Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

April 2009 NaBloPoMo: Growing (Up) (1 of 30/67 of 274)

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This will be my second consecutive month of attempting to blog daily. March daily blogging went pretty well, despite a couple of days where I had absolutely nothing to say. Life and blogging did go on, though, with a successful finish to the month.

The optional theme for April is Growing (Up). Growing up is something that I may never do. Growing intellectually, emotionally and spiritually is something I hope I never stop doing. And of course, growing old is inevitable, and the choice is simply between growing old gracefully or just growing old.

Growing as a writer and communicator has been somewhat of an afterthought. I returned to regular blogging with the November 2008 NaBloPoMo just for fun, but lately I’ve been thinking about how to make my blog more interesting and worthwhile not only to my very small audience, but to myself as well.

One of my problems that affects my writing is the same problem that has kept me in an accidental career for all these years. I have never found my true passion. I have found my soulmate, and I have a good and comfortable life. There are many things I enjoy doing, even love doing. There are many things I care about. But there is nothing I can point to and say it is my true passion, although the Rottweilers do come close.

I also know I don’t put enough of myself into my writing, because there are so many topics that I like writing about, but so few that I really feel compelled to write about. There is so much room for me to grow as a writer and as a person, if I can only figure out how and where to start. I’m hoping that a month of reflecting on the “growing” theme will help send me in the right direction.

Out like a lamb (31 of 31/66 of 274)

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Not exactly, unless you mean out cold like a lamb that was just t-boned by the lion who has been hanging around since bringing March in. Spring is seriously struggling for a foothold, even here in Chicago, which has been spared much of the truly serious weather received by other areas.

March showed some promise of going out like a lamb, with some warm and beautiful days. But winter returned on Sunday. It was a very short return, though, with not quite two inches of snow falling between about 2:00AM and 7:00AM. Most of it melted by mid-afternoon. It’s been cold, windy and rainy since then, and the bunnies and robins just don’t look very happy. Or maybe they look unhappy because Rottweilers are chasing them.

I always look forward to seeing the first robins of spring. They have been here for a while now, and there is one rather unusual-looking robin that has been hanging around the neighborhood. He has a lot of white patches all over his body, almost as though someone dabbed him with paint. I’ve never noticed any robins with this type of coloring before.

robin01

robin02

robin03

I did some searching on the ‘net after I took those photos and it seems that the probable explanation is that this bird is a partial albino. According to Journey North’s American Robin pages, this condition could either be genetic or caused by injury or age. Check out their article Photo Study: Who is That Masked Robin? and see if you agree that is the story for my visitor as well.

This concludes NaBloPoMo for March 2009. Give it up for all who participated!

A Tale of Tilapia (30 of 31/65 of 274)

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If I’ve ever puzzled or offended you by the choking-back-a-laugh noise I usually make whenever someone mentions eating tilapia, please let me explain. I am generally a pretty logical person, but tilapia is one thing for which logic cannot prevail for me. I know that the tilapia sold at the warehouse store and supermarket, and served at fine restaurants (insert that choking noise here), is farm-raised. I know that its (reportedly) mild flavor is a perfect backdrop for some creative and sophisticated sauces. I also know that despite my general love of seafood, I will never eat tilapia (choking noise again).

When I was growing up in Honolulu, no one I know would ever have thought about eating tilapia. Tilapia lived in dirty canals like the Ala Moana Canals and Ala Wai Canal. They supposedly eat algae, but being bottom-feeders, that means they also sucked up the other disgusting stuff at the bottom of the canal. If you fished for tilapia, it was solely for fun, and you would throw them back in the filthy water from whence they came. In other words, not something that anyone would willingly put in their mouth.

I don’t remember exactly when tilapia made the move from the canals to the fish farms, but I do remember the great amount of amusement it gave me every time I heard of some upscale restaurant serving tilapia. The fancier the restaurant, the bigger the laugh for me, as I was of course picturing fancy schmancy people catching canal tilapia.

The height of my illogical amusement came when I saw an article in the Norridge/Harwood Heights local newspaper about an aquaculture project at my husband’s high school. Just a few miles from where we live now, the students there were raising… yes, you guessed it… tilapia! I got way too much pleasure at asking him whether he was disappointed that he had never been able to participate in a tilapia farming project during his years there.

So, yes. I know it’s totally illogical. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat tilapia, unless someone tricks me into trying it. Umm. Do not get any ideas, please and thank you. And thank you for ignoring that little choking noise I make when you mention how tasty your tilapia was at lunch!

Social? Really? (29 of 31/64 of 274)

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The recent redesign at Facebook has taken up more than enough blog words and space over the last few weeks. My complaint of the day goes beyond the redesign, and in fact, back in time to start with a question I asked many years ago about LiveJournal: why am I calling these people my “friends” when many of them are not in fact friends under any real definition of the word? Why do I have to call them “friends” when they are at most “acquaintances” and in many cases, just “people whose stuff I read”? And “unfriending” or “defriending”? That is such a cruel concept if these people were in fact actual friends, isn’t it? Oh. I do feel that I have actual friends on LiveJournal, ones I’ve met and ones I haven’t, yet. But those are not the people I am talking about.

