This morning Carmen took me to get my hair washed at her hair salon. It’s run in a residential area (there aren’t really zoning laws here) and is adjacent to a clothing store run by the same propriertoress.

I didn’t really know what to expect. The Indonesian hairdresser actually washed my hair right at the cutting chair, including a really great half-hour head massage. I was wondering if they had some magical way to rinse out the shampoo right at the chair, but they did use their washing station for that. Then they gave a really good attempt to blow out my 1″ of hair and actually got it kind of poofy and soft.

The hair salon:

My ‘do:

After that, we headed up to Bukit Genting, a Thai restaurant, kind of botanical garden, and hotel at the top of a hill. From up there, you can see water on either side of Penang.

After that we headed to the “modern” mall (as opposed to the older mall that Carmen and I went to yesterday, which I may not blog about because it was a blur of jetlag) and went to Starbucks. It’s pretty much the same Starbucks you may be used to seeing, except for some funny pastries:

Pedometers: 2
Lip Balms: 12
Hand Creams: 3
Eye Drops: 2
Nail Files: 2
Erasers, Used: 1
Erasers, Unused: 4
Scissors: 2
Blacklight LEDs: 2
Packs of Tape Flags: 3
Pads of Sticky Notes: 9
Notebooks, Unused: 8

I gave up caffeine. Just like that.  I haven’t had any (much) in over 24 hours. I am still drinking decaf espresso and coffee, so I’m not completely off caffeine, but this is a serious decrease over my typical day of a quad latte for breakfast and a couple of cups of work coffee during the day. It just makes me too jittery and I’m distractable enough at work (as proven by this current blog posting). Sigh.

I kind of have a headache. I almost convinced myself to go get some potato chips to make it all better, but I think I’m going to see if I can make it home and have a healthy snack instead.

Wow, boringest series of titles for blog posts ever.

Today I worked with Rowdy on paying attention to me at the dog park. The dog park is just so much fun! It’s hard for him to remember that he has to pay attention to me when we’re there. So I keep him on leash and click him for eye contact. He’s usually pretty good unless a dog comes up to him.. then it takes him a second or two to remember how to get treats.

Lola’s great at the park, so we just worked on “come” and “hey, don’t run off into the bushes, ok?”. Then we came home and worked on touch with her and sit-down-sit-down with Rowdy. He’s too smart, so he mostly just guesses instead of listening, so I like to try to trip him up.

Yup, that’s it. Maybe they’ll have some kind of phenomenal progress tomorrow. Maybe.

So today I worked on Rowdy’s sits, downs, and stands. He never really had a good stand - he had the stand where you lead a treat out in front of him, but he didn’t a good stationary stand (where you drop the treat down along their chest and they have to tuck their head under and “pop” their back legs out from the sit). The good stand means that in obedience, their front legs don’t move forwards (and lose points) because the stand comes from the back end.

So I got thoroughly drooly all up my arm as he gently mangled me trying to get the treat that I was holding basically in his armpit. But he eventually got the action (after doing lots of neat bending tricks), got the click, and kind of figured it out. He won’t do it without bait in my hand, but we’ll get there.

I also continued to work on solid sits and downs - sits without sit up, and downs without a dead or a bark. He’s doing well.

Then Lola and I worked on touch! I’d forgotten how much she likes touch. I moved the touch from my hand to the end of a tennis ball throwing stick in 3 clicks - she is NOT dumb! Then I tried to work on “the magic only happens when I say “touch”, then you touch, not every time you put your nose on it” but it’s still too early for that, so we went back to “anytime you touch you get a click” and that was fine. It’s easy to tell when things are too much for her, because she just lays down and looks at me like “yeah, whatever”. Rowdy will keep guessing and trying things for hours (and, in fact, when I was giving him no feedback waiting for him to put his feet back on the ground in a sit, he pulled out a trick that I haven’t seen him do in almost 3 years. Wow.)

I hope that by moving “touch” to the end of a stick, I can get Lola to jump around in the park and play some games with her. She’s awful at games with people - she usually seems to think you’re trying to kill and eat her. This should be good for her.

So my jobs are: Motivate Rowdy to FOCUS, and motivate Lola to TRY NEW THINGS. They’re almost completely opposite.

For the curious, I’m using rollover beef flavor as bait. I can cut it into remarkably small pieces, it freezes well chopped or unchopped, it’s low in sodium, and it’s stinky enough that the dogs are into it, but it doesn’t make me reek like cooked liver did. Ugh.

I’ve decided to do 10 minutes of dog training per day for each dog. They need some refreshers and I think they would both be happy with more of my time and some more jobs to think about.

Here’s what they both know now:

Rowdy:

• Knows: Sit, down, relax, sit up, turn around, foot, other foot, up high, bow
• Kind of knows: Dead, wave, touch, stay, stand
• Would like to know: Roll over, be upside-down, speak, retrieving, spin (turn around the other way)

Lola:

• Knows: Sit, down, touch, foot
• Kind of knows: Stay, sit up
• Would like to know: Dead, speak, turn around, spin

Rowdy’s been doing it since he was just a wee pup, so it’s all he knows, and he gets a little overexcited or strung out when I get the clicker out. He’s so smart and he loves being trained (and he loves getting things right), so I started with the absolute basics with him to see if I could get him to relax and just go with the flow instead of guessing. When I first got the clicker and some treats out, he did the Rowdy Show of sit-down-relax-dead-relax-sit-situp-bark!-sit-relax repeat repeat repeat. I let him work that out of his system until he realized he was getting no reaction, then I started him on down, click, treat on the floor, wait for eye contact, “take it!”, repeat. He’d FORGOTTEN that he’s not allowed to jump on treats, so I had to drop them by my feet so I could step on them if he moves. He gets no reaction to moving except no treat, so he learns quickly that he has to give me eye contact to get the treat.

This went well so I moved on to some clarifying work. He frequently does sit-situp-sit-bark instead of just sit, so I worked on getting him to sit with both front feet on the ground instead of in a sit up or with one foot off the ground (he loves giving his paw). That works, but I’m not sure yet that he knows what I’m getting at. I just need to be consistent all the time that when I say “sit” I mean “SIT” not situp.

Lola wasn’t sure about any of this “obedience” stuff. Then I introduced the clicker and some cheese (I don’t do cheese anymore), and she got the idea in about 5 clicks. She loves this idea. She’s not a guesser but every time I click her, her ears go up! So cute.

So with her I worked on down and sit. She’s good at both, but I would like a more solid down so I can get her to stop jumping on people at the dog park. Ideally I want an instantaneous drop from both of them but that’s a ways off - I need a solid “down” at this point before I can work on an instant drop. And she’s still thinking about it before she downs, I guess ’cause the ground is pretty far away for her.

Create Your Own Sea Kitten at peta.org!

Nothing makes me happier than getting a bunch of books to read for work (and my boss knows it):

Now to get busy reading, understanding, and somehow applying it all to my job..

Thanks, Amy! Best shirt ever. (also.. fear my GIANT HAND.)

Some progress shots, taken with my craptacular cellphone camera.

The swatch (washed and blocked, thankyouverymuch):

The vest itself: