One of my favorite things about Nantucket is the wealth of edible plants on the island. From late May to early October, there is always something waiting to be spotted and foraged, and it makes every walk with the dogs into a treasure hunt for them and me.
Our first day there, I gathered a mix of blueberries and huckleberries (which very closely resemble blueberries in appearance and flavor) for our breakfast pancakes.
Blueberries and huckleberries (and pancakes!) remained a fixture on our trip -- the dogs pretty quickly learned to recognize when I was going to stop and pick berries, and Pongu would romble over to "help" while Crooky took the opportunity to flomp in the shade and rest for a bit -- but there were many other berries as well.
Cranberries:
and raspberries (a new discovery this year; as far as I'm aware, there is only one wild raspberry bush on the island, and Pongu found it for me because HE IS THE BEST):
and blackberries:
I had fun.
There were also other plants that aren't quite ready yet -- the beach roses (although the flowers could be used to make a wonderful ice cream, which we had at Ventuno one night) weren't quite ready yet, and the wild grapes will need another month or so to ripen.
And the dogs, being dogs, found plenty of their own treasures to forage. They found dead seabirds and deer skeletons aplenty. Pongu hunted down a rat skeleton (which he rolled in) and Crooky found a patch of skin and hair left over from a dead bunny (which he gobbled).
Crooky also found an enormous mostly-skeletonized fish head from a false albacore or "little tunny," which he triumphantly dragged up from the surf and paraded around proudly... until I took it away from him, mean person that I am.
On top of that, he proved to be quite the crab hunter.
This summer, once again, we took the dogs to Nantucket. Swanky.
The island is, without a doubt, Dog Mob's favorite place on earth. The first time we came, Pongu spent about a week being freaked out of his mind because we were somewhere new!! and scary!!, but now he's used to the cabin and knows that Nantucket means lots of awesome adventures, and it only takes him about a day to settle in.
Crooky, meanwhile, has never been anything other than completely stoked to go to "Bunny Island." I'm pretty sure he hopes that every car trip is going to end up in a surprise visit to Nantucket.
Anyway, they figured out our destination when we got to Hyannis Port and they could smell the sea and hear the seagulls screeching. At that point, both dogs went completely bananas, and bananas they stayed until we got to the cabin.
Waiting to load onto the ferry at Hyannis Port:
The ferry ride was fairly stressful for the dogs. We went on the vehicle ferry, which normally means they can just sit in the car and I'll read my Kindle and it's a relatively easy two-hour trip, but this time we ended up on the open-air ferry and our car was parked with the broken window facing an extremely loud air vent, so it was way too loud and scary for the dogs to sit in the car and we had to spend most of the ride out on deck with the salt spray in our faces (which is fun and glamorous for like ten minutes and then just becomes annoying. Seawater is sticky and leaves a gross-feeling patina on your skin in short order).
Crooky laid down and went to sleep on the deck when he got bored. Pongu spent the trip quietly hyperventilating, but handled it pretty well as long as I stayed near him and he had a wall to cower against.
And then we got to the cabin, where the furry little welcoming committee was waiting to greet the dogs.
(There are actually two bunnies in that picture, although the second one is far away and hard to make out against the greenery. Also, Pongu's expression in the mirror behind me makes me laugh and laugh.)
We've been here for most of a week and Dog Mob has settled into our island routine. I spend the mornings and early afternoons writing, we spend the late afternoon and early evening on hiking adventures, and when everyone is exhausted, we return to the cabin to watch some TV (currently: HBO's Carnivale, which we missed when it was originally on. It's pretty good, although solidly second-tier, and now that we're in S2 I can see why it fell off the air). Some nights we go out to dinner, others we don't.
But every day, without fail, Dog Mob gets to spend hours exploring the wilderness, bounding across the moors, rolling in the grass on the Serengeti or Sanford Farm pastures, and looking for deer and bunnies to chase.
They have wallowed in bogs and (accidentally, while over-enthusiastically chasing geese through deceptively thick cattails) jumped into lakes.
They've run full speed across open fields and perched carefully on craggy rocks (because I asked, and they are Good Dogs so they are willing to oblige me).
They have chased deer and bunnies and birds, and phantom noises and smells that might have been anything at all. I let them run free to chase whatever they want across the moors, because I have no concern that either of my dogs will get lost and I also have no concern that they'll ever catch or even threaten anything (Pongu won't go more than 50 feet away from me, and Crooky is much too slow and ungainly, especially now with his spondylosis, to run down even the most leadfooted rabbit). Pongu has literally tripped over a rabbit that startled out of the bushes in front of him -- he stepped on its back with at least one and possibly two feet -- and still neither of them could catch the bunny.
Here, they have total freedom on our walks. And that's the real reason we keep coming back.
