A Rose By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

SUMMARY: But What About Dogs?

Originally posted on Facebook: Nov 20, 2020 in response to the #originaldognamechallenge

I’m not going to repost my dog photos, but here’s what each of them came to me as:

“Chipper” = Chip (I stayed in touch with his previous family, and Chip seemed to work fine. But “Chipper” was a bit too chipper for me.)

“Greenelda” (or some such) = Boost (All the puppies had color puppy names to match their collar colors.)

“Jake” = Jake (he had a perfect name and he was already a perfect little agility dog and I saw no reason to change it at his age of sixish)

“Lone Star” = Sheba (I think Lonestar was a popular beer at the time. But, really, for a husky?!)

“Luke” = Zorro (Luke was actually a perfect name, but under a theory that he had already learned to blow me off under that name, I changed it. Made no difference. 😜) (On the other hand, it did eventually stop me from calling him “Jake”.)

“One of the two yellow puppies” = Amber

“Remington” = Remington (I tried to come up with several other names, but Remington just seemed to stick.)

“Savanna” = Tika (She had been adopted out from the shelter twice and returned twice before she was picked up by the rescue group. I don’t know where the savanna name came from during that process. She did not seem like a Savanna to me.)

Toys With Names

SUMMARY: Around here, you're not just "toy". You are, perhaps, "Mr. Toy".

(Ported from my recent Facebook post.)

I name the toys that my dogs and I play with the most. I use the names constantly while playing. My hope is that, just from that, they'll be able to fetch various toys by name. Turns out that, except for the winners of the Miss Popularity contest, it takes more work than that. But, for fun, anyway, here is the current set of Toys With Names.

Clockwise from top left and spiraling inward: Flying Minkey, Flying Fox, The Incredible Hulk, CAP-tain America, Spidey, Puffin, Squeaky Snake, Rope, Ropebone, Monkeyface, Ballflower, Liddle Toy, Liddle Ball, Bear, Binkie, Bikini Chicken (aka Playchicken), Flatball, Lattice, Bee (sometimes Buzz... no wonder they're confused), Rabbit (sans ears so closely resembles Bear the last year or so), Ladybug.

"Monkeyface iz MY's!" -Chip ^^^

[Since I lined up the family for the photo, I noticed that SOMEhow Purple Hippo made an escape sometime between when i lined them all up for photos and when I actually took the photo. And Jolly[Ball] is out in the yard. Oh, drat, I didn't think about MilkerToy or Riot Tug! Or Frisbee! Or, jeez, Cthulhu-Face! Hmmm--and Mr. Duck is completely MIA. Wonder where he's gone to that he didn't show up in a sweep of the house?]

Human Mom Responds to Your Questions About Toys With Names

Q: Omg...so many toys so little time. If my dogs see this, I am in serious trouble.  -Lloyda
A:  This is not #allTheThings. Just the #thingsWithNames. -Human Mom
Q: Even more reason dogs are not allowed access to Facebook!  -Lloyda

Q:  Turbo approves of the collection.  -Diane B.
A:  Thank goodness! -Human Mom

Q:  We do that too. Katie only brings us the correct named toy if it's obviously available and alone. -Dawn K.
A: We have a lot of that going on, too. Zorro can always bring Flatball no matter how many distractions, and usually Squeakysnake if Flatball isn't around. -Human Mom

Q:  Gem dismembers most toys. Yours look great. - Kathy C.
A:  We have deep dark secrets--FlyingMinkey is missing a leg. CAP-tain America and Spidey and Monkeyface have holes in the back through which they are regularly restuffed. Puffin barely has any part of his head without a hole in it, and when there's no longer enough head to hold in the restuffing, he'll go, too. And I picked up and tossed 5 other toys whose time had come while evaluating who needed to be in this photo. -Human Mom
Q:  Gem's favorite toys are Turbo Blackman's ABC toys. She likes to steal the toys of others... -Kathy C.

