Sep 29, 2025
This spooky season, please remember to be respectful during your graveyard walks.
Keep your voice down, mind the landscaping, and don't let your dog urinate on a grave marker.
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This spooky season, please remember to be respectful during your graveyard walks.
Keep your voice down, mind the landscaping, and don't let your dog urinate on a grave marker.
That's a wrap on Ollie's first big dog show.
Though I originally planned to try for our first Trick title, I decided to wait. Ollie had already delivered two solid Fetch tests in the heat to earn his Intermediate, and I could tell he was tired. Would he still have done what I asked of him? Totally. But I want sports to feel like fun, not work, and I felt that putting too much on his plate could diminish his enjoyment of the day. So we will do this test another time.
I am very impressed with how he handled an event of this size. The show had hundreds of dogs competing in a dozen different activities, and Ollie took it all in without becoming overwhelmed.
Looking forward to so much more of this.
(Pictured: left- Ollie resting in the shade by our car during a water break between Fetch tests; right- Ollie relaxing in the grandstands overlooking the conformation rings).
Recovering from our show day with a much more peaceful walk by the water
Baby dog forgot to pay attention for one of our throws and didn't see the ball land, causing him to run the wrong way. Fortunately, he knows his left and right, and I was able to verbally guide him to where the ball was hiding, and he completed his retrieval.
In the end, we got two qualifying rounds, and he earned his Fetch Intermediate. Only his Advanced and Retriever to go 🎉
Ollie's doesn't understand what is happening when I exercise. Me being on the floor would usually indicate a problem, and Ollie is here to help.
Tonight, like other nights before, I was alerted to my stress level while working out, and when I attempted to foam roll my forearms, Ollie interrupted as if I was scratching myself.
This is why I have been leaving Ollie at home when I go to the gym. I haven't quite figured out how I want to navigate this yet. I have just been ignoring him in these instances, and also reintroduced treats for alerting and interrupting correctly. But the false alerts keep happening, and I ultimately find it easier to just put him away while I am on my mat.
If any of you have gone through something similar, I would love to hear how you worked it out in the end.
Found a ton of Halloween-themed treats at the store, but most of them had chicken, so Ollie can't have them.
What I did leave with were some stuffed water buffalo hooves and these little carob cones that are, in Ollie's opinion, the best thing in the entire world.
We've been practicing our tricks for our upcoming Trick Dog test.
Ollie will be expected to perform 10 behaviors selected from the list the AKC offers. Novice tricks are all pretty simple, with all of them being behaviors that I taught Ollie in his first year of life. So we're really just brushing up on skills he already has.
The tricks we plan to use are: retrieving a ball from 10 feet, getting in and sitting in a box, getting on a low platform, high-fiving and shaking hands, push-ups (sit->down transitions), spinning in a circle, nose targeting my hand, and planting a kiss on my cheek.
Should be a piece of cake!
Teaching Ollie to open my sock drawer and bring me a pair backfired today after his bath, when in his crazed wet state, Ollie ignored my pleas for him to stop and excitedly began throwing the contents of my sock drawer at the foot of my bed 🤦♀️