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Obedience Class for Dogs

Hayduke went through a puppy kindergarten this past spring (Blue Sky Dogs) with flying colors, though with perhaps a little bit too much enthusiasm.  We took the class from Colleen who runs a pet shop on Cantrell Road, and it was worth every penny and every minute we spent.

For his beginning obedience class, we switched to the Little Rock Dog Training Club.  They have a much more extensive lineup of courses for people who want to show their dogs, but we thought that many of the skills involved would translate well to just having a good, obedient, reliable family hiking dog.

Boy, were we wrong.  What a waste of time and money!  We spent nearly eight weeks relearning all the things we already knew from puppy kindergarten, except that we spent time to learn them in a snooty, dog-show way.

Hayduke had already learned that when I say “sit”, he should put his butt on the ground.  He’s very good at it.  Sit.  Butt. Ground.  Good sit.  NOT a good sit, according to the snooty dog show people.  He should sit THIS way, doing THIS, and not do THAT.  Hayduke wasn’t interested, and I wasn’t either.  He’d sit sideways, or stick his leg out, or lean on me.  He and I were both so grumpy about the ‘new rules’ that I really believe he started sitting wrong on purpose.  In fact, when he’d occasionally get it exactly right, he’d realize it and get up and sit again, pointing backward.

When we practiced ‘recall’, I’d call him from across the room.  “Hayduke, COME!” I’d say in a happy, excited voice, and he’d run as fast as he could straight to me.  But was this correct?  No, it was NOT.  I was supposed to say it sternly, in a voice of authority.  “Hayduke, COME”, in a frowny loud tone.  I pointed out that the students who said it this way had dogs who walked slowly to them, or ignored them completely, or wandered off to someone else.  Mine was the only dog in the class who actually appeared to want to mind his human.

Most of the class was completely impractical pickiness and time spent fiddling with skills already learned.  We were both disinterested and frustrated.  I had to invent games for Hayduke to play or he’d get bored waiting on other dogs to do things perfectly.

Ugh.  We finished our class, and we got our certificate (that’s it, up top), and phooey on them.  We’re not going back.

 

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Arky 100 2011

We try to support the Arkansas Bicycle Club’s annual fundraising ride, the Joe Weber Arky 100, either by riding or volunteering to help.  It starts and ends in Sheridan, which is about a half hour from our house.  As we’ve done in the past, we drove down the night before, ate with cycling friends, and spent the night in tents behind the small-town community center.

Up early, we helped around the registration a bit and got Mandy started – she’d decided to ride the metric century with our friend Kathy.  Her husband left in his ‘sag wagon’ with their dog and ours.  And Bryan and I loaded up the supplies for Rest Stop 2 and headed for Poyen.

We arrived at our spot just after eight, set up to feed and provide drinks for nearly two hundred riders – fruit, cereal bars, hot and cold drinks, oatmeal, and – the crowd favorite – tiny pbj sandwiches.  By eleven we’d fed everyone, cheered up the stragglers, reloaded the Subaru, and arrived at Rest Stop 5 to visit with friends before heading to the finish line to wait for Mandy.

She bailed at the 50 mile mark and caught the sag wagon in with Jim Britt.  It was disappointing, but not too bad considering that she hadn’t ridden much at all since our summer vacation.  After a couple of finish-line hot dogs, she felt better enough to get her unicycle out of the car to entertain the people still left in the picnic shelter.

Kathy finished the 62 mile course feeling good and decided, after a bite to eat, that she’d just ride home.  The extra afternoon mileage meant that she met one of her big goals today – her first “century”, or 100-mile ride. Congratulations my friend and thanks for sending “photographic proof” as shown below!

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Lake Catherine

Sometimes the best places are the ones close by.  We wanted a quick, low-mileage weekend camp-out and hike, so we drove to Lake Catherine, near Hot Springs.  Why haven’t we been there before?  Probably because it’s only thirty minutes away.

It was a pleasant campground with some walk-in sites, so that we didn’t have to cope with neighbors close by.  We enjoyed walking around the camping area early the next morning and and exploring the short dayhiking trails later in the day.

Funny that such a pleasant state park’s practically in our backyard, but we’d never been there before.  There’s no doubt we’ll be back soon, though, for another visit.

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Traffic Safety 101

Now that I’m on the city’s Bicycle Friendly Community Committee, I’m really trying to practice what the League of American Bicyclists preaches in terms of exercising the right to ride a bike on the road, while understanding the responsibilities cyclists have to keep ourselves and others safe.  I hadn’t taken the League’s traffic safety course in quite awhile, and Mandy’s never taken it, so we decided to enroll in the September group.

Only one other student participated.  Our teachers were Tom and Brad.  Mandy learned a lot, and my memory was refreshed.  I think putting time and effort into this sort of thing is well worth it for everybody involved.

After the riding part of class concluded on Saturday, our class met up with Mitch and his kids for a bike-and-unicycle lunch at the Rivermarket, and we rode around downtown for awhile.  The area around the Rivermarket is such fun for unicycling, with lots of paths and bridges and people to look impressed by dads and their kids riding along on one wheel as if it’s the easiest thing in the world.

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North Georgia

Our friends Adam and Amy live in Georgia.  We keep in touch online but hadn’t spent the weekend together since before Bryan and I were married, and before their daughter Maddie was born.  Maddie’s three now, and another baby’s on the way.  We decided it was time for another getaway weekend.  Since it’s easier for us to travel, they chose a cabin in the north Georgia woods.


