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The Real Meaning of Roadwork

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No, this entry isn’t really about walking and conditioning your dog.  It’s about our trip into the great unknown.  Our first vacation that doesn’t involve some dog event as the main course of action and I’m so freaking excited!

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we are heading down to Virginia.  More specifically, we’re heading down toward Virginia Beach/Chesapeake/Portsmouth for four days before swinging up toward Washington D.C./Arlington.  It’s that time of the year that we get a week off of work and this year we intend to take advantage of it.  Getting to see friends and be ‘tourists’ for the first time in a long time is definitely a worthy reason to take a road trip.

We’ll be loading up the dog mobile with our gear and the gear of four of the five dogs.  We would be taking five, but unfortunately, Duo doesn’t travel well.  The stress of a long road trip does his system no good so he gets to stay behind and enjoy a week’s vacation as the only dog with Grandpa.  Luna, Lyric, Ryker and Mika, however, think that traveling is very awesome and they can’t wait to be going.

The one unfortunate thing is that BSL has limited our choice in areas to stay in up in the Washington D.C. area since a few of the less expensive hotels are in areas where there are restrictions.  We won’t put our dogs in that risk and so are avoiding those areas and spending a bit more money for a canine family-friendly vacation.  It sucks, but it is what it is when it comes to the response to owning an APBT because of the irresponsibility and management of others who have ruined it for the whole.

So, right now, it’s t-minus less than 24 hours before we hit the road.  So excited!

Life. Love. Happiness.

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There have been a lot of changes in my life in the last two weeks and it has caused my blog to suffer a bit of neglect while I settled into what has become my new life.  Everything that has happened in the last two weeks is a new path to follow to hopefully better my life.

On May 21st, I posted about Luna’s birthday.  Well, that’s not the end of the story.  That day, my then fiancé and I shared our wedding vows together at the local court house surrounded by friends, family and Luna.  She truly was the reason we struggled to make it because neither of us could imagine life without her or one another.  It was a truly beautiful moment and one that was nine years in the making.  The love of two people and one little pit bull is a beautiful thing.

We opted to do our reception at a later date (July 2012, tentatively) and instead did a simple dinner after the ceremony to commemorate that particular moment in time.  We enjoyed a quiet meeting of the families at the Outback Steakhouse that was literally right next door.  My dad walked the hoard of nieces and nephews over since they were entirely too full of themselves to load up in the car for a short jaunt because they were having entirely too much fun running amok on the lawn of the court house.

The next big thing to happen is the place where my husband and I work was sold to a different company.  We are there through the duration of the transition (120 days) and possibly up to a total of a year through a subsidiary company that will take over our paycheck payments.  It’s a whole different ball game from what we are used to but it’s going to enable both of us to work a crap load of overtime and bank every available penny possible as we hunt for our dream property to start our family with ten and eleven hour shifts and up to six days a week.  It’s brutal on me – my knees and hips ache regularly after a day there – but its income until I can get my boarding/training facility dream a reality.  It’s a scary prospect, but at the same time I can’t be too picky about the fact that I am employed when there are many that aren’t.

Other than that, nothing else has been tremendously life altering.  We had our ADBA Fun Show on June 2nd and it went off without a hitch.  It seemed like everyone had a good time.

My wonderful boy, Ryker, took Best of Show under judge Mike Norrod and took Best Brindle under judge Dave Wolf – both gentlemen have quite a few years in the breed – and it was an honor to place under them.

Lyric took first in the female treadmill class and Best Overall by beating out the male winner.  She topped out at almost 14MPH in the 2 minutes she hauled fanny on the slat mill.  I’m so proud of my little Tinker Toy.  She’s really starting to come into her own and I would have never imagined the brain transplant she seemed to get after her emergency spay.

But, other than that, nothing much has really been going on.  Training has been put on hold for a while because of other things and we’ve been living the life of a newly married couple.  <3

Love. Life. Dogs.

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**Warning: Post gets incredibly vivid on descriptions and may not sit well with sensitive stomachs.**

You never know how your life is going to change when you get involved in what I affectionately call “the Dog World.”  Little did I know what lay in store for me getting into showing and (quite possibly) breeding purebred dogs.  The trials and the tribulations involved in having intact animals in my home and the quandaries associated with them.  Such was the case just a little over two weeks ago when what I thought was going to be a routine vet visit for a urinary tract infection or bladder infection on my darling little pistol, Lyric, turned out to be so much more.

I took Lyric to my phenomenal vet, Hoover Road Animal Hospital, on Tuesday, March 6th.  She’d urinated in her crate three times in the span of about an hour and a half.  [Note: We crate and rotate due to compatibility issues with a couple of the dogs – makes life simpler when they’re not crabbing at one another and it was another dog’s turn.]  The first time she did it, I wasn’t incredibly concerned because she’s always been a dirty dog and not had a problem urinating in her crate but after the 2nd (and eventual 3rd that happened not even 20 minutes after changing out her blankets and cleaning out her crate one more time!) I was incredibly alarmed.  The first time, her urine smelled fine.  It smelled like normal dog pee (yes, I know…weirdo knows what their dog’s urine smells like) but the final two times before we made the end of day trip to see our vet, her urine smelled off.  Pungent and almost infection-smelling – but it wasn’t watery, it was heavily concentrated.  Quite honestly, it was gross smelling and I had a hard time handling the smell. (It quickly became one of a handful of smells I can’t stand and almost make me want to vomit.)

