Day four

[altivo]

First, here's a photo from last night at the obedience class. (Click thumbnail for larger view.) Red is working on his down stay with Gary. He's actually getting quite good at this, but the goal for the class is 15 minutes without moving. We used to have to leave the room while the instructor watched the dogs and walked around them bouncing a ball or dragging a pull toy, but I don't know whether this instructor is so demanding.


I spent much of the day working on getting that new warp on the loom. As I mentioned before, it calls for 354 individual threads, laid out at 12 per inch for a total width of 14.75 inches. This is 10/2 cotton, just a little thicker than heavy sewing thread, so one has to handle it with care and planning to avoid tangles or knots. Each of those 48 bobbins on the rack had to be wound separately with 425 feet of thread. That part is done, and I hope my counter was accurate. Tomorrow the warp will be wound onto the back beam of the loom, two inches at a time (48 threads in each step.) There will be 19 yards distributed to each section. Then the threading begins...


We got about 4 inches of snow, coming down continuously from early morning until sunset. That brought a lot of birds to the feeders in the yard, and we had five or six cardinals at a time but I never had a camera handy to capture them. At least it was warm enough that we didn't have to keep the wood stove going.

Comments

[shadow_stallion]

I remember mom taking one of our dogs through obedience training like that. Supposedly he got to the point you could leave him in the middle of a busy mall and he would stay right there until you came back to get him. That was the theory anyway, I'm not sure if they ever tried it.

We're quite content if Niko will just sit at the edge of the kitchen and not pace back and forth through it while we are trying to cook. :P

[altivo]

A lot of obedience stuff is strictly for show, like telling the dog to jump over something and he does it. There are a few commands though that I consider infinitely valuable. Come when called, instantly and unquestioningly is one of those. The stay is another, whether at sit or lying down. Even if you move out of sight, the dog should stay put for a decent length of time, at least ten minutes and preferably more. Leave it or drop it is also very useful and could be a life saver. The last one, which is difficult to teach but certainly worth the effort, is the immediate down. So if you've called your dog and he's running toward you, you can shout "Drop" or "Down" and he obeys, right where he is. Imagine the dog running toward you across a hunter's line of fire or from the other side of a road with a vehicle coming (or a railroad track?) and you can see how useful that would be. Our dog Tee learned it. Fortunately we never had to use it except to show off, but it might have saved his life.