The boys worked on some minor photography projects, though since Amy spent part of the weekend feeling yucky, we didn’t do the family pictures we’d been planning.  We made a few side trips to visit hiking areas and waterfalls nearby.  I think the biggest accomplishment of the weekend may have been figuring out how to drive AROUND (rather than through) the horrible tourist trap town of Helen, GA.

Predictably, all the tourist areas were mobbed with people on a three-day holiday weekend. The viewing deck at this pretty waterfall was so crammed with people we could barely get onto it.  Bryan’s magical postprocessing mashup* of several exposures makes it look like a peaceful scene.

We also hiked to the top of Brasstown Bald, the highest point in Georgia.  It was a wide, pleasant trail with a great view from the visitors’ center built at the top.

We enjoyed spending a weekend in a comfy cabin in the woods catching up with Adam, Amy, and Maddie.  Thanks, friends!

* Take lots of photos, layer them in Photoshop, mask out the people so they disappear and VOILA! Serenity in memory if not in the moment. –Bryan

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Bike Commuting

I’ve been wanting to try bike commuting.  From our house to my office is about seventeen miles, none of it particularly friendly to cyclists.  I don’t have the option of using a nice separated bike lane or path – it’s either the interstate service road or a busy 2-lane highway with fairly narrow shoulders.  Could I ride the whole way?  Could I drive partway and ride the rest?  Could I combine riding a bike and riding the bus?  I’ve spent the last month or so experimenting with multi-modal commuting.  First I tried just using a bike to do errands around our non-bike-friendly town.

Then I tried part-bike commuting: I drove the car partway to work, pulled a bike off the rack, and rode the rest of the way.  It was fun and not all that much more time consuming.  But it didn’t accomplish a lot – I was still putting a lot of miles on the car.

Then I tried driving to the closest bus stop – about eleven miles from the house – and taking the bus the rest of the way to work.  I thought the bus was fun, but it wasn’t saving any money, and it was using up a lot of time.

Then I tried riding the eleven miles to the bus stop, riding the bus to work, and then reversing that to come home.  This was the cheapest, and the most fun, but also the most time consuming – I was leaving at six to be ready for work at eight.  In the evening, I’d leave work before five but wouldn’t get home until after seven.  I was having a great time, but I was never home, and the housework was behind, and Bryan and I missed each other.

So now I’m back to driving all the way to work again.  In just a few weeks of fiddling with my commute, I learned a lot – I’m stronger now, and much better at coping with traffic.  I understand how to read the city bus schedules and route maps, and how to use the bike racks on the front of each bus.  And maybe most importantly, I know I CAN commute without a car – I can get myself from home in the suburbs to work in town, every day, for several days in a row, and have fun doing it.

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2 Rivers Bridge Dedication

The bike infrastructure and culture here is very strange.  Lopsided.  Great, and also terrible.

Cycling for recreation has become an accepted thing in the Little Rock area, I think.  Mountain bikers have lots of great trails in Little Rock and the surrounding counties.  Lycra-clad pavement cyclists whiz up and down the much-celebrated River Trail,but even it isn’t really finished – the signage is unclear, and parts of the trail have cyclists traveling on busy streets, or on narrow shoulders.  Years-long calls to “close the loop” are still being met with opposition from taxpayers and businesses in the city.

Cycling for transportation and utility is viewed as the province of the drunken and/or homeless.  Not many people care about interconnected trail networks or even safe bike lanes for people who actually want to GO SOMEWHERE on bicycles. Little Rock has yet to adopt a real ‘complete streets’ policy.In a city like this, would you expect to see THREE DIFFERENT dedicated bike/pedestrian bridges?  No, you would not.  But the county government supports cycling, even if the city government is halfhearted.  And so we have the Big Dam Bridge, the longest purpose-built bike/ped bridge in the US.  After much foot-dragging, the Rock Island bridge (AKA the stupidly named “Clinton Park Bridge”) is now being repaired and adapted for dedicated bike/ped use by the Clinton Foundation, as part of the park surrounding the museum.

And this week, we attended the dedication of the Two Rivers Park Bridge, spanning the Little Maumelle River to connect the west LR River Trail to Two Rivers Park.  It’s full of deer and other wildlife, and for years has been a community garden spot as well.  From the park, cyclists can ride low-traffic, paved county roads out past Maumelle Park, Pinnacle Mountain, and the quiet highways around the lake and up into the Ouachitas.

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Diamond Bear

Diamond Bear Brewery doesn’t have more than three or four employees, so when it’s time to bottle they call in their part-timers and put out an email asking for volunteers to help with the bottling line.  I’ve been on the email list for about a year, but they almost always bottle on weekday afternoons, which makes it hard for us to participate.

But this week they put out a call for volunteers for Friday evening, and Bryan and I snapped up the first two spots.  The bottling was rescheduled for Sunday afternoon at one, which was also fine. Continue reading “Diamond Bear”

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Goodbye, Fencing

We took fencing lessons from the local club (Central Arkansas Fencing Club) for about a year.  It was neat to learn the basics of a sport not many people know about.  We looked cute in our fencing gear.  We had fun stabbing at each other.  But fencing was expensive, in terms of time and energy as well as cash for club dues.  There were some details about the structure of the club that we found really frustrating.  We weren’t learning a lot.  And after a year, we all agreed that it just wasn’t worth it.

This weekend, we got out the gear and washed it and will send a for-sale flyer to the club.

Update: We managed to sell all of our gear!  Thanks for your inquiries.