Spin with a Drop Spindle - wikiHow

Spin with a Drop Spindle - wikiHow

Woo Hoo!

Picture soon...but Emma is now CH Wintercreek Angels Walk!! We won it with 4 majors and 3 Herding group 1's. IN the UKC a "major" means competition at a certain level...placing in the group or getting Best of Winners.

Fergus on the Memorial stones

Un Petite Update

Yes!! We found Mark a puppy. A tricolor sheltie boy with a remarkable temperament, intelligence and structure. He is a little rock, the reincarnation of Abe Lincoln…the bearer of the key. He is Fergus, (primarily Kensil)and just a fabulous little dog. Very likely will go oversize. But this is no matter to an obedience team.


And Emma and I ROCKED the park in Albany the weekend of the UKC English Shepherd Specialty. We got 2 Group 1 s and a Group 3 and are one win away from a UCH….which I find thrilling primarily because it was fun and we did it all ourselves!

September 1 was Emma’s 1st birthday and we took all the dogs, my mother and sister and their 2 paps, to the coast. It was a fabulous beach run…a clear temperate weekday, 7 dogs radiating joy and awe.

My Review of Multi-Cart

CSN Supply

The patented Multi-Cart ingeniously changes shape and length to carry huge amounts of equipment yet fols small for storage. Instant transformation into any of 8 configurations, the Multi-Cart replaces the need for 8 different carts. The revolutionary design results in a moving machine that is ver...

Multi-Cart

Dog Show Cart

woolgatherer Portland OR 8/18/2009

 

4 5

Pros: Can Handle Heavy Loads, Adjustable good on mixed, Maneuvers Well

Cons: Hard to bungee steer

Describe Yourself: Quality Oriented

Primary use: Personal

The biggest problem I have had is that, unlike my other cart, choices for where to anchor bungee cords are limited because the rails are square and or large or underneath the cart. Some welded O rings on the bottom would help.
Also, the handles and wheel placement require that you push the cart rather than pull it unless you want your ankles clipped.

What I like about it is it's adjustable/small footprint, it's ability to manouever mixed terrain and the high handle bar which allows an umbrella.

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Gay

The book that started it all for me... I still own my copy.

Fun with Hair Products

yes...there is another story to tell...coming soon...the 5th dog

Emma and I have been showing in the breed ring and having lots of fun. Since June we’ve been in the ring in Canby, Portland and at the NW specialty shows in Albany for a total of 9 entries.
We’ve won our class every time except for once and in Portland we got Reserve!

What does this mean? Well, it means that I’ve been taking a crash course in grooming shelties, which is a pretty complicated undertaking. I’ve gone from overwhelmed to somewhat competent at the basics: brushing, chalking, and fluffing ruff while smoothing croup. But trimming scares me and I’m very ambivalent about “coloring” beyond chalking.

I’m also learning a lot more about handling than I ever knew before. Luckily, Emm is a natural in the ring, a free stacker, animated and attentive and she makes me look good. I think. At least I feel good on the other end of the lead…Each time we go in is an opportunity to bond, to acclimate, to learn about each other. That’s the fun part.

I’ve had an amazing and generous group of accomplished people helping me and I’m having a great time with them…so it’s all good. For real!

Next weekend we’ll enter a UKC show…where the grooming is much less intensive and where, I understand, they are quite strict about the limits of grooming.

There is little I love more in this world than dogs with titles at both ends….so even though I have no plans…not even remote… to breed Emma, I dream of CH Emma UD…

Talking to Emma

Emma.
Wintercreek Angel’s Walk, officially now. In training in obedience and agility. She is confident, fearless often, intensely curious, willing, active, beautiful, playful. At times in agility she appears to be quite a little pistol…and she learns things at the speed of lightening.
I was teaching her to touch the palm of my hand with her nose, so that when I call her over she will come in close. This keeps her from dancing away from me if I need to catch her.

I watched her think it through.
Is this close enough?
Silence
Is this better?
Nothing
Here? I felt her nose on my palm.
YES! (treat from the other hand.)
And then she did it 3 times in a row.
I switched hands…bingo. She knows it.

She learned the front feet up on the stool so that every time we passed the stool in the barn she hopped up and looked for my response.

This is a conversation we’re having now. It is incredibly gratifying, and full of promise.

Emma and the TTouch Girls

I’ve been keeping a separate blog about Emma’s progress…but an up date is required here…

She is energetic, happy, calm, eager, a little independent, a little blown away by the world, but always steady and never spooky.
She is also into everything, alert to everything and passionate about small farms, so much so that she e fancies the flower garden as a field to be tilled and anything that moves (shovels, wheelbarrows) or comes in groups (gravel, bricks, flats of young plants) as livestock to be herded.

