Googled My Dog's Name and This is What I Got

SUMMARY: Wordless Wednesday

FYI, just a couple of words:

• Googled "Tika Clicker" (oops, messed it up; now these are the first images!)
• I paged down and took screen captures until my photos (that is, my photos or from my blog or photos of me & my dogs) no longer made up at least 50% of the images on the screen
• Purple blobs are items that are not mine

>>  Visit the Wordless Wednesday site; lots of blogs. <<

Smart Border Collie--Oh, Never Mind

SUMMARY: Where's your dish?

Boost is really a very smart dog, but some things don't prove it.

If I tell her to "Bring me your dish," or "Find your dish!" she will bring me her dish if it's within easy view, but if it's not, she kind of turns her head left and right and then just shrugs and looks at me.

I've been trying to train her to do better at the search by putting her into a down, clearly picking up her dish, walking into another room, setting it down, coming back, and telling her to find her dish. 90% of the time, she races into the other room and dashes around until she finds it (this is after a few weeks of practice). The other 10%, she looks around the room in which I put her in a down and then looks at me as if, "Well, I have no idea!" Really, she doesn't remember seeing me pick it up 30 seconds ago, carry it into the other room, and come back without it? Sigh.

This evening she showed a particularly dense portion of her brain. She finished eating dinner in the kitchenette. I walked around the counter into the kitchen (all one room really), told her to bring me her dish, which she did, and I put food into it, which she ate. Then I walked back around the counter into the kitchenette and she followed me. I told her to bring me her dish. She went frantic all around me, picking up everything she saw and dumping it at my feet and then searching frantically some more--but never once taking 4 steps to go back around the counter to where she had taken her dish half a minute ago.

My mind boggles.

Anyone else have those odd blind spots in their dog's brain?

I love my border collie. It's probably too much to expect her to be brilliant all the time, but these don't even make any sense. Ah, well.

Many Many Many Photos from Taj MuttHall

SUMMARY: Fun with Google advanced search for images.

This is cool--using Google's advanced search, I can find all the photos^* on Taj MuttHall of a specific thing. For example:

• All photos of Boost
• All photos of Tika
• All photos of shirts
• All photos with purple in them (although, interestingly, it found very few of the photos in my Agility Colors: Purple post)
• All the course maps (actually did this one by searching for all black & white images)
• All photos of people's faces

This is too much fun! Must stop now.

^*Wellll... it's not perfect. For keyword searches, it seems to rely on the text content, so for example if "shirt" is mentioned in a post, it displays all the photos in that post, even if they're not actually of a shirt. Still, pretty cool!

The Doggernet

SUMMARY: Dogs, dogs, everywhere you turn.

Individual pages for dogs and dog blogs are everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. The question is always how much to look for and how much to read. I learn something everywhere I go. For example, did you know that Yahoo has an "Individual Dog Blogs" category? And that Taj MuttHall seems to be on it? We've traveled pretty far for a blog whose original purpose was simply to be my way of tracking my progress and experience with my dogs and was never intended for public consumption.

I learned that latest tidbit by reading Pappy's Dog Blog and comments posted thereon by its readers. However, mostly I just follow two other agility blogs, Flirt's Dog Agility Blog and Training Journal for Devon and Jaime--because one day I found them, somehow, and because their posts are interesting and because they touch on lots of material that's of interest to me.

It's fun--or strange--to see how often pages I've worked on come up at the top in dog-related searches:

"hemangiosarcoma": Wikipedia's article, which I started because I knew 2 things about it from Remington's illness

"Remington agility": The top 5 listings from this Google search are me and my dog (all the more reason to have dogs with really unique names)

"how many legs to earn a NATCH?" (something I tried for what-the-heck last week) and of the first 7 responses to come up, one was my Taj MuttHall page about Remington and/or Jake earning their titles, one (another Bay Team member) Jack & Libby's page about Skye Buhite, and one a PowerPaws page about their dogs (my instructors and also Bay Team members)