Q: How do you remember the names? -Debbie
A:  Most of them are pretty obvious. Flatball. Flying Minkey. The Incredible Hulk. Puffin. Monkeyface. Like that. :-)  -Human Mom
A2: And I repeat the names over and over, intending for the dogs to learn them, but probably mostly me that learns them.  -Human Mom
A3: AND of course I didn't name them all at once; they acquired names when they first came into play. Plus, just, practice; I've been naming toys for many years, so it's habit.  -Human Mom
A4: If you have names for anything for your dog to get-- "Get your Leashie!" "Get your Dish!"--you've already started naming your toys. ;-)  -Human Mom
A5: P.S. "Dish" is "Dish" because, it turns out, "Bowl" sounds a lot like "Ball", so there was some confusion in the early days.  -Human Mom

Sidney T. Shares His Wisdom with Human Mom

Human Mom has very recently met Sidney T. on Facebook. Sidney has a charming and ever-expanding family of his own (including the assorted Mr Fox no.1; also 2, 3, 4, and so on to 9, who travel the world and send photos back). Sidney interprets for them all. Sidney's humans transcribe for Sidney. Human Mom had too much fun reading about said family and seeing their family portrait, which inspired this post. Sidney responded.

Sidney Thompson: Sidney says his photo also has absentees due to hangovers (Skype Bunny and Mr Hippomoomin if he recalls). It's so difficult to gather them all in the same place at one time. He says your eclectic collection is truly remarkable, and he likes the way that no matter how battered, they still stick around. He is fascinated by Mr Monkey Face, Bikini Chicken and Lattice. He has about thirty tennis balls, all of them called Mr Ball (no.1 to no.30), he says.

Human Mom: Thanks, Sidney. Human Mom attempts to winnow the truly battered ones, but some are crowd favorites and so stick around for a long time. Monkeyface has a hole in his head through which his brains are regularly removed, but it's easy enough to put them back so they can be removed again. Puffin, same thing. Bikini Chicken, however, went on to a better place after examination for this photo.
P.S. There are actually Flatball Thing 1, Flatball Thing 2, and Flatball Thing 3. Because Zorro loves them the best. And I dunno 4 or 5 Ladybugs. Sidney is a very lucky dog to have so many Mr Ball! Bet he has a good time with every one of them.

Sidney Thompson: Sidney says Bikini Chicken should be retrieved from her resting place if at all possible. The Mr Balls live at home or in various gardens of his customers. Sidney seems to find them easily when he visits every couple of weeks, he says.

Human Mom: Sadly, Bikini Chicken in all her rubberness was accidentally left in front of a sunny window for the better part of a year. Probably wasn't the dogs' doing. Human Mom is admitting nothing. So with every touch, bikini chicken was literally disintegrating. Barely could get her lined up for this photo. She crumbled away as I took her into The Other Room. :-( Like Mr. Alien, at one time her twins were readily available, but now it's just photos of them on the Interwebs.

Sidney Thompson: https://www.amazon.com/Charming-79888L.../dp/B000OWI254
Charming Large Henrietta Chicken
Henrietta Squawker is one of the colorful family members of the Charming Pet Toy Oinkers &…
AMAZON.COM

Human Mom: She's not the version of Henrietta in the Playboy Chicken outfit, but she might want to come home with us anyway. Thanks, Sidney.

Sidney Thompson: Sidney says no it's not the same one but still a Bikini Chicken to keep the lineage going, he says.

Human Mom: Who am I to question Sidney's wisdom?

Sidney Thompson: Sidney says he is very fond of his Mr Foxes, which is why there are nine of them, although two have emigrated so it's time to spawn some replacements, he says.

Luke Becomes Zorro

SUMMARY: Finally picked a name.

Because I and everyone else have trouble applying "Chip" and "Luke" to the correct dogs, I've blamed it on the fact that they are both short 4-letter guy's names (as in people-guys).  Although Luke is an awesome dog name, I decided to change him up in respect for Chip's previous family, who still occasionally see him--plus I've had 2 years to accustom myself to Chip and he's had 5 years, whereas both Luke and I have had a mere 1 year.  Soooo...

I've been talking about changing it for months.  Asked for suggestions on FB and got a lot of good ones (I'll post them here later).  Tried out a few.

