Elma

This little cutie is Elma. We're puppy sitting her while her raiser recuperates from a fall injury. She's an adorable bundle of energy. Elma is a Dutch/Grove puppy born August 9 of this year. Interestingly, we've only located 1 other puppy in this litter. Can anyone help us find the Dutch/Grove litter? Elma's raiser raised Grove and has asked about finding the other puppies.

Tonight Ryan, Lyn and I celebrated Keri's birthday at Salvador Molly's in Portland. This is a wonderful restaurant with food inspired by world cuisine that is home to the Balls of Fire - Habanero fritters - the famous fritters where if you eat 5 fritters plus the Habanero salsa in 5 minutes you get your picture taken and it joins the Wall of Flame collection of people who have survived the experience. Ryan ate one fritter once and he said it burned for 20 minutes. I passed, but a man at the table next to us ordered and we all watched to see if fire would come out of his mouth. The food was delicious. I had Jerk Chicken (really half a cornish game hen), peas and rice, corn fritters, and spinach side salad. We split 2 orders of coconut/pineapple bread pudding with a vanilla sauce. Yum. I definitely want to go back there.

Ardella and Annalynn worked with Cathie Laber on Friday and Cathie did an amazing job considering that Ardella and Annalynn are not working on identical issues. For Ardella, I'm interested in helping her cope with dogs in the neighborhood who may be off leash or a little aggressive towards her. The issue isn't so much teaching Ardella what to do as to teach me what to do. We worked on having a loose leash to prevent posturing (which can lead to a dog attacking another, and also is a sign of developing leash aggression), sitting to keep the tail up and out of a "scorpion" position, and observing Ardella using calming signals to let other dogs know she isn't interested in them. It was very interesting. She did everything I read about in the book Calming Signals and I really had thought she was not able to use these signals. She uses them very well. Cathie said there really isn't a manual of one technique to use when encountering aggressive dogs. It's a matter of me being able to read the dog's language and to take the leader role and take action. We went to Karren's house for this first session, but the next session we'll meet at my house and work more with Ardella in her own environment.

Ardella did another great job at agility today. She tackled the A-frame and dog walk amazingly well. The see-saw about did her in, but that was her first station and her confidence rose with each successive station. She loves the chute and will go down it when I'm not closely watching her.

I finished The Owl Killers and think that is one of my favorite books for 2009. I liked it so much I bought it for Keri as a birthday gift.