With the amount of April showers that we’ve had this year, we should be buried up to our eyeballs in May flowers. Of course, that will mean May allergies as well, so maybe that’s not such a good thing. Those allergies have been bothering me for most of the night, so this post will be rather short.
Another month of NaBloPoMo is now history, and a new one starts tomorrow. See you all in the merry month of May!
One thing that I really love about Chicago is its wonderful museums. I also don’t visit them nearly often enough. With life and my own carelessness interfering, I’ve had to kick myself hard over missing two exhibitions that I would have truly enjoyed.
There is a billboard that I see every work day as I get off the highway downtown. It often advertises the current or upcoming special exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI). I am slightly puzzled about the special attraction opening tomorrow, Harry Potter: The Exhibition. Being neither scientific nor industrial, nor even real, it doesn’t seem to me to quite fit in the venue. I am sure it will be very popular, though. It does appear to feature many items from the Harry Potter movies, so I guess if it includes such things as the special effects and animatronics used for the mythical creatures, that’s technological enough to be appropriate for MSI.
Understand that despite the worldwide popularity of the Harry Potter books and movies, I have not read a single one of the books, nor have I seen more than a trailers’ worth of any of the movies. Despite the assurances of many people whose taste and judgment I usually agree with that they were worth a look, I just had absolutely no interest. That makes me fairly unusual, though not unique by any means.
So my visit to MSI might be postponed until the next special attraction arrives. But! Remember those exhibitions I missed over the last couple of years? It looks like I am being given a second chance at seeing both of them at museums within easy driving distance!
Titanic: The Artifact Exhibit is at the Milwaukee Public Museum until May 25. That means I’ll have to nail down a date and actually do some non-careless planning pretty quickly. I have always been interested in the Titanic disaster, and even more so in the recovery of artifacts. I had no intention of ever watching the movie, but the underwater scenes at the beginning just sucked me in, and I was shocked to find myself absolutely loving it. The Titanic exhibition was at MSI in 2000 and 2002, so you see I have stupidly missed it not just once, but twice, in Chicago. Milwaukee is only about an hour and a half away, so this is obviously a sign that I definitely have to see it this time.
Unlike the Titanic exhibition, which I managed to miss totally and completely, I have seen Tutankhamun relics before. I did stupidly miss the current exhibition when it came to the Field Museum in 2006, but I saw the original Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition, also at the Field Museum, in 1977. That was also probably the last time I willingly waited in a long line for hours, and wasn’t pissed off about it. I was also fortunate enough to get the opportunity to visit it again the following year on a vacation to Seattle. I understand that the gold death mask is no longer allowed out of Egypt and thus not part of the current tour, so I feel very lucky to have been able to see the original exhibition twice.
Again, the relative proximity of this museum is a sign that I must not screw up again!
Due to the wet weather, Freya and I didn’t get very much training in over the last week. We did get a couple of days of nice weather. Those days fell before I had finished printing up a set of rally obedience signs, so I didn’t get a chance to set up a practice course in the back yard.
From AKC's official Rally Obedience Rules
Each sign has a graphic and a few words to describe the exercise to perform at that station. We practiced some of the exercises in the kitchen. The exercises that can, and in fact should, be done in a small space include 270° left and right turns, 360° left and right circles, call front-left and right finishes, sit and halt, and down and halt. So we did get in some training specifically for the rally obedience exercises.
The sunny days were probably not used to best advantage in terms of training, but Freya thought they were just fine with time to play ball and wrestle with Axel.
Here she is in heel position at my left side, wondering why I’m pointing a camera in her face instead of holding a treat or a toy for her.
Here she is right after coming in for an almost perfectly straight front (we have issues with good fronts), wondering why a light is flashing at her instead of my hand signaling her to go around me to finish.
I think we’re ready for a good hour of training at tomorrow night’s drop-in class!
I didn’t think the upcoming closing of Geocities would have much of an effect on me. Like everyone else who was on the ‘net 15 years ago, I did have a Geocities page at one time. Even back then, it wasn’t my “real” website, but just another free service and another excuse to post some pictures of my Rottweilers (my very first Rottweilers) and a link to my real website. It disappeared a while ago due to inactivity and I barely even noticed.