Then, one morning a couple of weeks ago, as I roamed around the house, I was singing (as I often do). This is the song that came into my head, don't know why:

Out of the night,
When the full moon is bright,
Comes the horseman known as Zorro.
This bold renegadeCarves a "Z" with his blade,A "Z" that stands for Zorro.Zorro, Zorro, the fox so cunning and free,
Zorro, Zorro, who makes the sign of the Z.**

And, as I was singing, I once again noticed the door scratches that I have attributed to him, and it suddenly hit me!

Comes the canine known as Zorro...

So, introducing.... Zorro!

Like a shadow, he marked the door and vanished again into the darkness. Well, it's not quite a Z, but he's a superhero, not a writer.

** From one of my most favorite TV shows; here's the music (and a sample show, if you want to see something kind of hokey but at the time I loved it): Zorro theme song and show

Names names names

SUMMARY: Darn it, Chip and Luke are nothing like each other!

And yet--time after time, in spoken words and in my blog, I type the wrong name.

Sigh. I might have to change Luke's name after all, because apparently my brain thinks they're the same thing. Because they're both common, one-syllable, 4-letter boys' names, or, I don't know. Darn brain. It might be like SP changed Cutter to Butter because she kept following the K sound with Kinetic instead of Cutter (same breed, new adopted dog).

Now would be the time to do it if I'm going to. But I haven't been obsessing for months over possible dog names, so I'm going to have to start, and do it fast.

I've called him these, more or less deliberately, while dealing with him the last week:

• Loki
• Punk

But I also believe in the power of names in ones' own mind, so by calling him either of those, I'm expecting him to be naughty.

I also thought briefly about Stark. Hmm. Maybe I'll think more about that. You think he looks like an ironman?  And it's not too much off Luke, but at the same time, different from Chip. I think.   

(Fun interlude into brain pathways: You have to understand how my mind sees names...  oh, yes, you have to ... For example, if I'm struggling to remember someone's name, I might come up with Jack Smith, and it turns out that his name is John Brown, because, I guess, Jack and John are both common, 4-letter, one-syllable men's names starting with J, and Smith and Brown are both common, 5-letter, one-syllable last names. Really. This sort of thing happens to me all the time.  It's possible that that's from a lifetime of doing crossword puzzles, but who knows.)

Anyway, by those rules,  Luke and Stark would NOT be the same--latter is not common, is not four letters, and doesn't start with the same letter.  Hmmm.

References

--------------

• Wikipedia entry on Tony Stark, aka Iron Man--genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, although don't know that he ever pees on the carpet.  
• And the fair-use image from WP, hmmm, I see some similarity in coloring and attitude, too!

Names! Aughhhh!

SUMMARY: How could one new dog complicate names so much?

Just about 24 hours ago, I posted on Facebook:

The addition of a wild, half-trained 8-month-old puppy is shaking things up in many ways, not least of which is that for the past 24 hours I have been calling each of the dogs by a name coming randomly from the list of Chip, Jake, Luke, Boost, and Remington. It's disconcerting. But I think also it's because Luke has aspects of different dogs, and Chip certainly has a lot more of Remington in him than I had originally thought but also some Luke and vice-versa, and also three boy-dog four-letter one-syllable names and, well, brain is still adjusting.

Despite having looked at the title of yesterday's post over and over, it took a friend this evening to point out, "I think you mean How Luke Came Home."  Augh, yes, I had titled it, How Chip Came Home!  (Fixed it now; thanks Human Mom to Scully, Sparkle, and Ben.)

When talking to my renter earlier this evening, I had to stop midsentence for about 5 seconds because I could not sort out which dog name to use when referring to Chip!

Jeez.

Milestone! Chip Came!

SUMMARY: Chip makes the decision to stop in midcharge and come back.

Chip runs to go fence barking/fighting.

With my back as it has been--almost since Chip came home--for days or weeks on end I've not even felt the urge to do any kind of training or even playing with and rewarding existing training.

I worked occasionally on "Chip, Come!" just after he'd already made the decision to come to me, intending to gradually move that back to just about the time that he was making the decision, and then to before he'd made the decision.

Previous Owner had to walk him down and corner him at the dog park because he wouldn't come. I experienced that myself when we did a dog park to experiment. My motivation should be strong because I want to allow all the dogs off leash in appropriate places and be able to know that I can call them back. Annoying having to keep Chip on a leash or long lead all the time.  Yet, with pain and medications and all that, I wasn't taking dogs anywhere anyway, so motivation lower.

