The Very Face of Terror...

We've just discovered that Jax is terribly afraid of brushes. If I set it in the middle of the room, he will slink around the edges of the room eyeballing it carefully. At first I thought he just didn't like the sound of the bristles, but his fear seems stronger than that.

A Good Situation...

"I've got a pretty good pocketknife and a pretty good dog and three or four good thoughts." - from A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry.

Not a one of those is trivial.

Class Issues

While pondering a recent automotive breakdown in the family, H pointed out that we have an interesting predicament: we've been going to school for far to long to know many mechanics, but we've also been going to school for far too long to be able to afford a mechanic.

Since we're not anticipating the situation changing much in the near future, I get to learn. It's better that way anyhow. What's slightly ridiculous is that when I was growing up (around folks that know about fixing engines, etc.) I was too busy reading books. Now, when I'm supposed to be reading books, I'm learning to fix things.

Don't tell me that the life of a grad student is intuitive. It's generally just the opposite.

Falling off the Wagon

What happened?!

So, the last two days Jax has been inexplicably (for me anyway) neurotic about his crate. Again, he's fine sleeping in his crate if the door is open, and especially if we are in the room. However, for the last two nights he has positively refused to be left alone in the close crate. By "positively refused" I mean his stubbornness has even exceeded mine. After making sure he had emptied all the requisite parts before bed, I put him in the crate with no excuse to whine. Then I listened to him go through cycles of whining, barking, moaning, etc. completely determined that he would just have to quiet down and go to sleep - that I wasn't going to let him out on his terms. Ugh. Two hours later (this is 2am), I relent. I waited for a brief quiet spell and interjected a "Good boy, Jax" for the quietness, which usually provides a brief hiatus from the cacophony, and then went to sleep on the couch. In less than a minute he was asleep in the back of his crate.

What now? We've had him for 3 weeks now with no noticeable improvement in crate behavior. I'm failing. And Jax is getting fat on treats.

Handsome Dog, Doting Owner

Sometimes I'm goofy: And sometimes curious:

These are some of my favorite things:

And these are some of the flowers that I didn't eat:

And this is the best time, play time:

A Heel Fan

In the last couple of days Jax has shown tremendous improvement on his "heel". We've graduated from working in the back yard. We can now walk down to the end of the block and back, doing a few stop-and-goes and figure eights along the way with Jax maintaining a heel position despite the smells and noises of a residential city block. Of course, he needs a reminder every once in a while.

And again, I'm amazed at how he learns. We've done this "heel" exercise on the sidewalk in front of the house for a couple of days now. It's a stepping stone to being able to take him on walks around the neighborhood that will be pleasurable for us both. Today, I decided to mix it up a little and walk through a neighboring yard in one section instead of using the sidewalk. It became immediately apparent that Jax associated "heel" with being on the sidewalk. That is, on the command "Jax, heel" he headed for the sidewalk. It's hilarious to see what he actually associates with the command. Training him seems almost like a slow specialization procedure: When he gets praised he associates all of the current situation with that praise. Then, we refine his association by slowly whittling away all those other associations by varying the environment while praising the behavior. It makes sense from a low-order logic point of view, but I wonder if it's really what goes on. Does his little brain take a snapshot of the situation surrounding the praise (and I do mean snapshot, timing is critical), or are there just things that he notices?

Meanwhile, it still sucks to be around the house when he's confined to his crate for very long with no one in the room. Efforts to repeatedly leave the house for short periods (1min or less) before returning to praise his calm behavior (while still leaving him in the crate for a minute or two as we wander around the house) have yielded little fruit. He's okay for about 35 sec after we leave, but there seems to be a psychological barrier for him to get over before we can extend this time.

So, now I sort of wonder about the tough love approach. Does he just have to get over it? If we leave him at home regularly for an hour or two in his crate, will he figure it out? After the strange associations with the crate door (see "Beginnings..."), I'm careful to make him stay when I open the door, and even to make him get back in the crate and stay a few times (with door both open and closed on different iterations) immediately after letting him out to make sure he understands who's in charge and that being in the crate calmly on command gets him praise (and chunks of ham - again, he probably notices one more than the other). We don't want bad associations with the crate. Or, worse associations anyway.

Oh! and last night he performed a flawless sit-stay in his crate while we ate dinner (in the same room). More progress!

Finally, Jax is gaining weight rapidly. Unofficially, he's now close to 23 lbs, or about 5 lbs heavier than he was 14 days ago. We have to go back to the vet next week for vaccinations, so we'll find out just how much of a chow hound he is (it's the treats, really). It's just puppy-fat ;) When he gets a little older we'll be running together 3 mi or so a day. The fat won't last.