We’ve been going to Ellie’s and 2 weeks ago we started a foundation agility class in a beautiful barn out at the far west edge of Beaverton.
We are learning balance, attention, games, and the feel of the equipment with things like a wobble board and a tunnel of hoops.
Our favorite thing has been learning to tug and we’ve been experimenting with all kinds of tuggable materials. Whatever it is can be instantly enhanced by being tied on to the end of a 4 foot pole and shimmied around.

The class is at night and when we leave the building it is pitch black except for the various glinty bits of the sky and all I can hear are frogs and the bugs of spring. It has that air that is enriched by space and dirt and open vistas…beautiful.

We have fun learning together. She is very fast and is starting to let herself play and be more expressive in the world….although very few people have seen the REAL Emma who is a ringing little dust storm with teeth and springs in her legs.

Each time we go out and learn together we get closer.

This weekend I took a 16-hour TTouch workshop. Tellington Touch was “discovered” when Linda Tellington Jones was working with horses and it is a method of touch with the goal of bringing a body back into balance with itself from various states of imbalance like fear, pain, anxiety, over stimulation. etc. It pretty much addresses almost any problem state of being in a very simple, and highly respectful way. It is also a way of mindfulness for the practitioner…as its success depends on attention and communication.

Day 1 I brought Maudie with the goal of learning to help her seizures and need to recognize that she has a hind end and Day 2 I took Emma. For Emma I want a safe way of touching that will help her relax around human hands. For quite a bit of time in the late morning, she sat in my lap and was gorgeously trusting and cuddly.

It was at OHS and every time I took her out to try and get her to potty (something she has yet to do while on leash) someone would ask if “it was available for adoption.” This kind of depressed me; the idea that she would be and up for grabs to the public most of whom would not have either the sensitivity or knowledge to bring her out and although she might be just fine…she really belongs with me. I suppose it would be like going to a dance with your spouse and although there were plenty of eager partners, everyone kept eyeing yours…
But the workshop was yet another encounter with a revolutionary point of view about being in relationship with animals.
If anyone reads this blog…I would encourage them to give TTouch a look.
In Portland the go to girls are Debby Potts and Lauren McCall at The Integrated Animal. They are very easy to spend hours and hours with: kind, funny, authentic.

5 weeks Later

Emma

A Surprise from Longago

My story is like that of so many others like me. The child fell hard in love with Lassie and with Terhune’s Lad and that love guided the rest of our lives. And even though the object of our affections was not always the collie per se, that vision of human/dog relationship presaged all our futures. Trainers, breeders, handlers, devotees.

I was a purist. Everywhere I went I looked for collies. Sunday drives with my family led us into the country where any green field might reveal a gold and white figure. I read books that held even the vaguest hint of collie talk, including Tess of the D’urbervilles because there was a tiny collie on my cousin’s copy. All I know of kindness, nobility and character was formed in that focus. Mythical, beautiful, possible.


When I got involved with papillons my thought was that they were the smallest in a line of 3: collie, sheltie, papillon. I was convinced that papillons and shelties shared at least one ancestor (and indeed they may have). And that connected them all back to collies. I needed the smaller dog who would fit in my smaller house and smaller car AND be able to fly in the cabin of an airplane with me. I cannot imagine ever being without a papillon. But on my 50th birthday, we added a collie to our household because there was nothing better than to fall headlong into young love again.

But as with all things living, the life story changes as it grows and unfolds in surprising ways.

When I was about 10 I read a book called GAY, a Shetland Sheepdog several dozen times while studiously copying Margaret Johnson’s drawings. (That study was to last well into adulthood, as my library reveals. The great ones are almost as much a part of my mythology as Lad. Peter Pumpkin, Steely Dan, Sea Isle, Pocono, Banchory, …)

One day when I was about 12, I was upstairs in my grandfather’s sitting room listening to records of the Rolling Stones. Ruby Tuesday. The poignancy of the song, the sunless 4pm air and the rain made me feel very very far from everyone. I was alone. I was waiting for someone to come home. And suddenly I had a clear vision of myself walking under the enormous leafy trees, rounding the corner toward that big house on Cotswold Rd….with a sable Shetland Sheepdog. I cannot hear that song or… have you seen her dressed in black… without reliving that moment; it is embedded in the music.

And then suddenly at 51, with collie and papillons, I have a 6-month-old sheltie pup in the house. The story of how she came to be here is one of serendipity and luck, synchronicity, need and timing. She came because we thought we could reboot her confidence and because I had a strong feeling that I knew what had happened to turn this live wire into a flickering bulb. And because she gave us a clear sign of trust.