I help maintain websites for a few friends, and the ones who started out on Geocities have long since moved either to my VPS, to Yahoo! Small Business Hosting, or to one of the many discount web hosts who charge less than $10 per month and whose names I barely remember.
All around the ‘net, people are either wallowing in overly sentimental reminiscences about their first websites at Geocities, or else snarking about how bad the service was. Archive Team is in the process of saving as many Geocities sites as possible. They say they’ve already archived everything from 1999 and before.
I didn’t think any of this affected me. Until I was looking through my Rottweiler bookmarks and realized that one of the sites has a photo and story about my dear departed Jake’s sire Aiko. Obviously that link won’t work whenever we reach “later this year.” I don’t know if the web site owner plans to archive or move his site. I’ve never saved the photo and story (just for personal use of course), and I would be very sad if I could never see them again.
So check your bookmarks and see if anything you cherish is out there on Geocities. Just in case.
Bear with me while I test Live+Press for crossposting from here to LiveJournal!
I’ve been crossposting full posts for all of my NaBloPoMo posts, and a few other categories as well, to LiveJournal. I’ve also been accepting comments at LiveJournal. At the moment, I’m planning to change that and crosspost excerpts only at LiveJournal, and accept comments only on the main blog.
Although the results may not yet be visible to the naked eye, I am still making my way slowly through 31DBBB. I haven’t been able to keep up with the one-task-per-day pace during the week, and I’m not caught up as far as I want to be, but I am still getting a lot out of the project. You can sign up at any time, and I suggest it for anyone who wants to improve their blogging. Even if you don’t join the project, check out some of the 31DBBB posts at ProBlogger!
One change that is probably visible, even to the naked eye, is the header on the blog. Back near the beginning of April, the first task of 31DBBB was to write an “elevator pitch” for our blogs. Mine is here, and I’ve finally made some of the changes and additions outlined in that post. I hope you like the new header, which features my favorite puppy picture of the lovely Freya!
I’m currently bogged down a bit on Day 8, where I need to interlink my post with other related posts within the blog. Yes, there’s a plugin for that. But as I started to work on this task, I realized that my categories and tags needed a major overhaul in order to work properly with plugins, and for that matter, to make it easier should I end up choosing to do my related links manually. So that’s a project to complete this coming week. I hope.
Freya’s first rally obedience training session went very well. We didn’t even trip over any of the signs. Our team’s biggest problem is, as usual, me. My leash handling needs work. Rally Novice is done entirely on leash, and keeping a loose leash is very important to avoid point deductions. I also need to get accustomed to using as much body language and verbal encouragement as needed. Extra help like that is not allowed in conventional obedience competition nor in Schutzhund obedience, so most handlers will phase it out during training as early as possible.
It’s not that I don’t want to continue on to conventional obedience competition or a Schutzhund BH, but realistically, I don’t know if I ever will. So it makes the most sense at this point to get through the Rally titles using every legal command and motivator that I am able to, and then worry about phasing out the extra commands and encouragement later.
As promised, today we stopped at the vet after obedience class for a weigh-in for Freya. I was quite relieved to learn that she had in fact lost weight during the six weeks since her annual check-up. Not quite so happy that it was just two pounds when she should have lost somewhere between 4-6 pounds, but at least she didn’t gain weight!
Seriously, this just underscores what I mentioned in Thursday’s post. In addition to switching to the low-fat formulation of her current food and monitoring calorie count of her regular meals, I really need to also be more careful about monitoring her treats.
I found quite a bit of helpful information at the Assocation for Pet Obesity Prevention website, including a list of calorie counts for many popular pet treats. Unfortunately, calorie counts for some of Freya’s favorite Wellness treats aren’t included, nor are they given on the Wellness website. I’ll try emailing them for the information, though.
I haven’t done well at increasing exercise, so that will be a greater priority as well. Masha left a good training suggestion in the last post’s comments: using a toy instead of treats as a motivator. I’m going to test it out in our next training session. I’ve had a few dogs who just got way too amped up with a toy as a reward, but it’s definitely worth a try.