The Furnace of Humiliation

The heading comes from one of the readings for the feast of St. Mark (today).

For gold is tested in the fire,
and those found acceptable, in the furnace of humiliation. Ecclus. 2:5

That's fantastic! Those found acceptable are tried in the furnace of humiliation. Apply it to the death of Christ. Apply it to Christ's body, the church. It's a challenging word.

Speaking to a conversation that I had with a friend yesterday, we are all humiliated before God by our own sin. We're humiliated precisely because we are conscious of it, that we are powerless before it. We are humiliated because the possibility of the kingdom seems always before us, and yet we find ways to subvert its coming. But it is important that we are not paralyzed by our humiliation. The gold is not burned up in the fire, nor does the humiliation overcome us. Perhaps there is redemptive value in suffering humiliation, even the humiliation that we suffer before God when we cannot be perfect even as our father, the humiliation of knowing that we made the wrong choices. The embarrassing family member that we kept at a distance. Broken promises to a spouse. The pleasures of fine dining while the homeless are just outside the door.

The furnace of humiliation refines the hope of a contrite heart.

Trust in him, and he will help you;
make your ways straight, and hope in him. (v.6)

It is the interest on our debt which, having already been paid, makes us love more. It is a vehicle for grace.

John Chrysostom would say that all the choices we make for the easy road in this life will be countered by difficulties encountered in the next. There is some hope, still, in the redemptive possibilities of knowing our sin and being humiliated by it.

For the Lord is compassionate and merciful;
he forgives sins and saves in time of distress. (v.11)

Conversations out of context...

I hear a lot of funny lines out of context by virtue of taking public transportation. Today's favorite comes from a 19 year old:

"Dude, globalization sounds easy, but it's really not."

To start a blog...

To blog for me is a stretch. I am, well, intermittently paranoid about the diffusion of personal information, if not also skeptical about impersonal monologues (it might just be narcissistic, oh well). With regard to information, you'll probably notice a scarcity of identifying info (unless I drop my guard). No names, except Jax who has already been outed. I don't mind putting his picture up too, since he's in disguise anyway.

What will be the content of the blog? Could be anything, but the regular visitor will notice pet topics ;) Of course, Jax will be a popular one, as I try to channel the Monks of New Skete in our training regimen. No doubt, the dog will teach me much - and I will share. In addition, I'll probably write about theology, poor people, and science as these are all parts of my daily life. It will not be as neat and tidy as the "science and theology of poor people." Rather, it will be more of an ongoing narrative with many loci for orientation. Jax, the poor, modern science, and Christian theology will all have to be read together, and somehow get along. These many loci, the intertextuality of the narrative, should help to keep me honest. There is no privileged position to occupy after all, no moving the Earth with a rational lever (if we are to meld Archimedes and the Enlightenment in order to say something post-Enlightenment).

Welcome to all you anonymous souls. I hope that your anonymity is fleeting.

Beginnings...

This will be a very long post, to catch up on Jax so far...

On April 5, after months - no, years for me! - of expectation, longing, and recently much husband&wife bargaining, H and I adopted a 3 month old retriever mix from a local shelter. His name at the time, for which neither of us harbored great affection, was "Buster Brown." While we agreed that his name had to change, we also found that we lacked much common ground with regard to favorable names. I wanted to name him after an Old Testament prophet (Amos, Ezekiel, etc.). H wanted to name him "Honey-cheeks" or some such nonsense. With some help from our Minnesotan friends who accompanied us on the adoption trip, we settled on Jackson, or Jax for short, during the short car trip home.

Jax came house-trained, a plus. But he did not come crate-trained (much more on that later). We did not have high expectations of a rescue dog. In truth we were only really shopping for temperament. We wanted a pooch that was outgoing and social, friendly but not domineering, playful (for me) but willing to cuddle (for H). So far, I think we got what we were looking for. Jax has not yet met a dog or human that he is not content to play with or gnaw on (however the mood strikes him). And as it turns out, beyond our expectations, he is actually a pretty smart puppy. At 3.5 months old, he knows "sit" and "down" very well. He will "stay" on command easily for 1-2 minutes even when humans leave his sight. Tonight he even held a stay for 5 minutes+ while watching H and me eat our dinner in front of him. Very promising. When I say "crate" he bounds ever so awkwardly at top speed into his crate from wherever we are in the house and promptly sits in expectation. He has been known to stop so suddenly in his crate, from so great a speed, that his bed accordions into the back of the crate sending him into a skid. He is learning to "heel" and under the right conditions does so very nicely, but this one is still in progress. We work on these daily, ideally in three sessions (6am, 12pm, and 6pm) of 10-15min each, but often we only get to it twice a day.