As you can guess, I’ve never received an answer, let alone a good one. But that’s fine. I’ve not dwelled on it, except to laugh at the people who periodically inflict emotional blackmail upon their friends list and threaten to defriend people who don’t comment to their adoration-seeking post. Pathetic attention whore, much?

Now on to Facebook. And for the record, I don’t like the redesign. Almost every time I’ve logged in since the changes, the so-called news feed greets me with a dozen or more entries trumpeting the fact that someone just distributed pixel gifts to their friends. This would not be so bad except that it totally eclipses more important things, like status updates, or posted articles, or posted photos. You know, the stuff I would actually want to see from and about my Facebook friends, some of who actually are real friends from real life.

So I don’t have the same issues with the meaning of “friend” on Facebook as I did on LiveJournal. My issue with Facebook, other than no love for the redesign, is that I’m no longer seeing how it is any better to interact with people solely through pixel gifts and games, as to not interact with them at all. Sort of like the people who never send you a personal message via email, but send only forwarded sentimental crap with duckies and kitties and flowery prose about friendship. Ironic, that.

I do have friends on Facebook (as opposed to so-called friends, and like everyone else on Facebook, I have those, too). Some are family and in-person friends from my offline life. Some are online friends that I’ve never met in person, but might someday. But these are all friends or acquaintances who actually communicate with me and each other. We have conversations and discussions and genuine interactions, offline or online. We comment on each others’ blogs, leave personal comments on each others’ postings. Maybe we also play the same games.

The ones I’m talking about communicate solely through pixel gifts and games. I’m finding that it is taking up a disproprotionate amount of my time to even just fast forward through the fake interactions to get to the real ones. Ultimately it’s my own responsibility to get my time back. I think I need to look hard once again at the real meaning of the word “friend” and the quality of interaction I want to have with my current true friends and those who I would like to develop a real friendship with.

Rottweiler rambles (28 of 31/63 of 274)

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Saturday is obedience class day for the lovely Freya. I consider group training classes a lifelong activity for my dogs, and I’m always happy to find those classes, clubs and instructors that can make those classes a good experience for both me and my dogs.

We like our current class very much. It is an intermediate/advanced class, which means some of the dogs are fresh out of beginner class, some are more experienced and some are working on off-lead or competition. Class size is small: 10 dogs when everyone is there. We use mostly positive training with food and praise, but correction collars and corrections are not forbidden. After owning six rather stubborn Rottweilers, I no longer believe that all dogs can be trained solely with pure positive methods. If you do, that is fine, and we will just have to agree to disagree.

What I really like about our instructor is that he is able to help reactive and unruly dogs work in class, without undermining the experience for the other dogs. The hall is large enough to provide enough space for dogs to work at a comfortable distance. Over the past few weeks, an extremely reactive dog has gone from working outside the group at one edge of the training room, slowly moving closer to the group, to being able to work with the group for at least half the class period now. Freya is reactive herself to small hyper dogs, so this has also been a good opportunity to get help in teaching her to work through what to her is a huge distraction. This has been so much better for me than having to rely on random public encounters where I have no control over the skill or intelligence of the other dog and its handler.

I need to set up some specific training goals for Freya, and make them more real by picking out some actual trial dates to shoot for. She is a pretty smart dog whose lack of working titles is due mostly to my own procrastination and somewhat weak dog training skills when it comes to competitive obedience.

I am so glad there is such a thing as Rally Obedience now. When our first Rottweiler Heidi came to live with us in 1994, the sport did not exist. All of our Rottweilers go through obedience classes, and we actually did trial with Heidi and her little brother Oscar, but never did title them. Traditional obedience competition demands a lot of precision, which is something I am terrible at. Rally Obedience requires the same routines and exercises as traditional obedience, but it is more relaxed for both dog and handler. This I can probably do, so this is what I will work towards.

My real dog sport love is Schutzhund, but I don’t know if I will ever get back to it. It requires even more commitment in training time and practice time than many other dog sports. Since it involves a protection component, you really cannot do this without a club with an experienced and safe helper. With the current legal climate for all dog owners, there is a particular responsibility for dog owners participating in protection sports and unfortunately, that is not something that can be ignored these days.

Did I not mention Axel yet? No, apparently I did not. I am still deciding on what his activities should be while he is taking a break from conformation showing. We were doing private lessons before he left in December, and I’m not opposed to continuing those, but I also feel he needs to get back into group classes so he remains accustomed to seeing dogs of different breeds on a regular basis. I won’t even think about working titles for him until after he completes his championship.