On Saturday and Sunday, Pongu and I went out to two different obedience matches.
Originally, I had thought we were only entered in one, and I had planned to scratch from that one, because Pongu's nowhere near being ready to do a match in obedience, not even in Beginner Novice. I didn't have a plan for what we'd do in the ring and I didn't have any expectation of even minimal success, so I figured there was no point in going.
But then!, our super awesome instructor talked me into it. Just go into the ring and play, she suggested; don't worry about doing obedience behaviors. (Well, her actual wording may have been something rather more along the lines of "I **FORBID** you to do any obedience behaviors"... and by "more along the lines" I might possibly mean "just exactly that," but hey, let's not nitpick here.)
So off we trundled to a new obedience club that we'd never previously visited, and into the ring we went.
Here's that, in all its four-and-a-half minutes of glory. I don't expect anyone to actually watch it, except maybe me in a few years' time.
I was really happy with this. Yes, Pongu's wobbly, and yes, he gets distracted, and yes, I should have stopped at the three-and-a-half minute mark when he starts fading during that short stretch of heeling. I made several mistakes during this match.
But my dog stayed with me, he mostly stayed engaged, he was willing to play (for a certain value of "play" -- a lot of that is stress jumping as much as it is legitimate engagement). For his first time going into a new venue with zero prep, and being asked to do something that's moderately strange for him (Pongu is not accustomed to just going into a ring and playing with me), that is a good performance for us right now.
So on Sunday we went out to K9Jym to do the same thing again. And this time, even though Pongu was only a little wobblier than he'd been on Saturday, and his engagement wasn't all that much worse, I felt really sad after we left the facility, whereas I'd been full of renewed optimism the day before.
Part of it was that this was a familiar venue to him, and in the past he's done okay there, so I was really expecting him to be a little better, rather than a little worse.
Part of it was that we warmed up outside a ring where a former NOI competitor was doing awesome Utility work with her blazing fast, accurate border collie, which is sort of like trying on swimsuits in the stall next to Kate Upton's. Not really a formula for improved self-esteem.
Whatever the cause, I left feeling pretty lousy, even though the tape doesn't look that bad to watch.
The rest of that day, I moped around obsessing about how we were never going to do competition obedience and what was even the point of training and why was I putting myself or my fearful dog through any of this, bla bla fourth verse same as the first, etc.
And then this morning I saw that the agility intro class I wanted to take in July wasn't filling -- in fact, as of right now, there are only two students enrolled, so if more people don't sign up then the class will likely be canceled -- and thought "welp, so much for switching to a totally new sport, I guess."
And then tonight Pongu and I had a good training session outside.
So I don't know what to think. Currently my plan is that I'm going to take the rest of the year and just play around and train these exercises and try to get Pongu really happy about doing them, and I'm not going to worry about trialing or doing matches or any of the other stuff.
It is strictly going to be about the journey, taking small steps each week, and I refuse to raise my eyes to the prospect of titling down the road.
We had two more not-very-successful Rally trials in the past week. Saturday we went to Let's Speak Dog in Nazareth; Wednesday we went to Bella Vista outside Harrisburg. Only the second trial was actually bad, but neither of them left me feeling good afterwards.
We struggle with stress, with anxiety, with disengagement. We struggle with difficult environmental conditions, but we also struggle when the environment is -- or should be -- fine.
I wonder if we've hit a wall, if this is as far as we can go, if I've finally reached the limit of what my fearful dog can do. Is this it?
I can see some small improvements. Unless something pretty dramatic happens, Pongu doesn't break Stays anymore. He doesn't refuse jumps. At Saturday's trial, he knocked a bar and NQ'ed a Level 3 run, but the next two runs when he encountered the same jump, he took it without flinching. A year ago, that knocked bar would have frightened him for weeks (which I know because a knocked bar in class cost us several Qs on jump refusals and runouts in trials days later). This degree of resilience is something he wouldn't have been able to summon then.
But I also see much that isn't improving. I do not have a happy dog in the ring on most runs. Pongu is still worried, still stressed, seldom relaxed. Our scores aren't getting higher. (Actually, when I went back and scrolled through the trial listings, our scores apparently have never gotten higher after, like, last March. What's that about?)
I don't know whether my disappointment is a factor of my increased expectations or whether we really are stalled out. Am I just shifting the goalposts too quickly, or too much? Have we just had a fluke run of bad trials? Or are we genuinely not making any progress here?
I've got no idea. I feel like we're floundering. I hope we're floundering in a generally forward-ish direction, but I have not the foggiest notion whether that is actually true.
Last Sunday we drove up to northern New Jersey for a World Cynosport Rally trial at Kellars Canine Academy.
It went... okay. Not great, not terrible. Pongu was a little out of practice (we hadn't trialed in about a month and we have not been doing a ton of Rally practice at home lately) and seemed a little stressy, so it was not one of our more glorious showings.