But, I've been thinking more about doing stuff. On Instructor Nancy's recent suggestion, I went just for "Chip". I liked the idea anyway, because he arrived here with a weak name response (e.g., might or might not look at me when I said his name, and with not much interest; if nothing else interesting was in process, a response was more likely). And I finally had the energy to just say Chip "a million times a day" and give him a treat every time.

I had already started that as soon as he came home, at agility trials on leash in particular or while out for walks on leash. His name response improved, but again, only at close range and not reliably and not very fast.

Is the neighboring Noise Dog there?

If ya can't see 'em, smell for 'em.

Anyway--started doing it much more often three or four weeks ago, out in the yard many times (although not every time). Just taking a bag of treats and randomly calling his name and giving one for coming.   His name response in times of no more than mild arousal had become instant--that head just whips around towards me.

Did I already talk about using the Premack Principle on his fence fighting with the Noise Dog next door?  I continued doing that as well, moving farther and farther away.  Again, I wasn't consistent about doing this regularly, but when I did more of it, he more often tended to do some barking and then immediately come back to see whether he'd get a treat.

Anyway, all of this combined to where, today, the Noise Dog hit the fence and made a ruckus, and Chip bolted straight in his direction.  When Chip was nearly there, I yelled "Chip!" from almost the other side of the yard (not near him) and he slammed to a halt, turned, and trotted back to me with no hesitation.  Huzzah! That's the first time that he's taken the initiative to come back in full flight! Yowza yowza! Every other time when I tested this, he might have slowed slightly and turned his ears back towards me, but then continued on his mission.

He got a ton of treats AND the frozen chicken foot for that!  (I knew that we were close, so I'd had it in my treat pouch the last couple of times along with the other treats.)

Everyone came away happy and quiet.

Well--quiet in part because he won't do the actual barking/fence fighting if I'm standing there trying to take a photo for evidence to be used against him. He's a suspicious kind of guy.

As I washed my hands afterwards, I thought--I have to keep up on this, repeating all the time for the rest of his life, which is what I needed to do with Tika. Because if I stopped practicing, a lot, frequently, her recall deteriorated and she'd no longer, for instance, call off of chasing a squirrel.  THAT might be one advantage to starting with a puppy: If their minds grasp the recall thing very early and before they get used to doing what they want to do, maybe it wouldn't require constant intense renewal.

Boost has a pretty reliable recall. Maybe because I taught her has a puppy. Maybe because she's a Border Collie.

Well, they can't all be Border Collies, and that's just as well. Chip is really really fast, and if I can harness that into agility, he could be a Contendah--if I can ever confidently run again.

I'm rambling again. Good night!

Another Boost! *Two* Boosts!

SUMMARY: Unusual dog name.

In all the years I've done agility, I've never encountered another dog named Boost.

Just found out that there are two others dogs named Boost who do agility. Is that cool or what?

Here's the other Border Collie Boost, owned and photos by Tanya Lee.


This Boost is a year younger than my Boost but, OK, here's the really spooky thing--her Boost is *exactly* a year younger because they have the exact same birthday!

She told me that there's another Boost, a young Sheltie owned by Linda Robertson. I don't have photos. Nor do I know the birthday.

I feel a sudden kinship based solely on the name but doubly on the birthday. We're a very exclusive club, we owners of Boosts.

A Good Name For An Agility Dog

SUMMARY: How Boost got her name.

Starting back in 1998, I did some work for a start-up high tech company who manufactured a device for speeding up data traffic over networks. They named the company NetBoost.

In the nature of Silicon Valley companies, they had t-shirts and hats and all, and one day I was looking at the hat--

--especially the back side of the hat--

--and it suddenly struck me, "Boost would be a good name for an agility dog!"

A few years later, in early 2002, Tika came to live with me. She wasn't named Tika--they had called her Savannah--but "Boost" somehow didn't seem to fit her, so I moved on to other names and "Boost" went unclaimed.

Four years after that, a little blue merle border collie puppy came home with me, and it was pretty clear, I think even before she came home, that she was the dog who needed to be Boost.

