We hope everyone was able to celebrate the Fourth in their favorite manner.  We humans spent the majority of the day in the pool, while Ray played in his deck jets for a while before drying off and relaxing in the air conditioned house with a good bone.

After which he engaged in some serious sofa sleeping followed by dinner.  Despite the drought we are experiencing, our town still engaged in a fireworks display.  Well before the fireworks began, I tucked Ray into his crate for the evening with his favorite stuffies, blinds closed and blanket over the top for a nice safe cozy spot.  The whole family was in bed well before fireworks started.

How did you spend your day?

Ray wanted to share a little bit about his weekend, so he will be taking over posting today.

Enjoy the beginning of the Dog Days of Summer.  Keep cool, everyone!

What an amazing week last we had!  Well, actually it took a few days to really get into a groove, but the walks have gotten so much better and on Sunday something slightly amazing happened.
We were walking around the block when a little black fluffy-dog-thing came rushing up to us, barking and full out annoying.  It stayed out of reach, thankfully, and Ray was straining at the leash, jumping and wanting to play.  Finally the owner sauntered over and started calling her dog.  It went like this: she stood about five feet away, called her dog and then turned her back to walk away.  Rinse and repeat three times.  My heart was pounding and I was trying to get Ray to walk away while she finally got her dog to leave, giggled a “sorry.”  Then when they finally left, Ray and I went a few more feet and then … I believe he settled himself.  We walked to the other side of a parked car and Ray sat.  I got him into “down” and gave him a couple of treats and lavishly praised him for the time out before we set off again.  A similar type of settling also happened later that evening which is great.

The problem is settling and not jumping are huge obstacles for us and though this was a step in the right direction we still deal with it too often.  There’s a point at which Ray gets too wound up and though I try to avoid getting to that point, it still happens and it is disheartening.  There’s a mixture of too much puppiness still with some attitude and topped off with a dash of stubbornness and when that happens, it is upsetting.  I want to make sure he doesn’t jump and nip and sometimes he is very sensitive and eager to please and other times he is the Honey Badger and he just don’t give a shit.  I’m thinking about some individualized classes but the mindset is almost that I’d have to get him wound up just to teach him to settle.  Seems counterproductive. 

Do you have or have you encountered similar issues?  How did you deal with them?

I hate to state the obvious, but practice makes perfect things really good.  No one and nothing can be perfect, but with hard work and constant practice, things go in the right direction.

As I wrote before, I get nervous leash walking with Ray even though he is generally good.  The part aside from the ‘generally good’ is what worries me.  When he gets too tired or too stimulated things degenerate to where I just want to run away from him and hide or lob him  into tomorrow or something like that.  It’s still way better than before when he was just a three month old jumping shark mouth attached to a springy body. 

Sometimes it takes a determined refocus for me to get back to the basics.  One, we need to practice and train every day, even if it is just squeezing in a few basic commands in the morning and brushing up on rusty skills.  I’ve been making  a concious effort of having  Ray sit to have his leash attached and using every leash walk as a training opportunity.  That one is hard since all of his outside interactions have to be on leash while the yard is torn up and the fence is down. 

On today’s walk, we did really well in that there was minimal pulling and he refocused and checked in often. 

That leash looks taut, but wasn’t…yay!  

He even went out with Asia and she said he did wonderfully well.  That gave me so much confidence that we went out for an evening walk nearby.  The traffic stimulated him enough that I turned it into a walk around the block, but even so he did really well.  Go Ray! 

Now tonight he did something I’ve never seen him do before…he left the room I was in and went to lay down by himself.

We will definitely be incorporating more walks into our daily routine!

I’m not sure what kind of time table I was imagining but it certainly wasn’t like this.  Day One of the pool install went from this:

To this:

In less than six hours.

Of course Ray was wondering why if he is not allowed to dig holes in the yard, why are these strangers allowed to? 

Naturally, Ray being an awesome digger, well on his way to the hole olympics, he felt highly confident that he could dig a hole of this magnitude without the crutch of using heavy equipment.

While the yard is under construction, we are working hard to find ways in which to occupy Ray and also to get him some exercise.  Walks, of course, are going to be the order of the day which makes me slightly panic-y excited to practice our on leash walking.  I will be on vacation this week for the first week of install, so we should get plenty of practice in.
As for keeping him occupied while inside and directing his attention away from the loud noise of the heavy machinery out back, we’d like to thank Emily from Our Waldo Bungie for turning us on to these Chew Gourmet Bones. 

I’d say he likes it.