It's About Time

The past few weeks have been filled with technical mishaps. I've learned some lessons the hard way.
Chatting with a friend on Facebook, my screen suddenly froze. Unable to get things moving again, I shut down the computer and restarted. Instead of the usual pictures and welcome greeting, I got "disk read error". Eek. Off to the computer specialist, who pronounced my hard drive dead. So dead he couldn't retrieve any data.
No problem, or so I thought.
I'd faithfully backed up all my work files. All of THAT stuff was completely fine. What didn't even occur to me to back up were all my pictures. Lost are all of Pinch and Moto's puppy pictures. I am sick at heart about this. Those you can never retrieve. I do have SOME pictures, thankfully posted here on the blog and on Facebook. But everything else is gone. So, hopefully you'll read this and have the forethought to back up the little things in your computer.
Speaking of lessons learned, I also learned something important with all the tornadoes we've had this Spring. In addition to putting a bucket and toilet paper in the bomb shelter, important documents and pictures are now safeguarded. All irreplaceable should disaster strike.
But I digress. Back to the dead computer. Hubby let me have free access to his, but he has this weird ergonomic keyboard that has humps to rest your palms on and angled so as to help relieve carpal tunnel. I cannot type on that thing. The computer guy gave me a hard drive so I'd have basic computer capabilities back at home. I can do stuff like blog online just fine, but anything fancy like picture editing or even looking at pictures is a test of patience. But hey it's free so I won't complain.
Then I realized I hadn't been getting many phone calls. Turns out the battery in my cell phone died. Once THAT was fixed, I was embarassed to find out I'd missed quite a few phone calls, some of them of relative importance. Again, Eek.
We cannot afford a new computer. I'd love a fancy new phone, too, but that is out of our reach financially also. So I'm saving up like crazy. First, a new computer, probably a laptop. Then a phone.
Some good news too: my daughter doesn't need heart surgery! Should be dancing and jumping about with joy but relief and finally giving in to exhaustion is what happened. I'm still needing sleep but it's getting better.
With the advent of "getting back to Normal", I didn't realize how much of my life had been put on hold. It's been that way for almost 2 years. First the car accident kept me from making plans. Then Barry's illness. Then Kim's dangerous pregnancy and Ella's precarious health. Then, my daughter's health. Our family didn't dare plan anything as we may need to race to be at my sister's, or my daughter's side at any given moment.
But now we are blessed with normal. Didn't realize how precious a gift Normal is. So the first plans in many years are being drawn up: my daughter and sister will come here to visit. Laurie my friend can come to visit. I can plan to go see my family for a happy reason. What a luxury!
Everything seems heightened, too. I feel so alive and experience giddy joy in every weather moment - awe at the wind, feeling the humidity, listening to the spring sounds of chirping frogs and the beauty of fireflies. I seem to notice the veins in the leaves and color contrasts in clouds.
Although it's been a really rough couple of years we've received yet another gift: realizing an ordinary day is the most wonderful day of your life.

Obedience Could Be A PBS Documentary

Just got back from a four-day Obedience Camp with Pinch and Moto. As always it was perfectly wonderful, filled with lectures, discussions, and floor time to try out what we had just learned. All of us attendees listened with interest as Gary and Kathy spoke and the questions were frequent and lively.
There's been lots of discussion about the sport of Obedience dying but it sure wasn't apparent for those of us in the room those four days.
While it's been discussed ad nauseum on many lists about the hows and why's of bringing the sport back into the public eye to generate interest, we have to be honest here:

Obedience, to a non-obedience enthusiast, is boring to watch. Other doggie venues such as Agility and Flyball are thrilling to watch, and easy to understand. Obedience is highly technical and the fine points are simply lost to the public eye.

But wait! There are so many reality shows out there. As we were at camp, I began mentally putting together a mini-documentary about Obedience. The room was full of good character studies: there was a Novice A person with their first dog; another very accomplished OTCH handler with what is considered an Unlikely Breed to do well in Obedience; another who had not only switched to a new, bigger and entirely different breed; a newbie who had a talented dog and big dreams; and of course our wonderful teachers Gary and Kathy. Wouldn't it be fun to follow these people from this point forward - say the Novice A person's journey to their first time into the ring, and the others on their journey?

What makes Obedience so special? Here's why it is for me: virtually nothing the dog does in the ring comes by naturally to them. The level of technical effort involved in getting high scores requires a tremendous time commitment for the trainer and great effort from the dog. Which is why many of us are blubbering idiots when we do well. You cannot talk to your dog of bring treats into the ring. While performing you cannot even touch your dog. So why does the dog do it? Because of the bond you have established with them. Any dog with a title behind it has hundreds of hours of training, exciting highs, and some tears and dark moments too.

It is interesting to note in one of our groups discussions that the vast majority of us are quite detail-oriented. So much so that we keep spreadsheets on our dog's progress. So, are Obedience people the "nerds" of the dog world? Mind you, I think nerds are cool people and let's face it, nerds are pretty darned successful in the business sector.

So perhaps if we made it personal like a documentary and followed some dog-human teams in a cross-section of the country and various levels of proficiency, it might generate some interest to the public out there.

Whether it does or not, I sure had fun putting it together in my nighttime thoughts.