Udo, walk in the woods, clicker session

My day has improved immensely. I went home and took a short nap and then went and did some fieldwork. I was able to take my dog Udo [Udo is an 11 month old German shepherd] with me to do the fieldwork and that always makes things fun. The site is about an hour away and is up in the foothills of the Sierra's at approximately 2,000 ft. The site is fairly disturbed in places--it is adjacent to a mining site and most of the lowlands have concrete and rubble piles. People have dumped trash on parts of it as well (very odd to be walking through pine duff and suddenly stumble on 1,000sq ft of carpet remnants. The rest of the site though is classic ponderosa pine woodland along with some lovely drainages, chaparral and ponds--very fun to walking. Udo had a blast running around. He was very unsure about quail though :) He cracked me up every time we got near a bush with quail in it, his hackles would raise up and he got very nervous. He took it like a trooper though and as soon as I got there he relaxed and walked past.

The trip made me realize how infrequently I take him to totally new places. I think that I'll try and start making Saturday's a hiking day and take him with me to some new areas. Sunday (sober) can be reserved for disc golf.

When we got back to the office, he was being a spaz for awhile. Sandy had her dogs at the office as well, so we let Scooter and Udo play for awhile. Scooter is an adult female Australian cattledog and hadn't seen Udo since he was a little puppy. She wasn't quite sure about Udo now--he was rather large for her. We had to do some calming signals and space management to get her relaxed a bit (giving her an out, having Sandy stand rather than sit [Scooter started guarding Sandy], and having Udo lay down). Udo finally won her over and they had quite a nice little play session.

Speaking of Udo, I've gotten more jazzed about doing clicker training with him and have been doing sessions in the evenings. A couple nights ago we had an interesting session. Now that I'm clicking for a lot of different things, he suddenly seems to understand that he might get rewarded for other things than sitting, downing, and waving. He started throwing all sorts of behaviors---it was quite fun. I was trying to teach him to bow and I clicked the beginnings of it many times. It was interesting because he would start bowing several times in a row and then suddenly stop and start throwing other behaviors or just sit. I saw what another CS subscriber described--starting to throw calming signals in the middle of a session. You could just see how hard he had to work. I would stop the training session at that point and let him relax for a bit. Later, I was clicking him for turning his head to the left. I was working towards a left spin (he already spins right). It was really odd because he seemed to understand that it was the head turn getting clicked--he'd throw the behavior 6 or 7 times in a row and then suddenly he'd just stop and lay down (again, I'd tell him he was good and throw some treats out and end the session if he started throwing calming signals.) This seemed different than what I see when he's experimenting to see what is being rewarded. It is almost like his brain just got full and was overloaded. It will be interesting to see what he does during the next session.

marriage

I still feel really bad about yesterday. Having G make sure to let me know where he is has been a big issue for me. Background: G and I have been married for almost 6 years. This November will be our 6th anniversary. We have had a fairly uneventful marriage thus far. We get along well, we rarely fight, etc and so forth. This year has actually been one of the hardest so far. We've both just been going through some weird funks. Recurringly, our main issues are money (big surprise) and G's smoking and not calling when staying out late. I have issues with needing to know where people are because I get very worried that people are dead (my mother died suddenly when I was 23 and my mom's best friend was killed in a car accident--I never think people are late--I think they are dead).

So, me not calling last night was unexcuseable. I also was out with a group of our male friends and G (Mr. Non-jealous Himself--normally) had just had issues last weekend about me flirting too much with these guys.

There are other issues here that I need to think about....
  ¶ 3:25 PM