricks covers "spinning" and says that within two weeks of learning "spin" he should do it without a treat and by command. Thus far he seems deaf to the command without a treat. This is disappointing, previously when he learned new skills, a hearty Good Dog! was plenty adequate reward.

Today he demands a peanut. Which is fine, but he has had a lot of peanuts and not once has he spontaneously spun! He will  voluntarily sit for no reason! Because well, he has to sit, he can stand, or he can lay down or he can sit. He does not "have" to spin .

I try to comfort myself by remembering the hours and hours and hours of practice it took to learn how to sit on command.  I don't know to what end we are working so hard to learn "spin", I don't know  what agility skill we are laying the ground work for as we have been told that most of agility is about jumping and successfully making jumps over things, not spinning. Rocket has a four foot vertical jump when he wants to, but he has rarely been asked to or found any pressing demand to jump over anything and then the very few times he has jumped  "over" it was at a standing start, he has never been asked to jump over anything at a run or to aimed at something and then jumped over it.

This class is going to be hard.

Laugh while you can.

Harold Ramis died Monday. You probably all ready knew that, it was everywhere within seconds. He was young too, he made his first movie Animal House - First movie, right out of the box, Animal House! and then Meat Balls and Stripes  and Ghost Busters
andGroundhog Say and Summer Vacation ... Pretty much every movie you laughed at, every movie you saw over and over, the first movies you got a tape, the first movies you go on DVR. Your favorite movies, all of them. The movies you knew all the words from, by osmosis because everybody loved these movies and everybody knew all the words. Because he made those movies.  He was the Steven Spielberg of comedy.
I hope he had a lot of money. I don't hope for that with many people who I know have a lot of money, I hope he had solid gold everything, I hope he had his very own tiny giraffes!  He wrote everything that ever made you think that you could do that too and then you found out that that was a lot harder than it look - comedy is hard, very, very hard. And to make everyone laugh all at the same time at the same thing for the same reason, is practically a miracle.  And he was a miracle worker.

Here is a very good essay from Funny or Die .


You know what the bitter cold did not kill, the wasps! Rocket is right now stalking baby wasps in the livingroom. Today I wore one blue stocking and one black, it was not my finest moment.

Back to our regulary scheduled programming

Sigh. The Olympics are over. Makes me sad. I only watched a little and then only on NBC (USA!USA!USA!) so I can't say I saw a lot of athletes from other countries, but I understand they all had really lucky breaks and life time best times and because of that synchronicity , beat our athletes pretty much right left and center. Holland has some really lucky speed skaters. Our speed skaters had underwear issues and that made them less than competitive.

Our ice skaters did fabulously well, and all had terrific back stories! Imagine! All. Of. Them.  I wanted our hockey people to do better! And they did! They beat the Russians but were felled by the Canadians. Its all right though, we beat the Russians and they didn't medal at all.  Thus endith all I know about Hockey.

Also I learned on NBC that all the routes the skiers had to take down mountains were too hard or too dangerous! We couldn't possibly be asked to go full out and risk hurting ourselves on such clearly dangerous, vertiginous routes.. The Norwegians, clearly, did not have such issues. Or the Germans. Or the Russians. Some snowflakes are more special than others. Perhaps it is time to take our teams off the bunny slopes and introduce them to the Black slopes, where in their youths they learned how to be Olympians in the first place, skiing down black slopes blind folded, backwards and on one one ski. They just need to go back to where they learned how to not feel fear. Fear is the enemy, fear is 12 bronze medals.

We did however, manage to do fabulously well . It wasn't the Summer Games, which is clearly "ours" and we're much better suited for those kind of  ground based competitions held in warm places, hey, kind of like Sotchi, when its not been doctored within an inch of its life to look like a winter sports mecca. Putin is a fool.

893 days and counting , in Rio.

And now onto the  Closing ceremonies and tomorrow we will go back to having no interest in Eastern Europe at all. Ukraine who? Revolution? Government asunder? Unjailed opposition leaders? Empty Presidential palace? EU or Putin? What are the Kardashians doing?

Thursday Bar Visit

We didn't win anything in the raffle and I didn't enter him in the Cutest Dog because he hasn't grown a compelling, contest winning back story since the last time and the only tricks he can perform aren't cute, freaking awesome though! I'd like to see the "praying" mini pin/rat terrier mix climb a ladder! I did however get my Big Book of Dog Tricks in the mail today, so at the very least he will  viable trick the next month for him to adorably not perform on demand. One can hope.

Friday Cat Blogging

Pre-Agility Week 1

Busy, busy day! Rocket did really well in our first pre-Agility class, and was the universal example of how each skill should be performed. He did fabulously well with the instructor.

And then there was me. I am clumsy. I only have two hands and can't work/ hate the clicker. I can lead him through the skill or I can "click" his success or I can give him a treat. I can not do all three things simultaneously. I do not understand why its important that the treats be in one hand verses  the other and why it matters. Personally I would prefer going with "good dog", and not fattening him up with treats that in prior classes, gave him the the trots.

Since there have been no store bought soft treats,Rocket has grown a sleek, graceful neck  and now my project  is to go to Big Lots and score him a collar one size smaller for class - his pretty collar kept slipping off and he would go visit with the other dogs and this is a massive No No. The dogs are not supposed to interact. No, No, No. Which only makes the other dogs that much more interesting. I think its self defeating.

Even with a sliptastic collar and a slow, clumsy handler, Rocket was so good in class! He got progressively better at spinning right and spinning left, he was a champ at  bowing, and we will get better at making fast tuns around my legs. He is fearless.

I am not. I will get better.

#Eat the Rich

Instead of watching the Olympics, like a good person. I am watching Bitch Kids of Beverly Hills on my computer,  Its actually called something else but its a lot more accurate.

These are horrible creatures. I think this is what untreated, un-medicated narcissistic personality disorder looks like in the wild. I'm sure they have all spent time in therapy because duh, rich kinds from Beverly Hills, but they need to have nets thrown over them. Or drowned, either way. Drowned might be better.

So now I'm watching this while the real people are throwing themselves down mountains for their countries. I think the real people are kind of crazy too but they are at least being crazy in a brave, patriotic, talented way. It is not brave or talented to get into a an argument over the quality of an instragram picture. Or to compulsively take pictures of yourself being rich.

I am now hoping for a huge earthquake to turn BH into rubble. Sorry other people, but you'll get credit for being a martyr for the cause. These people need to be crushed under walls. Or eaten by sharks, I like that idea too. Maybe they can  run from the earthquake and end up at the beach and then get eaten by sharks. Rabid sharks, rabid sharks infected with plutonium. Glowing, rabid, land sharks.

No, that would be a fancy and memorable death. I think dieing alone and being eaten by rats would be better. Ugly rats. Eaten slowly over a long time because the ugly rats have no friends and their families have abandoned them for being such ugly, unpopular losers. Rats that can't get laid. That would be good.

I loath all of them. Its a good thing they send me lovely Amazon gift cards for this. I am totally earning it.