Morpheus & Abu

Some videos from Morpheus's October play date with his brother/litermate/movie star, Abu. :) (Yes, that's my dog trying to pee in the pool in the last video)!

Walk the Line

Teachers in Tacoma have been on strike for 4 days. Today we picketed at CAB (the Central Administration Building) downtown Tacoma. It was the first day that we all picketed together at a central location, instead of at our individual schools. We had a rally at Wright Park afterward. Here are a few videos from today's experience.

Nosework Demo in Wright Park, Tacoma

This morning we took Morpheus down to Wright Park for a nosework demo, at the Bark for Life event. (a fundraiser and awareness event for treating and preventing canine cancer). Mike handled Morpheus today so I could get some videos of him doing what he does best. Videos of each of his 5 searches are posted below.

Morpheus did a fabulous job today! On our drive down to Tacoma, I was crossing my fingers and just hoping he wouldn't pee in the search area. Not only did he NOT pee in the search area - he ignored all of the many distractions (including tons of dogs barking & playing flyball at the other end of the park - and a lot of dogs and owners hanging out right outside of the search area to watch the demos), and got right to work. In fact, the longest video below is only 32 seconds long. The video of his last search is only 4 seconds long - and that's including the time it took Mike to reward him with a treat for finding it!

The woman speaking on the microphone throughout the videos is Diana. She runs the center where we take nosework classes. We take classes with her colleague Doug (who wasn't present at the field trip today) - but Diana was overwhelmingly impressed with Morpheus's skills today too! Diana first met Morpheus at his very first class - where he came right in for his first search and (not knowing what the game was yet) tried to pee on a cone instead. He's sure come a long way since then! I'm so proud of my dog! :) Enjoy the videos!

Pigments

At long last... here are some photos of my first pigments.

The weld started out looking like this:

...and now it looks like this!

and the last two photos are my first madder experiment. (it started out as dried root). i'm still missing the bit of info that would get me the nice rose color... but I did get a nice earthy orange out of it. I couldn't decide which of the two photos came out better... so you get both.

videos from Mexico

we hiked to the top of the mountain to the lighthouse (El Faro) on our second day. these were a few of the butterflies we found at the top.

the atm we used in Mazatlan was awesome. every time you finish a transaction, it plays a little song to celebrate! Unfortunately I recorded it sideways, and I can't figure out how to rotate it. oops. (nope, you won't find Mike's pin number on the video - i started recording after he put it in).

we had dinner at one of the restaurants on the ocean, and watched the surfers at sunset. you can see them in the waves in this video.

i loved how the waves hit the rocks

live music in Plaza Machado after dinner

it started raining after breakfast on our last morning in Mazatlan. it just suddenly started pouring rain - right about the time we wanted to catch a taxi. i tried to get video of it, but i didn't feel like the video was quite capturing it.... which is why there are so many of them.

we had a couple of hours at the airport, which was enough time to watch a plane come in... here are a few videos of it. it isn't the plane we took back to the states (in fact it isn't even the airline we took), but it was fun to watch.

The 4th

Mike and I walked Morpheus over to Lake Meridian to watch the fireworks. I took a few short videos of the fireworks. Enjoy!

Nosework Class

Morpheus is nearing the end of his Nosework III class, and is currently working on more difficult searches with a Q-tip saturated with birch scent. The challenges he worked with in class today included putting the Q-tip inside a closed box without holes, and hiding the Q-tip in tight areas where he might need to ask his person for help. He has done a number of box searches before, but until today the boxes had holes in them to let the scent out a little better - and so today we added the challenge of no holes. He's also done searches before where he needed to request help to get at the scent, and that is one that he really needs to practice, because he's more of an independent searcher who likes to do it all on his own.

I took video today while Mike handled Morpheus. He was a little goofy and off task during his first search, but after that he did better. He rests between each search while other dogs in the class take their turns searching.