That left me pondering what her full registered name would be. Registered names (in AKC at least) start with the breeder's kennel name, hence Hi C-Era. (Side note for those from out of the area--that would be "High Sierra", a reference to being up in the high country up to the tall granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada, such as in the upper ranges of Yosemite; the highest peak is Mount Whitney at 14,500 feet (4400m).  Hence also the name of various sporting gear and events and such. See the High Sierra Wikipedia page.)

To the kennel name, I could've just appended Boost and left it at that--after all, my previous 3 agility dogs have been registered as Finchester's Remington, Finchester's Jake, and Finchester's Tika (all rescues, so I used my own "kennel" name).

But I wanted to have fun with it.

I right away came up with a name that I wanted to use: Interstellar Propulsion (Boost--Booster rocket--get it?). But, after adding the required kennel name, the AKC forms and instructions said that I had two too many characters. So I agonized and waffled and tried a whole lot of other names. Friend Gail helped brainstorm and we came up with some good, shorter, possible alternatives:

• Escaping Gravity
• Lightspeed Liftoff
• Lightspeed Propulsion (just barely fit if I counted right)
• Orbital Express
• Interstellar Engine
• Escape Velocity
• Mach 25 (that being, if I'm remember correctly, the speed it takes to escape earth's gravity... but probably a bit too obscure. I also toyed with "Achieving e" but that's really quite opaque. )
• Interstellar Velocity
• Nearing Lightspeed

But I still liked my original the best.

So I dawdled and dawdled, waiting either to decide on one of the alternate names from my list (kept pulling them out and reviewing them in case perhaps I had missed one that was particularly good) or for The Perfect Other Name to appear from the heavens. But no deux ex machina resolution appeared for my dilemma.

Then, over time, two separate people told me that their understanding was that AKC would, in fact, nowadays accept names that were much longer than their forms allowed. So I took a chance and finally sent in the forms (had to do it before her first birthday, which was coming up fast, or pay a penalty).

And, Lo! They accepted it, and henceforth she became Hi C-Era Interstellar Propulsion, call name Boost.

And she certainly is fast! However, in agility competitions where our skills melt down and we crash and burn, I think, I had in mind rockets nearing lightspeed and she had in mind O rings from Morton Thiokol.

Ah, well, I still love the name, and the dog.

My lightspeed girlie:

A Name By Any Other Name--

SUMMARY: Cultural changes.

I've lived in the same valley for more than 40 years, but the names that surround my life have changed significantly.

High school, 1974

Here are names from my senior high school yearbook in Cupertino--first name on each of the first 10 pages:
Kera Alexander
Michael Bauer
Bob Bieghler
Kathryn Bowen
Robin Carpenter
Linda Cooper
Kim Curtis
Ralph Delsid
Jeri Eaton
Susan Foster
... you get the idea. I know how to spell and pronounce the names. I often know whether they're male or female (although some European names--like Kim and Robin--can be used for either).

Same school, 2011

Here, I pick 10 names from the current newspaper for that very same high school in Cupertino, in the order in which I found them:
Stephanie Lam
Cally Chung
Rachel Chiou
Nancy Chang
Jenny Wong
Patrick Xie
Emily Vu
Ruri Kobayakawa
Stephen Ho
Arjun Baokar
... well, the first names are mostly still familiar--still can spell and pronounce, still know gender, but the last names are of a whole different ethnic origin.

And now, well...

Working environment

Here are the names of one team I worked with for most of the last year:
Guo Wei
Hui Ding
Wei Guo (go figure, different person)
Zhiyan Fan
Allan Lillich (token non-Beijing resident)

...and here are the names of 10 people I've worked with and around for the last 3 months (all ALSO in Cupertino):
Priti Alwarshatty
Moazam Raja
Amol Kulkarni
Kris Bell
Katherine Long
Srinath Seshanarayanan
Manoj Dhoble
Datta Katadilkar
Preeti Suryaprakash
Avinash Yadav
(and the first names of people in my cubicle and across from me: Rohan, Praveen, Balakrishna, Mohammad, Amar, Mirshad, Venkateswarulu)

The last few years have been educational for me in the name department. Learning how to pronounce and also starting to learn genders that typically go with the names. I still have a long way to go.

Dog names

So I got to thinking--what about dog names?

