Come

On our walk today, the dogs and I started to work a bit more on the Come command. Lately, Turtle has been getting more assertive with Eddie as he ages. She'll blatantly take toys from him (not too unusual as he's always let her take toys, but she's more brazen about it now); she attacks him (playfully, of course) with more gusto as they play on the trail; and she generally is attempting to vie for top dog more than she ever did in the past. She doesn't succeed, of course, but I've decided these behaviors indicate I need to treat her more like I treat Eddie. Anyway, another fun new development is that she's become a bit bored of always staying on the trail and likes to head off perpendicular to go exploring. I don't mind if Eddie does this as he will come back fairly quickly when I call. Turtle does not. She'll take a good 3-4 minutes to reappear if she goes off. Not good. So yesterday, I worked on the Come command with them in the house and gave them a piece of dog food each time they came (100% success rate in house - excellent). Today we worked on it on the trail. It's less of an immediate reaction because they're concentrating on smelling and running around, but after Turtle saw that I rewarded her with a piece of dog food, she was quite eager to come whenever commanded. This was with only stationary distractions. I know that if there were another dog or a person, I would have little chance of successfully getting her to come when I called, but baby steps. I feel a little badly because Turtle should really be a perfectly behaved dog as she's is exceptionally easy to train and has the ideal temperament for a dog. Any failings are purely on my part. With Eddie, I know he is a stubborn, too smart for his own good, and an extraordinarily willful dog and that I have done my absolute best, so I don't feel too badly when he's less than stellar.

What a lazy day for me today. I slept in quite late after making D get up around 7 AM to stop Eddie from barking. Apparently, I was quite terse about it and barked at him, "I think you should get up and stop your dog from barking." Then I got a bit testy when he came back to bed earlier than I thought he should and I thought he hadn't let them out to pee. I don't quite recall all of this, but D was quite relieved when I finally came downstairs nice and perky (11 AM, tyvm).

D is off working out now... during the Superbowl. God, I love that man. I haven't had to listen to even a moment of that stupid thing. Yahoo! I plan to scope out all the good commercials online tomorrow.

Check out this photo from Fashion Week in NY. Now Britney and Paris don't have to go through all that effort of pretending they "accidentally" flashed their snatch while getting out of a car - they can just wear this new skirt and voila - snatch flash!

We couldn't find a movie to go to last night (gasp!), so we rented Sherrybaby. I would give it a B-. It was very well acted, but brutally honest and this made several scenes extremely uncomfortable. However, that was not the issue. It just wasn't all that interesting of a story. D stopped watching about 1/3 of the way through and finished doing our taxes. They're now done and ready to be mailed.

Random Story of The Day
A middle school in NJ has banned tape recorders after a student recorded his history teacher telling "students that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark and that only Christians had a place in heaven." (quote from this NYT article). This is like solving a problem with police brutality by saying people can't record the police at work: if you can't see the problem it doesn't exist.