At least, no words of my own beyond this: Compare and contrast, say, precipitation (bright blue bars) or low and high temperature curves (lines).
When I bought my current home, nearly 2 decades ago, my Agility Gung-ho-ness expressed itself dramatically by taking my money. And I don't mean classes or competitions or travel (although those were also true). I mean: Equipment! Full set! Here in my yard! To train fabulous world-class agility champions!
... we didn't get to world-class because I'm honestly too lazy to be that dedicated to training and improving our skills. But it did help in achieving speed, accuracy, and championships of various sorts and quantities for Remington, Jake, Tika, and Boost. |
| Dogwalk when only a few years old. Glory days. |
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| Dogwalk is about 30' long. |
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| Dogwalk needs... um... TLC? |
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| A-frame in its younger age. |
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| A-frame in my back yard. (Go straight across to the right from the green arrow.) Takes up a lot of visual space and all in one large chunk. |
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| Aframe now. Mostly usable condition. |
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| But this is a problem (bent pipe). |
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| My teeter gets a lot of unauthorized use. |
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| Why teeter needed resurfacing 10 years back. Replaced with fiberglass. Currently, the metal parts are rusting and some of those surfaces are peeling away. But I think it'll be OK. |
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| Old tire parts I dragged out from behind the compost bins. Needs work. But OK for occasional gentle use at the moment. |
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| When expensive metal jump bases rust away... out they go. |
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| Same model chute as mine. Beautiful colors! Mine has no duct tape. |
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| When tunnels (purple) and tunnel bags (teal) are new and beautiful. |
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| When Good Tunnels Go Bad... and should really have been disposed of much earlier. |
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| This is what USDAA broad jumps should look like. Mine are flat across the top and form an upside down arc instead of an ascending format. |
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| My current weaves (except I've removed all the colored tape). Weaves also take up a lot of space: 12 poles with 22" between. (And modern poles have 24" between. So, yep, 22 feet long.) |
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| Previous weaves. The pegs had screw bases so they could be put in line as usual or you could move them out onto the tab to one side or the other for training. Those little screw bases' threads rusted away, sometimes the entire screw base. |
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| Tika demonstrates an unauthorized use of weave poles. Rules prohibit dogs from lying on their sides and pulling themselves along the weaves by hooking paws over the poles. Such a rebel. |
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
Ack! I missed my Captive Prince anniversary date (3/16/20).
Reading background before CP:
Writing background:
Started pursuing fiction writing in mid-’80s, attended conferences and lectures and a year in a weekly critiquing class at a local JC, and started a writers’ group [in person, yes] and participated for years with my own things. Sent out story after story to markets--lots of rejections, but then started getting higher and higher awards in the Writers of the Future competition and some *nice personalized* rejections from editors.
Drove to Idaho from CA for a week-long writing workshop in1995. In 1998, spent 6 weeks in Seattle at Clarion West. I sold a couple of short stories and a poem to paying markets (pro and semipro). Then I discovered dog agility in 1996 and somehow that led to the end of my writing pursuits, to which I had devoted most of my attention for 15 years. Doh. But, still: Books. Fiction. Writing.
Footnote: Also started this blog to be about my dogs in dog agility. Pffft.
(Now I've done no agility since 2014. Nor writing since 1998... but wait for it...)
Early March, 2020: Finding images. Pandemic! While using Google image search for something like “captive prince chains”--Don’t ask--amazed and surprised how many images came up. Kept searching and searching for days--so many cool images! Including the Japanese cover for this book. Which hit all the right buttons for me.
March 16, 2020: Ordered the book Eventually it became clear, aha! the book is titled Captive Prince. Jackpot! Because I...was searching for captive princes... don’t ask. I read the synopsis, looked possible, and ordered only the first and only as an e-book. Because--what if it’s as badly written as 50 Shades of Gray? Or worse?
March 16/17, 2020: Reading reading reading can't stop! OMG it matched so so so many things in my own internal fictional world! and a bonus: amazing UST from the beginning, too. That I never knew that I even needed to have in fiction. OK, then.
Footnote: My internal fictional world: Hrm. might or might not ever discuss.
March 18, 2020: Ordered the next 2 ebooks as fast as my fingers could fly.
March 19, 2020: Fourth book! Desperate for more Captive Prince or other works by the author. ...Desperate barely begins to describe it. And then I found The Summer Palace and Other Stories. fourth book in the group. Ordered as an ebook. Read that, too.
March 20, 2020: Images like crazy. OMG searching again. Started collecting links to many many many of the online fan art, now that I knew what was going on. And so much of it excellent ... (but this was just fan stuff; how could it be excellent? do artists do this sort of thing just for fun?)...
And started reading the series again. And again. And again. And again and again and.... [link, brief mention at the beginning] then, reading things I started finding on Tumblr, and then...
April 22, 2020: Joined AO3. Because a link to this came up in Tumblr and it caught me; I wanted to read more. Fanfiction?! Writing quite good--storytelling, too [not the same thing]. How could that be? Do good writers do this sort of thing just for fun? This one, a modern AU (alternative universe) playing out the same three novels, yet keeping true to the original characters and story arc.
