I Totally Should Not Be Doing This

I tried the blogging thing several years ago, when you had to explain to most people (meaning all but the geekiest of geeks), what a "blog" was or the meaning of the verb "to blog" (I blog, you blog, thou bloggest, they will have blogged). I didn't like it for a lot of reasons. The blogging sites either offered not enough control over look and feel, or too much, meaning you had to do it all by hand via html. I'm too much of a control freak for the one, and too lazy for the other, to be worth it.

Then a short while ago, I started realizing that my long e-mails about, well, not much, were boring people. It's now de classe to put that sort of thing in personal communications. I could almost hear their thoughts - Why don't you blog instead? Then we could pick and choose what's interesting?

So here we are.

I’m one of those “too much or too little people” - both phases supremely boring to read, I know. So, what my hope is, is to make this as extrospective as possible (though blogging is de facto an expression of introspection, even on external topics). Not to make it less boring, but in the hope that I’ll culture that habit in my thoughts permanently. And that's the last really "me" focused bit I hope to bring here. I have to plead indulgence for spiritual reflections however - this is the inevitable result of writing to a diverse audience.

Plans for the week: I’m working on building Ted’s confidence holding and working with pressure. This paid off many-fold when I had a customer come for a lamb. Ted held them for me for about thirty minutes, largely on auto-pilot, while we yakked and I pulled out one lamb after another to compare and narrow down our choices. It was only when they’d gone that I realized that was his first time doing that, solo, for that length of time. And afterwards, just curious, I took him out to see what doing the “cutting horse” thing for that long had done to his “outwork” - and lo and behold he now has twice as long an outrun, and shows no more than a normal baby dog amount of nervousness on the drive.

Thus, I’ll continue to work on his “at hand” pressure, and play at training trial type stuff pretty much only when others are here - or to set it up for a video. Meanwhile I’m delighted that he will now go out reliably for sheep as far as he really needs to anywhere on this farm, with the exception of the large field. The issue there is less the distance (in sight gathers are around 250 yards now since we fenced the bottom chunk), and mostly the fact that the dog must work out of sight for most gathers.

I'm also going over to the lake twice a day with Bet (except days I'm too busy). She's gotten amazing at spotting geese even before I do. It's hard to see them on the hilly, woods-surrounded lawns since we go when the light is pretty low. The geese have gotten to where she doesn't even have to move, they just go where she can't see them, uplake.