A little Christmas melancholy but a very Merry holiday to you

T-shirt tales—Because every t-shirt tells a story, don't it.
And I have so very many of them. Shirts. And stories. ---- Tell me more. or Read all t-shirt tales

SUMMARY:  It is hard not to feel it. For me anyway. At this time anyway

Source: Discord chat with another writer Dec 22,2023

Somehow I seem to be more busy than before I retired, moved out of state, and left most of my family and friends behind. But I have finished my Christmas shopping since I really have only two family members, two dogs (Only one of them mine), and a couple of neighbors And friends to shop lightly for this year. Such a small number of gifts. So surely I can leave wrapping them until the last minute tomorrow.

As much of my life as I can remember – – and I'm retirement age, so that's...forever – – everyone in the family and their significant others (And often their parents and siblings) and their children and random friends and cousins from near and far and Dad's parents until they died (in the 1970s, but I can still recall how disquieting it felt the first Christmas that neither of them were there) gathered at my parents' house Christmas morning for an astonishing number of Christmas present openings. Even if each person received one gift, that was still a lot, but some of us--like my dad and me--enjoyed giving more than one gift to each person. Christmas at their place became legendary.

Then my dad died in 2015 and it impacted me like a crash and burn. We still all gathered that Christmas and still had a lot of gifts. But he had been the true driving force, And of course their house was good because it was huge because we all grew up in that house. The following year, mom's health declined rapidly and she died two days after Christmas, and we sold their house. We tried for a while, but it wasn't the same. I know they say that, to avoid this kind of sadness during the season, one should create new traditions. We didn't seem to be doing that. I didn't know what to try to create.

[Sidenote: That was a hard, hard year. Lost dad and mom, Tika and boost, dad's cousin who used to spend Christmas with us, and the beloved dog,Who got along well with Tika and boost, of My cousin (dad's cousins daughter) who also used to spend Christmases with us]

I have to work at managing the grief around this holiday. Not looking for sympathy, it's just a thing that is true. Three of us moved completely out of state to basically the same town and we are experimenting with planning a Christmas this year more suitable to three people than 20. We will open gifts, we will have a good meal, we will go for a probably short hike, we will drive out Christmas Eve looking at decorated houses,  we will see about trying to visit some of the many local waterfalls that we haven't seen yet, we will go through our notes and photos from our big trip in October, We will probably watch some Christmas shows or movies. we might do a jigsaw puzzle. Whether a new tradition will spring out of this remains to be determined.

This will be our ninth Christmas without Dad Cheering us on and preparing parts of a Christmas feast to browse from all day and mom trying to keep him moderate and doling out love. Missing them still feels like yesterday.

I have mom's Christmas T-shirt that she received fairly late in her life. It's almost new. I have worn it at Christmas. I don't feel like mom when I do. But the message on the front feels like her.

I Have This New Dog

SUMMARY: Working on enthusiasm and basic agility skills.

First, see yesterday's post.

Today, I adopted a new Border Collie. Her name is Boost. She's 7 years plus a month old. She has quite a bit of agility training, but apparently the wrong kind of training, because despite her speed and her drive, she has very little to show for it in the agility ring. F'rinstance, she often gets the highest opening points in Masters Gamblers, but who ever notices when she doesn't get the gamble due to a refusal or a bar down? F'rinstance, she sometimes has close to the fastest time in Jumpers, but who notices when she doesn't get the Q due to refusals or bars? Getting the picture?

So her old handler has decided that she needs a different handler, and it turns out that I'm the only one available. So now she has come to live with me, and I need to figure out how to fix almost 7 years of bad habits.

She's the sweetest dog you could want. Not super-affectionate, but not completely stand-offish, either. She will jump onto my lap and lay her head on my shoulder if i really insist. But only for a moment. She loves to play. She's really smart--rumor has it that she learned how to get into a tiny box simply by watching her previous handler teach Tika how to do it.

Today, we started working on attitude and enthusiasm. First, I encouraged myself to actually put on dog-agility clothes before going out into the yard rather than work clothes (ahem, well, my work clothes are jeans and slip-on walking shoes, but ya don't wanna get those jeans dirty before going in to see the client, and those slip-on shoes aren't the best for running in, although it can be done even at agility trials in a pinch).

Next, I encouraged myself to actually set poles on all the jumps and think about a couple of small courses that we could run. Yes, I'm oversubscribed in work and at home at the moment, but really, what difference could taking 15 minutes out of each day really matter to everything else, when it can probably make a huge difference with my new dog and her new handler.

I picked a couple of things to work on:

Like, the table. I watched videos of her old handler saying "Down" and she always leans into and over her dogs. So I'm going to work with both dogs keeping my shoulders back and my head up and work on the speed of the "down". Tika's table down has gotten to be SO slow in competition, it's nuts. Boost hasn't been bad at it lately, actually going down and staying down rather than gradually elevating, but we want to reinforce that. Keep at least one thing going that her previous handler fixed OK!

And, like, supporting my verbal cues with my body. I watched videos of her old handler, running and making a stab at an obstacle with her hand and then pulling the hand back in. So I practiced running while signallling a jump or tunnel with my arm held firmly in that direction until the dog was completely committed.

It may be tough, and maybe today it was easy because it was such a beautiful day, but for enthusiasm and basic agility skills, yes, I think Boost's new handler can learn them! And maybe the new handler can gradually turn Boost into a really fine agility dog.