11.02.09

Will videos work on here? :-)

Posted in News at 22:26 by nikki

First off, thanks for the comments guys!

Thought I’d try to put a couple new videos on here to see if it works. I’m curious, there’s a separate button for videos so I just have to try it. Hehe I want to know how long it takes to upload and how it shows up in the blog. Can’t help my curiosity it’s inherited from my Nana. *Well it does seem that it is NOT working for me at least so I’ll just have to upload to YouTube and Rúnar showed me how to embed it to here from there so it’s working in a sense.

Here is a cute video of Skella’s version of fetch.

We haven’t taught her to retrieve yet but we do throw toys as a game at times (I know we should teach the former retrieve first!). It’s something her former owners did alot I heard because Skella is a total nut ball for playing fetch. We´re working on her NOT barking with excitement and that went really well at this session. The first video I took she was barking non-stop until she realized that while she barked nothing was being thrown. :-Þ  We´ve been working on hold/give as a totally separate thing at home which is our first step in retrieve training and soon we will put a cue on it. She used to run away and hold the toys so tight and would jump out of the way if you came towards her to try to grab ahold of the object/toy, there was no way she was giving them up. So our very first line of business is to teach her to hold all over again from scratch and so I’ve been working on that. Strangely enough I ended up having to shape her to hold because if I held the toy in my hand and showed it to her she wouldn’t take it, she only grabbed toys away from the other dogs or if something was thrown she’d run after and take it. Very typical dog behaviour of course.  She’s getting better at the more formal hold now since she’s been getting reinforcement for giving or should I say at the moment it’s still pretty much the unconscious act of  dropping it when I click her for taking it and we are already up to taking it from the ground and holding. Tonight she managed to go into the room and find the ball (I have it hidden between sessions but it was in her reach this time unfortunately) that I have been training her with and she brought it to me but again she would not let go because I didn’t have the clicker on me and I didn’t want to give a cue she doesn’t know (although I made the mistake of saying it once without the correct response) so we traded it for a piece of food. Like I say we have a bit of work left to get it under stimulus control but I think it will go fine. She loves training.

We had a great visit before the weekend from a few very lovely ladies! Terry was here from USA to attend the ISIC meeting and our friend Brynja called to ask if they could come and see me and the dogs. It was short notice and I got a shock because the house was a mess so spent hours on whirlwind gear to get it half decent. I was very excited to get to meet her, Terry’s female Rassa is expecting puppies out of Klói’s brother Kelikátur and it was great she got a chance to see both Birta and Klói in person. Always fun when you can actually meet related dogs especially a parent because you have a better idea of what to expect.

Klói surprised us, he just loved this wonderful person to bits and spent every second he could sucking up to her for attention which is not really something he does with strangers too often. Although he really and truly reminded me of his grandma Freyja this time because she loved everyone she met and so I saw her character in him that I don’t always get a chance to see. I know that he is a great judge of character and that’s a good thing in my mind in terms of me trusting his judgement even though it can be embarrassing when he ignores people that really want to talk to him. Oops, lalala we have to make excuses sometimes that he is a bit shy. Sssshhh don’t tell. We really and truly enjoyed their company, I’m so thankful to Brynja for coming. I haven’t seen Brynja for awhile either and so it was great to meet somewhere other than a dog show when you don’t get any time to talk together. Brynja loved my heart dog Freyja and she almost took her herself as a puppy, it was fun to see that Brynja’s daughter and Birta Freyja turned out to have an instant attraction too. Birta was doing her normal “I’m so cute, look at me” act and it melted everyone as it usually does (she is typical of her mother’s love of strangers but Freyja was a little bit calmer by nature). Birta always cries with delight when people first enter the house. Birta and Soley (Brynja’s daughter) played together whenever Skella wasn’t around (she doesn’t like anyone else to play, center of attention!) and I actually thought when I saw them together that darn too bad we didn’t think to ask her to show Birta when she was in her prime. I said I thought it was sad that she wasn’t shown more (twice I think we showed her and she placed with champion quality) and they did say that they didn’t think she was too old to show and that they think she is beautiful. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.

I was really hoping to see another good friend of mine that I genuinely miss. Liv is here from Norway for the meeting and she owns Hófi’s father Sámur but has never met Hófi. I haven’t seen her for years and was looking forward to getting to see her because she was going to come on Thursday. Unfortunately I didn’t hear from her, I waited for a phone call because I didn’t know where she was staying. No doubt every minute of their time was accounted for with learning about the Lathunden program on Thursday and Friday and then the meeting all weekend with dinner together etc. She isn’t a young girl so no doubt she needed rest too! I’m so sad that I missed seeing her AGAIN because last time she was here for ISIC I didn’t get to see her either.  I’m hoping she didn’t call our home phone while we weren’t home on Friday evening. We ended up having to help clean Rúnar’s mother’s house because the new tenants moved in on Saturday. We thought we’d only be an hour or so but ended up being there all evening with his sister cleaning and packing. All of us were so tired on Saturday that we just felt like doing nothing.