I found this cool page with Indian dog names. What if I'd named Boost "Neela," meaning "Blue"?

My cousin's dog is Jamela, which is Arabic for "beautiful"; the same site has tons of Arabic dog names.

You can also search the web for, say, Swahili dog names, African dog names, or your favorite.

Click here

I wanted to find !Kung dog names--!Kung is the Bushman language. If you've ever seen The Gods Must Be Crazy, you've heard it: The ! represents a clicking sound and it's one of the few languages that uses that sound regularly. But I search for "!Kung dog names", "San dog names", "!Xhosa dog names"--all clicking languages--but no luck.

We have a couple of dogs around here whose registered names include "!":
Kicks!
Tally Ho!
Do you suppose they're pronounced with clicks? And are they male or female? What ever happened to King and Queenie?

Cyborgification

SUMMARY: Another pointless exercise.

Are these interpretations accurate? You decide:

Get Your Cyborg Name
	Get Your Cyborg Name

Sing Your Puppies to Sleep

SUMMARY: Cute names and the amazing power of lullabyes.

As I mentioned, there seems to be a plethora of puppies suddenly! It's so hard to come up with unique names in agility, and yet people keep coming up with good ones. For the party gal, Jenn, there's Tonic (Jenn and Tonic); for Ash there's now Dash (Ash & Dash); for the lady who videotapes agility trials and whose husband works in high tech, it's the name of one of his products that seems appropriate for a camera person: Tcam.

And for all those puppies out there who won't settle down: Warm up your singing voice! Link forwarded by a friend. (Direct link)

Naming Names--Or Not

SUMMARY: Trying to decide on a Taj MuttHall policy.

For most of the life of Taj MuttHall, it has been TMH's general policy to use names only of dogs and not of actual humans. For example, for the whole year and a half that Casey the little black dog lived here with my Housemate, I always called her Housemate and not by her actual human name. I'll often use something witty and unique for each person, such as "Bump's mom" or "Steamer's mom" or "Sparkle's mom"--although now upon close examination it appears that perhaps they've not been quite as witty and unique as one might have hoped.

However, there have been exceptions. Sometimes when the person is well known and the mention is about them in their well-known capacity (e.g., a Rachel Sanders seminar, or Ashley and Luka winning yet another national competition). This will probably continue. But sometimes just in passing, for whatever reason, I mention the actual real name. Some people have told me that they've done a search for their name (or a friend's or relative's name) and dog's name and ended up at Taj MuttHall and enjoyed the results. This might be an argument for using actual given names. Although this was intended to be a diary for my own use and not specifically with any other audience in mind. (Yeah, right. Like that happens any more. Take this post, for example.)

On the other hand, the blog is SUPPOSED to be about life with agility dogs, not life with agility people (although they do for some reason play a large part there), so just like the Peanuts cartoon that never ever showed an adult, my theory was that I would never ever mention actual people's names.

So, if you've ever wondered why I maybe said something like "I finally met a fellow blogger from _______" or "a friend and I went...." and didn't say whom, that's why--it's not because I was avoiding going on record as having such-and-so as a friend, it's that I was dancing the line between not admitting that humans exist in my agility-dog world and yet acknowledging what actually goes on in my life.

So here's what I've--I mean TMH's--been thinking. If you want to know. Which you apparently do, since you've read this far. TMH is thinking that people will exist but they'll now have their own special Taj MuttHall names (which they already kind of do in the back of TMH's brain). And maybe TMH will eventually get around to creating a key for who is whom in case someone wants to do a search on hers or whoms name and end up here. Or maybe not.

Can you tell that I'm good at goal-setting?

When You Wish Upon A Star

SUMMARY: Tika has a good day. Boost? Well-- Oh, and dogs' names, too.

Sometimes fantasies DO become realities. Tika earned that Grand Prix that I wanted for her, with a 5th place out of about 22 in her height. She earned that Snooker Q to complete her Snooker Silver (25 masters snooker legs), and did it in style in 4th place with a Super-Q. AND she ran clean in Steeplechase, being one of only five 26" dogs out of 21 to go on to round 2, ending a one-year dry spell (same trial last year) AND completing her Tournament Master Gold! Whoo! She got extra treats! Plus if we can avoid Eing tomorrow we're guaranteed to be in the money! A whole 3% of the purse for 5th place again!