April 23, 2020: Tumblr and Twitter. I’ve had accounts for years, but have barely done anything in either--mostly just following links. On this day, I sent an online junkie friend a request for help in how to find people and things in both places because I was struggling and craving more art and more fiction and it had become clear that the world veritably teems with Captive Prince artifacts.
Footnote: Friend is not a drug junkie. She's an online junkie of sorts.
Most of Spring and Summer 2020: Reading more and more fanfic AND learning SO much about fanfic and about the vocabulary for that and for M/M fiction and for sex-related things and how to use and navigate AO3...so much to learn.
Footnote: The m/m fiction essay was written by a friend who is also quite a successful author. No self-publishing here that I'm aware of. A smart woman; always has been. I found it, as a writer, to be interesting on its own subject (who's qualified to write what).
May 4, 2020: My first Tumblr comment. Have been reading CaPri fanfic voraciously for a few weeks, and finding more in Tumblr. No interest in commenting; I just wanted to read and stay anonymous. Might have clicked Kudos. Or not. But on this date, I posted my first comment to someone's post. Somewhat reluctantly, because I wasn’t interested in discourse. But the fiction was so good. My 2nd comment on something wasn’t until July 2. After that, commented regularly.
May 7, 2020: Clothing! Found Forest Elf Fancies artist! And asked for this custom t-shirt from his existing Vere and Akielos designs. (Never have I had t-shirts for characters from specific fiction among the 250-ish that I remember ever having in my greedy little hands.)
May 18: Arrived! Yowza! I am all in now. ...As if full immersion, week after week, of nothing but Damen of Akielos and Laurent of Vere didn't already have me all in.
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| Yes, it's a selfie of me in a mirror, reflected in a mirror again. |
July 16, 2020: AO3 bookmarking. On this date, I created my first AO3 bookmark--a bunch, actually, probably of things I’d read. Erk, I'm falling unwillingly/willingly into another universe and community. Resented it a bit, but still--wanted to be able to re-find the stories.
On Tumblr, unknown 2020 date: "Follow"ed my first person. Wasn’t ever going to do more than a few, because: I already have FaceBook, thank you very much.
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| The Akielon Lion. Banner of the ancient-Greek-like Akielos, home of the Okton (sport of kings) and of Damianos (Damen), crown prince. (Should be gold on red, but since t-shirts are only one color...) |
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| The gold starburst on blue of the Crown Prince of 14th-century-France-ish Vere, Laurent, who makes an ally at castle Chastillon, home of the finest hunting for "sanglier, a northern breed that was larger, with longer tusks on the male." |
Dogs are insane.
Chip barked enthusiastically at the dogs next door (next door on both sides of the yard) through a solid wood fence (he'd look through knotholes until he saw them). Not quite in a fence-fighting way so much as tail wagging and fur not raised, but still very barky and I hated it. I ended up putting up a lightweight solid fence about six inches from the fence on one side to chill him down a bit. Worked fairly well--although only on that side.
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| Chip, peering through a knothole at the neighbor's yard and wagging his tail. |
I adopted Zorro after Chip had been here for over a year and while the don't-bark fence was still up, and Zorro never barked at the dogs next door, and Chip was more minimal. For months and months after Zorro arrived.
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| Dog window in fence! Awesome! |
Then, because I eventually took down the fence on that side because it was a nuisance and Chip's barking had calmed, Chip started barking at that side again as well as the other side. But Zorro--still months of nonparticipation.
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| The antibark fence along the side. It's black(ish) and behind things, so you almost don't notice it. |
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| This is what it is: Construction "chickenwire" with water-resistant paper. Eventually, the paper does deteriorate and it starts looking crappy. But it worked for no-bark! (Can't see it, can't smell it up close: can't bark at it.) |
And then one day when Chip was barking, Zorro plowed through Chip and took up ferocious fence-fighting barking, and from that day forward, it was Zorro who barked like crazy at the neighbor dogs, even if Chip weren't the initiator. (Chip would still do it, but Zorro would often push him out of the way and take over.)
Added April 11-- Just found this post from 3 years ago:
April 11, 2018: OK, for the nearly 3 years that Zorro has been here, he has not obsessively barked at the dogs next door. Chip has done that always given half a chance. So--why this week has Zorro decided to take over that job? 🙁 (Chip the tattle-tale, was just in here letting me know that Zorro was misbehaving. Interesting dynamics around here.)
[I hope that I have photos of Zorro barking at the fence. Haven't found any yet, but I have *so many* dogs-in-yard albums without any tagging on the photos. But in the process I rediscovered an album with a ton of photos of Chip running through his tunnels. Which I then spent an hour editing and posted on Facebook. (No idea whether that link will work for anyone.) Not barking related, but such happiness!]
Since Chip died last June, Z has shown less and less interest in barking at the fence, and the few times when he does, it's for just a couple of seconds and then he's done. Was he taking care of Chip? Was he just trying to prove that he was tougher than Chip? Did he think that was a game for the two of them to play?
But he does bark to let me know if a dangerous entity is approaching my door, or parking in my driveway, or if a monstrous delivery vehicle (say, Amazon, UPS, ...) is threatening us anywhere on the street.
Dog minds are endlessly fascinating.
