Cyborgification

SUMMARY: Another pointless exercise.

Are these interpretations accurate? You decide:

Get Your Cyborg Name
	Get Your Cyborg Name

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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)

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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?

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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!)

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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.)

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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

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