Beans, Beans the Magical Fruit

I was supposed to have this week off. The training center is shut down for the week because of the Thanksgiving Holiday, and I’ve had no seminar or judging commitments. However, I’ve been conscripted to be an emergency substitution judge for a TDAA trial in Medina Ohio this weekend. The scheduled judge, Doreen Lucius has a terrible neck injury and has been forbade to travel by her doctor.

On my return from Montana I’ve had a progressively worsening cold. At first I thought that it was a reaction to spending four days in a horse barn. You know that the ill-kept horse barn surface will harbor all kinds of interesting and invasive dusts and spoor. But by this point it’s very clear that I’ve contracted some sort of cold virus. Marsha went out to buy a selection of cold medicines. And after experimenting with Nyquil and Robitussin I finally found something that actually allows me to sleep… Theraflu. The Theraflu furthermore mixes up into a nice hot drink that is pleasant to take. It strikes me that it would be an interesting marketing twist to give medicine in the form of a hot-buttered rum drink rather than the awful medicine-tasting remedies that we usually are forced to endure.

I asked Doreen for all of her courses so that I wouldn’t have to go through that fire-drill myself. I’ve redesigned all of Doreen’s courses for the weekend, and have added briefings for the game which were absent from the detail that she sent to me. I have a specific comfort level and want to see dogs succeed, while they are appropriately challenged. I suppose I have peculiar ideas about course-design. You’ll have to attend the TDAA trial in Medina this weekend if you want to see the courses.

Anyhow, Marsha has headed off to Parkersburg, WV for three days to enjoy the Thanksgiving holidays with her family. I was supposed to go myself, but the emergency obligation up in Medina has excused me from going along.

Consequently I am enjoying Thanksgiving alone by cooking myself up a pot of beans. Mine is a mixture of black beans and pinto beans. I soak them overnight so that they are ready to cook. And then I cook them on a low heat for four hours. I include in the mix a modest tsp of salt, a bit of paprika, a diced wedge of onion, a couple smashed cloves of garlic, a couple pork hocks, and some chopped up celery. I also threw in a quart of tomato sauce out of my own garden that was jazzed up with bell peppers, yellow hots, and jalapenos. One should only add any tomato product to beans after two hours of cooking. If the tomato is added too early there is a chemical reaction which will cause all the beans to have a hard core and not be sufficiently mushy. My litmus is to add the tomato when you can blow on a spoonful of beans out of the pot and the skin will curl beneath your breath. In the last 15 minutes of cooking I will strain out a cup & a half of beans and mash them with a fork. I put this back into the pot, to thicken the soup. The soup around the beans becomes a favorite part of the dish.

I always make my beans when Marsha is out of town. She does not appreciate them as I do… and appreciates my farting even less.

The Lesson Plan Recyclery

For the past eight weeks I have resorted to recycled lesson plans. Because I have been so busy, it was easier to pull out old lesson plans than to create new. Some of them were quite old, and reminded me of what I’ve learned over the years. For example, when you design a lesson plan it should be clever enough for all of the sequences for a working group to begin pretty much in the same area. If the sequences start at varying places around the floor, then you’ve got to move your students between sequences. Just moving them around consumes time that could be spent in training and running the sequences.

It is really quite fun to run games that we played five years ago, or eight. I have these wonderful feelings of déjà vu as I remember how a competition in league play went so many years ago. And then to get to run them again is positively delightful.

I also get this feeling of jamais vu[1], as in, what could I have been thinking, when looking at some of my old lesson plans. The most glaring example is a lesson plan in which we calibrate the speed of the dog to arrive at a paces per second (PPS) understanding of how the dog works. The sequences that I put up were entirely too technical to arrive at a good understanding of the dog’s working speed. The reason the handler wants to know the dog’s working speed (or PPS) is to make a reasonable measurement of what the dog can do in a gambler’s class so that the handler can arrive at the beginning of the gamble in a timely manner. Well, the handler is not likely to adopt a sequence that is overly technical in order to get the best speed out of the dog. When I taught the lesson plan early in the week I softened all of the sequences. I should have left that advice for my instructors who taught through the end of the week as I skipped out of town for one of my many obligations because they remained entirely too faithful to the lesson plan.