I tried crating him inside the trial venue for much of the time, since it was a hot day (86 degrees!) and the parking lot had no shade. With the windows rolled down and a reflector shield in the rear window, the car was tolerable, but I thought Pongu would do better indoors.
That might have been a misjudgment, I don't know. It was hard to tell.
Our scores were pretty meh. 206/207/203, 210/206/193(!! our worst qualifying score in WCRL ever! yesssss). I had some handling errors on both of the Level 3 runs -- I really need to figure out a better way of getting Pongu back into Heel position after the send-over jumps -- but almost all of our deductions were on repeat cues, with a couple of stray 1-point hits for crooked Sits and lags in heeling. The courses had a bunch of moving Downs, and those continue to be a weak point for us when Pongu gets stressy.
He also broke a Stay during the Recall Over Jump by standing up on the last run of the day, which is a mistake we haven't had in a while, and which I view as an indicator that he'd had enough by that point.
So it kinda sucked. Pongu placed in every run except our first Level 1 (a 206 does not get you into the ribbons in Level 1!), but never higher than third. In fact, our average placement for the day was exactly #4, so that is the ribbon I kept (plus the white rosettes are the ones I like best anyhow).
Good things:
-- I mostly got better Heeling off the start line than I have in the past. We had some stretches of quite nice Heeling, in fact. Never consistently for the entire run, or even half of a run, but good enough to make me feel optimistic that we're improving, particularly since Pongu was not on his A game during that trial.
-- it's kind of nice (I guess?) to be in a position where I can look at a 203 in Level 3 and go "JESUS CHRIST THAT IS TERRIBLE WHAT IS GOING ON HERE." This time last year, we were struggling mightily just to scrape together three Qs for our Level 3 title.
Bad things:
-- basically everything else
-- Pongu really, really sucks at working when he's hot.
Overall, not a super fantastic day for us, although it was nice to see friends and the KCA crew is always great. We'll try again next weekend, and then we have one more WCRL trial in June before Pongu goes on hiatus until August.
On Friday, Queenie met up with her prospective adopters and canine housemates for some pre-visit introductions. Neither of the resident dogs in her proposed new home was immediately thrilled with her, but at least they didn't react with spittle-flinging rage, either. She went home for a trial sleepover, and I spent the next couple of days with my fingers tightly crossed. While I had a certain amount of faith in Queenie's good nature and house manners, she was going into a situation with a couple of new variables -- the resident dogs in the adoptive home were female and smaller than she was, as opposed to the all-boys crew here -- so I couldn't be completely sure that I knew exactly how she would react.
But it went well! Monday morning I woke up to find an email announcing that her prospective adopters wanted to knock the "prospective" out of that description. Hooray!
I was particularly happy about this adoption for a couple of reasons:
First, the adopters had recently had a bad experience with a shelter dog that was not disclosed as being dog-aggressive prior to adoption. The aggression was a dealbreaker, and they'd been forced to return the dog. (To be fair, the shelter staff may not have known the dog had problems with other dogs. It's often hard to differentiate reactivity and even outright aggression from the general stress and overarousal that can be a constant problem, even for "normal" dogs, in kennel environments. But that exact problem is one of the reasons I tend to advocate adopting from a foster-based rescue rather than a shelter for most people.)
That sort of experience often turns people off from adopting ever again. Fortunately, these particular adopters were so committed to rescuing a dog that they kept looking even after an experience that would have sent a lot of other people straight to a breeder.
Second, they initially weren't too excited about looking at pittie mixes, but they were open-minded enough to reconsider when they saw how friendly and talented Queenie was. I really liked that. I don't have a problem with people liking or disliking certain breeds (seriously, I don't -- I have my un-favorite breeds too!), but I do have a lot of respect for people who are willing to rethink their opinions in light of new evidence. To me, this is indicative of an emotional flexibility and tolerance that really, really comes in handy down the road with any new dog (and a few old ones!). So I thought that was a promising sign.
Third, they were not only willing but eager to enroll with Queenie in a local training club. Not two days after I relayed my friends' recommendation for the best club in their area, these adopters went to check it out. That, too, made me really happy; I was glad to know that Queenie would get a chance to continue her fun games of learning in her new home.
So that was that! Queenie, newly renamed Agnes, got her happily ever after, and I could not be more excited about where she ended up.
Good luck to you, little dog.
...and now I'm on hiatus from fostering for a while. Pongu's performance at our last Rally trial was not too hot, so clearly we need to spend some more time working on competition stuff, and also I should probably pay some attention to that book I'm supposed to be writing right now.
Hopefully in a day or two I'll have an update about Queenie. She went off on her trial sleepover today, and I've got my fingers crossed real hard that it all works out.