She didn't get ANYTHING that I DIDn't ask for--completely crashed through the first bar in Standard, don't know why, although the rest of the run was nice, and had an excellent Gambler's opening but I got ahead of her when the first whistle blew and so had to come to a complete stop to send her, so she pulled off the gamble obstacle.

Boost's day can be summed up in two words, one consisting of a variety of emphatic puncutation marks: #%$&*@ weaves! She either mucked the entry, or popped out early, or sometimes both, or in the Steeplechase 6 or 7 times from a down-stay BEFORE the weave poles all in one run! And I waited around for 90 minutes or more for that run!

What am I to do? (That's a rhetorical question--I'm working on it--but meanwhile what passes for my wits are nearing a terminus...)

But the weather was nice, I was among friends, pal Apache and his dad finished their ADCH, Boost actually had a couple of runs that were very smooth with no refusals on jumps and made me feel like I was running a masters dog instead of a babydog, and she DID get the gamble although over time because we were out in the middle of the course HAVING ANOTHER DISCUSSION ABOUT POPPING OUT OF THE #%$&*@ WEAVES! ARRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhh...

And speaking of ellipses--We discussed dogs whose names contain punctuation. Today there was "Rowdy!" and another California agility dog is "Tally Ho!". I said what about a dog named "." (pronounced "Dot")? Do you think that every secretary would call when you sent in your entry to say that you didn't give the dog's name? What would the gate steward call when they saw "." on the running order list? Or would they think it was a typo? And, hey, how about a dog named "ellipses" that was spelled like this: "..."?? Wouldn't it just be a blast chiding USDAA and CPE and all those other organizations for not spelling your dog's name right?

Then we got around to a dog who, after he wins the National Championships or maybe has his photo on the cover of Clean Run or otherwise now becomes famous, changes his name from a run-of-the-mill traditional dog name to a sort of a bone symbol on a stick something like this and now he's known as "The dog formerly known as Prince"? Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't you want to be trial secretary dealing with TDFNP's owner who wanted the symbol correctly on the page? (Thanks to my fellow scoretableist for the Prince idea. You can hit her if you want--it's not my fault!)

Big Show Statistics

SUMMARY: Haute TRACS 4-day trial is coming up; how big is it? And a comparison with our smallish March CPE trial (well--what Bay Team considers small). And a comparison to the February Turlock CPE trial (which was really tiny for around here).

April 10-14 is the mongo four-day Haute TRACS trial (technically, two 2-day trials hosted by Haute Dawgs and by Two Rivers Agility Club of Sacramento). This event is huge, even though it's not a regional. It's LIKE a regional but with a whole extra day! These people are insane! I signed up for only three of the four days because it kills me!

I'm always fascinated by trial statistics. (Well, you knew I had a sorry excuse for a life anyway.)

Trial	Haute TRACS	Bay Team March CPE	VAST Feb CPE
Dogs entered	407	201	100 (est)
Number of runs / scribe sheets	4,630	1,383	600 (est)
Most common breeds	173 Border Collie 42 Australian Shepherd 39 Sheltie 24 All American (under assorted breed names) 12 Jack Russell Terrier	36 All American 33 Border Collie 28 Australian Shepherd 10 Welsh Corgi (Pembroke) 8 Sheltie
Most popular dog names	4 Piper 3 Callie 3 Chase 3 Maddie 3 Murphy	3 Sadie 3 Sydney
People entered	267	155
Number of judges/rings	5/4	3/3	1/2

I'm meeting with the secretary and friend(s) to assemble those scribe sheets this weekend. That's putting 4,600 stickers on individual sheets without getting anything out of order. Oh--and watching the Iditarod on TV! And eating! (Agility is all about the food. Contrary to what you might have ever heard me say before.)

My Dogs' Names In Wikipedia

SUMMARY: Fun and games with the World Wide Web.

OK, don't know why I never thought of this before--being confirmed and documented as a Wikipediholic--but I just didn't. It's just fun to see all the things that come up when I plug in their names:

• Boost
• Tika
• Jake
• Remington
• Sheba
• Amber
• Sam