And here she is. For a week now she’s been here and by day 3 I was hopelessly smitten, plunged down the rabbit hole …moved by her courage and trust and joy. Hungry for the feel of her perfect little skull and the smell of her puppy fur. When her breeder offered her to us we said yes.

When I look at her, I hear Ruby Tuesday and I remember those moments of clear transcendent desire I had as a child. All those hours and weeks, months and years of pleasurable agonizing over which breed to commit to had come to this.

Holding her against my chest this afternoon, her head tucked under my chin I noticed how exactly she fit into my arms, how perfectly she balanced in my lap. It occurred to me that all my life this was what I had wanted…this breed…this magical little collie…as sensitive and loyal as I remain to that image born into the loneliest days of my childhood…

And so it was for that hour this afternoon and so it may be for a long time. But what matters is that we have found each other over miles and years and we can take that walk I envisioned: one foot, then another towards wholeness, on a lonely tree lined street in the rain.

Gayton photo 12/2008

I LOVE this photograph of the Tartanside girls.
It's from John Budie's website.

a day at the beach

The work is a mile high at school: a hiring committee, a lecture on my relationship to art histort, a panel on working as an artist, and 2 classes that overenrolled. M’s birthday was this past weekend and his gift was an overnight at the coast. For me that means many hours of preparation to leave the house in suitable shape with clear instructions for the care of the animals left behind.

But we had a swell time and the cabin we stayed in, right on the ocean, allowed dogs, so Maudie had her first trip to the beach.
We inspired her to a few moments of zooming and then she settled in to walk right beside us, only veering off to inspect the grasses at the edge of the sand for a moment or two before coming back. Like the corgis she insisted on finding a spot inside the grass and way off the beach itself on which to poop…I imagine it’s the same impulse that makes the herding breeds so easy to house train.

We thought of Gussie a lot. It would have been lovely to have him there too, and he would have had a great time. M talked about sitting with him inside his coat on a cold day at the beach. The paps love the beach as well as any other dog…and probably more than Maudie, but Maudie is an ideal traveling companion and measures her joy by how much she brings to us. To see her in that beautiful light was magical.

I have been thinking about breeds in relation to M. I hate the idea of his dropping out of the training world without Gus; I have loved having him be a part of it with me; we could share experiences in conversation as well as in actuality. It was fun to go to shows together and I loved watching him work with Gus in class. He may not be able to work another papillon—which is one response to his loss—and it gives me a chance to dip into the other breeds that HE loves: big poodles, little dachshunds and to think about the way he trains and the temperament and height that might bring him a different kind of engagement than Gus did. Because on Gus’ terms…he would be damn nigh impossible to beat…or match.

There is always the prospect of another collie, a stellar match. Although I am partial to roughs, if it were up to me I’d go for a smooth tri…. because I like smoothes best as tris and because I find the rough coat a little overwhelming. But it wouldn’t be up to me.

snow storm

December 21 2009. the wind was blowing, the snow just kept coming; in the end we had about a foot. On this day we walked down to Gabriel Park for burritos.

missing gus

We’ve stepped into January; the snow melted and turned to rain and it just keeps coming. The yard is soupy and covered with fallen sticks and leaves and the general rot of winter in our moderate climate. Funny thing is that the papillons will go out in it…but Maudie has to be pushed…she just does not like to get wet…Whereas Flynn used to back up in horror at the sight of rain, she now goes mincing out to potty pretty easily; Sonny barrels out and then barrels back in. Maudie looks stricken….

Gus’s absence is strange and deep. There is a clear feeling of being one less; the hole he used to fill is fuzzy and large. I miss his feathery little body curled up next to me, his perfect silky coat cool white and coal black with rusty thumbprints on his brow and cheeks. I even miss that odd smell of metal and spit he gave off these last months. I miss the way he would dance around all bossy and excited to get a cookie or be told how fine and handsome he was while getting a back scratch. I miss the top of his head where the white hairs of his head mingled with the black, and instead of being clearly delineated, they meshed. I miss his upturned bridge and his tiny front teeth. I miss the way his front feet folded when he rolled on his back for a tummy scratch…the fur on his fragile forearm that seemed always to be growing back after being shaved, the bright pink or purple vet tape that held the gauze to the vein that had been punctured for a sample or a tube. The little brown map that was left on the gauze after the tape was rolled off. I even miss how quiet it is when I and the other 3 dogs go to bed. He would already be there with Mark and would get in a snit about us disturbing them.

It’s that physical absence of a dog that is so painful. The feel of them, the smell, the sound conjures tears and an ache of loss. Our relationships are so about being physical and close, touch and smell. We watch them poop, they follow us into the bathroom too. There is no shame; there is just a being in the world together. And when one is gone, certain ease goes with it…a dance partner has bowed out…a team member folded, a comforter gone cold.