One of my favorites was the lesson plan we used last week. I’ll share the league play game with you here:

Week Eight – Standard Course JFF Rules

Briefing

This is a standard course judged under JFF rules. There is no standard course time. Faults include:

• Wrong course (however unlikely) 5 faults

• Dropped bars 5 faults

• Missed contact 5 faults

• Failure to perform 20 faults

• Refusals are not faulted

• No faults in the weave poles. Any error must be fixed to avoid failure fault

The sequence shown in the lower right corner was a lot of fun in class. Marsha stepped up and basically threw out the lesson plan to use the sequence as an opportunity to teach and demonstrate certain laws of movement that we fondly desire for our students to understand. Marsha is a great teacher in agility. I believe that she could be a great seminarist out in the world, having a canny understanding of teaching both dogs and handlers. Because nearly all of her dogs are rescues she’ll probably never be a famous smart-aleck and so one of the great teachers of our age languishes in obscurity.

When someone first looks at the line of jumps surrounded by inviting tunnels, they must wonder how in the heck are they going to keep the dog out of the tunnels, should they want to work straight through on the jumps alone. Essential to our teaching is that movement conveys direction and motive to the dog. In this sequence the handler merely should take an adequate[2] lead-out before releasing the dog and then move with best speed and confidence to convey the straight line to the dog.

This sequence allows us to test the idea of the handler working at a distance from the dog in a parallel path. It is positively amazing how often this will work for all manner of dogs. The dog that is most likely to fail is the very novice dog that has not been taught his job or the experienced dog that has been carefully conditioned to be suspicious when the handler isn’t glued against him in a Velcro attachment.

The parallel-path lead-out is something that I teach my own students, and will teach in seminar work. It is very unusual these days, when more people have been taught to do the poseur’s lead-out… you know the one I mean… the handler leads out forward of the dog, comes to a stop, faces the wrong direction, and assumes a heroic posture. But what if, just what if, the control position of the challenge for which the handler needs position is 10 paces to the right of the landing side of jump #3? In that case, the poseur’s lead-out accomplishes absolutely nothing, except to gratuitously add risk to the start of the course.

Now, what if the handler actually wants the dog to go into a pipe tunnel?

In this sequence (there was actually more to it) the handler takes his lead-out, accelerating as he moves away… that’s the part shown by the solid line for the handler. Then, the handler slows down, coming nearly to a stop… shown by the dashed line for the handler. To demonstrate that this has little to do with the handler’s arms… or with the handler turning, Marsha forbade her students from using their arms to turn the dog, or from actually turning to address the tunnel. Again, it was an amazing thing as dogs immediately interpreted the slowing of the handler and curled naturally into the correct entry to the pipe tunnel.

By the way, it’s proper to note that the foundation for this understanding of how a dog interprets changes in the handler’s speed was carefully documented by Patti Hatfield-Mah in a series of articles (Clean Run Magazine, May June July of 1995 if I remember correctly) that are today loosely remembered as the City-driving / Country-driving articles. It is incredible to me today that so few people have been introduced to this important teaching.

Firefox

Okay, I have downloaded Mozilla Firefox and installed it as my default internet browser. If I understand the blog posts on Eric’s Agility Vision correctly it was my pop-up blocker that was keeping me from inserting graphics into my web log over the past two months. In a moment I’ll put it to the test.

I am also suspicious of the Norton protection schemes on my computer. Norton is way too intrusive. I’m seriously considering switching to Avast!, a far less intrusive virus protection suite. Don’t take this to mean that I am anti-Symantec. Some of my best friends are Jews.

I also need to finish loading my new computer and Marsha’s. We’ve purchased two of the most powerful computers that are available given today’s technology. I’m especially interested in doing some video editing.