jesse so far

Truly, I've had nothing arty to write about and about a million more nature-in-winter photos to post (and, in a moment of weakness, probably will) so I've been avoiding my blog. The only thing I've created in the past three or four weeks (besides a commotion with Rock Band 2) went directly into the recycle bin. On Monday I start working on that mojo relocation project. As for year-end/beginning reflections and overviews and lists and deep stuff like that, I'm swimming in the shallow end right now, so would rather take the fifth.

Adventures in service dog training: We took a bit of a Christmas holiday. It's back to puppy class on Monday and I'm fearing the worst. Jesse has been suffering from cabin fever so severely (partly due to the fact that I injured the ACL in my left knee) that he almost flattened a frail old woman at my dad's nursing home yesterday, then, when visiting my uncle, annoyed his extremely geriatric dogs (who are, thankfully, much bigger than him) enough that it was time to go all too soon. I'm totally in love with him, he's smart and sweet and funny (who knew an empty 4L milk jug could provide so many hours of noise and entertainment?) and beautiful, but he may end up being too dog distractible to be a good service dog. He would make an awesome companion dog for a family with a special needs child, though. In any case, at eight months old it's too early to tell and I'm far from qualified to even take a guess. His future will be determined when he enters advanced training in a few months' time (probably the summer). It's been a really big learning curve for me as I've never done any dog training more advanced than basic obedience for my own two departed pooches, with the exception of learning hand signals for a deaf, three-legged Australian Shepherd we fostered for a few months until he went on to an amazing home. Learning to use 'here' after saying 'come' for 17 years (service dogs have their own language), plus the 'release' command, which I still have a lot of trouble with (as you will see in the video as I totally forgot to use it), are just two of many examples.

Here's the little video we made this morning of Jesse, me, some tasty cheese, and another snowy day on the wet coast (this is starting to get old), going through some of the commands we've learned. We've never had a camera that takes videos with sound until now, when I got Greg a Canon PowerShot SD880 IS, a super compact digital, for Christmas. I'm pleased with the quality from such a little thing, if not so much the dog trainer.

For better quality watch here on YouTube and choose 'watch in high quality' below the video.