Jax has three speeds: "idle" - sleeping too soundly to be woken by a freight train, "slow"- wandering around the house looking either for something to eat or for someone to cuddle, and "demon possessed" - running hell for leather from one end of the house to the other grabbing some forbidden material or other (blankets, shoes, underwear, and the occasional plunger) in his mouth in the short time it takes to reverse direction. In this light it really does not matter how you spell it, but the dog needs to be exercised/exorcised every day if anyone is to live with him.

Regarding walks: At first I took him with me every morning on my walk up to the church for morning prayer. Unfortunately, two barriers have ended this until further training permits. First, Jax becomes very anxious when left alone (more later), and listening to a dog whine is not particularly conducive to prayer. Second, his walking-on-leash skills deteriorated rapidly from a continually-stopping-to-smell-the-world walk on a generally slack leash to an ooh-ooh-I-know-what-smell-comes-in-a-hundred-yards-Let's-go! bout of uncomfortable pulling at the leash, all in only a few days. So, he's banned from that particular walk until he learns leash skills. To my delight though, and perhaps finding out against better judgment, he behaves very well in the open ground when off-leash. He comes without fail when recalled (thusfar), and generally walks within a few feet of me. This may just be puppy-ness, and may change as his independence grows. We will see. For now H takes him for a nice long walk in the morning, and we play in the yard in the afternoon after our obedience session and maybe go for an after dinner walk.

The great difficulty is his anxiety about being left alone. We were told when we adopted him that he was "partially crate-trained" which translates to "mostly not crate-trained" but we didn't know that at first. So on the first night we had him, we put him in his crate in the kitchen and prepared for bed. Chaos ensued as Jax the lovely cuddle dog went totally bonkers. Incidentally, that was the first time we found sure evidence of a beagle in his gene pool. Hint: think voice box. So, to compromise for the first night, I slept on the couch and he slept on the floor near by. The next day we moved the crate into the den (a more comfortable space for him, as we spend more time there and it's warmer), and proceeded to ease him into the crate mentality.

I went to PetSmart, bought him a proper bed for his crate (pet owners are suckers) and a toy that could be filled with peanut butter for distraction. We got him attached to the bed by leaving it out in the middle of the floor where he normally lies anyway. He took to the synthetic sheepskin quickly. The next step was to put it in the crate. Once we convinced him that the solution to this problem was not to drag his bed back out of the crate (comical moments... when we continuously repeat the cycle for 20 minutes or more of me putting the bed in the crate and him dragging it right back out), but rather to sleep IN the crate he was happy enough. Like I said, he's a smart dog. On the second night he slept in his crate, again with me on the couch nearby. The object, from my perspective, was to keep him calm and comfortable and slowly move out of his sight. This worked for a while, except that the further I slept from him (first the guest room which adjoins the den, and then our bedroom which is down the hall) the more times he woke up in the night and had to go outside.

A warning sign that perhaps I did not heed early enough was his whining and initial anxiety when the crate door was closed. I thought I could overcome this by calming him down verbally until he lay down and then I would go to bed. But then we just got into a cycle of doing this routine every time he woke up and realized he was alone. Each time, I would take him outside, let him "eliminate" (as the literature calls it, although his command for this is "Jax, go pee!"), and then go back in for the crating and calming. Ugh! The worst was the few nights that, after he went to bed at 10pm, we got up at 12am, 2am, 4am, and then finally for good at 6am (H told me later that day that he slept soundly all morning. Little bastard!). To my chagrin his anxiety in the crate has been growing, in part I think as an amplification of his pre-existing anxiety over being left alone - because we always put him in the crate when we leave the house for extended periods.

Then the other night I learned just how carefully I have to watch what we teach the pup. I was working on putting him in his crate, closing the door, and rewarding him when he was calm. But for some reason, I could not get him to "stay" while I was opening the door to let him out (such was his anxiety after even instantaneous closing and reopening). Then it got even more bizarre. After putting him into the crate, having him "sit" and "stay", if I even touched the OPEN crate door, he came out of his "stay" and walked out, not in a hurried-anxious-"Get me out of here" way, but in a "This is what happens next" way. Somehow we taught him that touching the crate door meant it was time to come out. Presumably, this is because every time we approach the crate while he is in it and start fiddling with the door it is for him to come out. This, despite my trying to have him "stay" while I open the door. The anxiety seems to have blocked those attempts.

That's probably enough for this posting. While Jax continues to be a great dog, we've got to figure out how to get him comfortable with being alone. In light of the above crate issues, we've returned to square one, and we're relearning how to go in the crate and "stay" until released regardless of crate door position. I'm glad he's smart, or this could be tedious.