One of my students, Vicki Davis, identified to me a nice crop of Poke greens alongside my training building. Apparently the interesting Poke plant is an opportunistic kind of weed that seeks out bare earth with little competition. And so the fringes of recent construction are ideal for the emergence of the plant.

A fella called me once a “Tree Hugger” because I am a vociferous advocate of the environment (and one of the reasons you’ll note, that I don’t much like the Republican Party). While I was transplanting young trees the other day… I pretty much decided that anyone who uses the expression “Tree Hugger” as some kind of condemnation or invective is pretty much an imbecile. And frankly that got me going on another notion. Every now and again I’ll use a word that maybe I’ve known and used all my life and it dawns on me suddenly that I’ve never bothered to investigate what it means.

Today my curriculum design requirements have changed in fairly dramatic fashion. We no longer do weekly classes, favoring instead a twice-monthly mini-clinic format. The chief difference is that the equipment is not locked into a specific set (where it must remain all week). Indeed, for a four hour mini-clinic the equipment really needs to be rearranged and in some cases pieces substituted. While it may be true that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, if you don’t actually change anything it will become painfully evident after a short while that you are skinning the same cat, over and over again.

On Friday evening when I was stranded at the Cincinnati airport on account of weather and so forth I ran into USDAA judge Lois Mark who was also traveling to Chicago to serve as Masters judge for Contact Sports Agility. Lois is a well respected judge in the USDAA judging corps. Lois, if you ever get a couple beers in her, does an incredible impression of the Crocodile Hunter! Now that he is gone, it has probably spoiled her nightclub entertainment career, being a one-trick pony and all.

On April 1, 2008 came the deadline for the TDAA continuing education judges’ exam. The test consists of a written part, mostly multiple choice, and a practical part in which the judge had to design a suite of standard courses for three levels, and two games nested off the standard.

I started writing this on a plane bound for Chicago where I’m schedule to do two days of seminar for Wiggles & Wags and the Eastwoods. Unfortunately the it turned into a screwed up travel day. I only made it as far as Cincinnati where all the flight arrangements fell apart because of both weather and mechanical difficulties. The airlines has put me up in a local Hilton, and I have an 0’dark:30 flight out in the morning to Chicago… so I’ll still arrive at the seminar site in time. The real downside is I’ll be wearing the same underwear tomorrow that I’ve worn all day today… because my bags and clothing are still “with” the airline. And the weather channel is promising snow tomorrow in Chicago even though we’re a good month into Spring. That’s my life.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been thinking a lot on the precarious world of the dog trainer. We each of us know that either we are endowed with bold genius and canny instinct; or we are completely mad and lunatics disconnected from reality.