However Rúnar and I went to the store and got some training supplies to hopefully start training urban tracking using Steve White’s HITT (Hydration Intensified Tracking Training) method. I found out that PVC pipe in Iceland is really expensive, I got it to save my back when putting hotdogs on the track since I’ve been really bad lately and can’t bend or walk too much without my back locking and horrible pain. I must get that checked out, it’s not funny any more. I also got 6 shallow glass jars on sale that we put a hole in the top and I am using for scent discrimination. I do have loads of glass jars in the cupboards because I’m just like Nana, can’t throw anything away, but I needed to have 6 the same and shallow enough so that the dog doesn’t have to lift his head up too high and since these were on sale…well now we have to really save. Tomorrow Rúnar is going to Reykjavík after work to get the winter tires they didn’t have the right size in Selfoss when he went today, that means he has to buy more expensive ones. Darn it,  so no more wasting money on silly training stuff or things we don’t need for a while. Hehe

Well we cheated too by pigging out on goodies on Halloween, since we don’t get trick or treaters in Iceland we just have to eat candy ourselves. Oh my goodness did I wake up with a sugar overload hangover the next day, felt like my feet weighed a ton. I swear sugar hangover is just like an alcohol hangover from what I remember of my old party days. I keep telling myself stay away from sugar it’s not good for me but do I, NO. Rúnar just laughs at me and when I ask him for some chocolate or candy he says you know what you said last time, I know I should listen to him but he caves too sometimes. We are quite the pair.

Back to the glass jars, I know Klói has a natural ability to use his nose although I did try a bit with him and he wasn’t really getting it, he uses his paws too much thought he was supposed to target them with his paw. I’m gonna try discrimination exercises with toys first with him before we go onto the glass jars.  I tried Frigg just for fun because I know she loves to do stuff (although her sight is failing as well as her hearing we’ve noticed) she still loves the sound of the clicker, it cuts through somehow, the sheer tone of it I guess. Anyway, Frigg was so frustrated and ONLY wanted to paw, scratch and throw the jars around the room, she is a cross-over dog and often will still resort to frustration when she isn’t getting it. Of course I have to take some of the blame myself, I guess I should work harder on tiny increments with her and practice my timing. She was ruining the cardboard stand that I’d taken all night making and I couldn’t have that so we gave up quickly. She is better at basketball anyway so I decided that this was something I could let Hófi try because she isn’t a big paw user and she turned out to be AWESOME, she loves learning. I hope in future I can actually get Rúnar to make a wooden box for me to use so I won’t be so afraid of “ignoring” (with hope of extinction) the pawing behaviour of the other dogs.

So here is a training video of Hófi doing her first session of scent discrimination, there are two scented jars and one not. I was using vanilla as the scent. And at the moment the non-scent jar has a gold lid. I was taking the video for myself as a training log, didn’t plan to share it. I wanted to see what I could do differently, my own timing mistakes etc. I had videos of her first introduction to the scented jar on it’s own, nose touching it in my hand and we had already started transferring the cue sit to scent cue but I went too fast with that so back to the nose touch alone. I think I might go with a down instead as she has always tended to back up a few steps before she sits when she gets the cue, don’t know why. She’s always done that since the time I got her from the quarantine station who knows what she might have “learned” there and why? I haven’t taken the time to teach her a new sit, maybe I should do that! But this was the video that I thought was worth sharing as you can see it was heading in a bit of the wrong direction for a little bit due to my off timing, I just didn’t want to NOT click her for being near the scent jar. I wanted to start by clicking for anything I got at first and got her pushing the stand a couple times, my bad but we quickly worked our way out of that. I did make a timing mistake or two not to mention clicked for the gold lid by accident but I am pleased that I managed to shape the nose touch back with my timing, instead of the paw touch. I surprised myself there. Hehe Can’t take all the credit though, I swear Hófi is the easiest dog to teach.

My Mom has arrived home safe and sound so I was glad to hear that and I’ll phone her later tonight to hear all the news from her trip. For the moment I can’t remember anything else but I’m sure I will as soon as I stop thinking about it. Hahaha.

A couple happenings some might have seen on the news in other countries. McDonald’s in Iceland was closed this weekend, they had been very strict that all ingredients they served were imported so it became their demise when the kroner fell and no hope in sight for a quick recovery of the economy here.  I often wondered why their burgers tasted so “foreign”. Haven’t eaten their food for YEARS now.  :-Þ  I’m quite happy with the fact that McDonald’s is gone because let’s face it it’s not the healthiest food you can get, many might have seen the videos on Youtube about the 4 year old food from them that doesn’t rot, horrible stuff. No wonder people in the western world have all kinds of diseases and cancers, it’s what wer’re eating…no question about it. Anyway, the guy that had the franchise changed the name of the restaurant to Metro and will be buying ingredients in Iceland creating jobs here and cutting costs for them. He had said it was the only way they could survive.

Another story in the news on the weekend was a hunter that was accidentally shot in both legs by his hunting buddy. He’s fine but it reminded me of one famous American. Hehe

One of our most famous comedians and actors Flosi Ólafsson died recently just a day before an interview with him was to be printed in one of the newspapers. He was 80 years old and was in a car accident, although he wasn’t seriously hurt he died in hospital just as they were thinking of letting him go home, it came as a shock to everyone. He was one of the main instigators of the Joke Room type humour here in Iceland and will be missed.

Permalink