Doc took her temperature and it was incredibly high – like concernedly high.  He gave her a fever reducing injection and we talked about our options.  Since she’d urinated on their floor, she had no more urine left to give a sample, but he didn’t want to send us home without starting her on antibiotics simple because we couldn’t run an analysis. So, armed with a prescription for cephalexin we went home.  There was concern that it wasn’t a bladder infection or UTI but I was told to come back if there were any changes – unfortunately, those concerns became incredibly valid not even 24 hours later.

We started her immediately on the medications after picking them up from the pharmacy (Yay for $4 generic prescriptions at Kroger for dogs now!). The following afternoon when we’d come home from work, I took her out on our potty run (we couldn’t see anything that morning since we leave for work at 4am most days) and she was oozing pus out of her vulva.  We made the call to get her back in immediately and an eternity later and a bazillion worrying tests later (okay, so it wasn’t that many, but I never felt so worried in my life over this little hellhound) the determination was pyometra and the fix was an emergency spay.

My life and hers changed so quickly. Never would we have expected to have her show career cut off at the knees by Mother Nature, but I’m glad I still have my girl and she’s safe and sound and on the road to recovery.  While Mother Nature had other plans for her, forcing us to drastically change ours, it also opened up so many more opportunities that wouldn’t have existed prior to that.

It is really true that when one door closes, another opens.  I’m eternally grateful to everyone who has been so supportive of her and me during this entire ordeal.  I would never wish this on anyone in a lifetime – it has become one of the scariest things I’ve gone through since making the decision to maintain intact dogs – and since we’ve had to walk through a new door and onto a new path in life we walk with uncertainty in our plans ahead but keeping in mind that we have each other and hundreds of new things to try, train, and excel at and a gratefulness that my little demon princess was not ripped from my arms and taken across the Rainbow Bridge before she’d had time to finish her reign of terrier terror on this plane. I ultimately learned to never distrust my senses in knowing that there wasn’t something quite right with my dog and her behaviors and am blessed to have such a phenomenal bond with her and the rest of the Wolf Moon pack.

To many, many more years of learning and living together, Lyric.  I love you with all of my heart and while we may walk a new path, we will do it together into eternity.

It’s Not The Dog, It’s The Owner

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I’ve heard this saying and said it a million times and yet I still hear the same excuses and the same complaints – heck, I’ve said them a few times myself in frustration over my own dogs.  Having owned and trained my own personal dogs for as many years as I have and competed with them, I’d rather give them the time of day than to rush them.  Here’s to you, Ms. Rainey for another fabulous bit of authorship.  You rock!

This entry is dedicated to all of the dogs out there who are slow to go – including my own Lyric, who’s ADD goofy behavior has often driven me nuts.

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How often have we all heard that saying? How often have we all SAID that saying? I’m willing to wager it’s a fair amount for us all. I wonder, though, how many people really take into consideration what it truly means. For sure there are instances of dogs that are too damaged physically or emotionally to do a certain job or task but I have to often how often one finds oneself in such a situation. I think that in today’s world of high speed technology and “bigger, badder, better” mindsets we often lose sight of one of the greatest tricks we have in our trainer’s bags. Time. It seems like such a simple notion, doesn’t it? Time, by definition, is a common term for the experience of duration and a fundamental quantity of measuring systems. Why then, when none of us knows exactly what our personal “duration” will be are we so addicted to the notion that we must confront an experience, master it, speed through it and set another mark in the distance to aim our warp speed engines at? Simply put, we have time. A select few have managed to find joy in the journey, but what about the baby steps of just finding joy in today? in the hour? in the now?

I constantly see younger and younger dogs in the rings training, competing and then being tossed aside for the next new dog, the next better dog. My question is why? At what point did we forget that it is our time and our efforts that we put into these dogs that results in the benefits we get back out of them? We have a saying about canine nutrition (that we often also apply to breeding): garbage in, garbage out. I believe the same is true of training and time. You cannot put 5 minutes into your dog a day and expect the dog to give you the focus and working drive of a dog that is receiving 50 minutes a day. It just does not work that way.

Beyond that a dog that earns it’s UCD title at 12 months old with a score of 95 gets the exact same certificate as a dog that earns its UCD title at 5 years old with a score of 71. So why the rush? If you don’t get a “super awesome hotdog bonus wow” certificate, then why push? My personal experience is that even an extra certificate wouldn’t be worth the rush (and subsequent foundation shortcuts) but that’s a topic for another lengthy note. Enjoy your dog. You can’t guarantee that you will be here tomorrow. You can’t guarantee that your dog will be there tomorrow. But you can guarantee no regrets if you spend your time appreciating what your dog is doing (or trying to do) for you, spending your time judging your successes and not your failures and refusing the play the “I need a better dog” game. In the end, we get the dog we NEED, not always the one we thought we wanted.

We Have Snow!

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It’s official.  Winter has set in in some places or it did a little bit yesterday.  We’re back up to 45° again today for some reason.  Mother Nature really can’t decide on what she wants to do.  The dogs were glad for a bit of romp time in the chilly weather, though and I was able to take some fun photos of the kiddos in the snow.  Enjoy!