Women Over Fifty

In my last post I said I was sick.  Sick with a nasty upper respiratory infection.  I could get around if it was nothing too strenuous, but I felt terrible and I needed a lot of sleep.  So, while at Uluru I asked at the desk if there was a doctor.

I was told, yes, there was a doctor, but he was flying out after lunch.  The park at Uluru is spread out in a large circle.  You can walk around the circle or go through the middle, but it’s going to be a distance from one thing to another.  The distance to the doctor wasn’t within my abilities at the time so I asked about the bus that circled the park periodically.

A bus was coming soon, they reassured me.  An hour later and no bus and I was in tears.  I feel awful, I told them.  I want to see the doctor, but it’s too far to walk.  After trying to convince me it wasn’t all that far, they finally found an employee to take me there.

When I walked in, I discovered this was the fabled Her Royal Majesty’s Flying Doctor Service of Australia.  (I may have the exact title wrong.)  I was the last one on the doctor’s list that day.   I decided to pay with my Visa card since I had no idea what this visit would cost.

In the waiting room there was a woman waiting to be flown out with the doctor to a hospital.  I was fascinated.  I had heard of the Z position people assume when they have appendicitis, but I’d never seen it.  Apparently it’s the most comfortable position for the patient.  She was on her knees on the floor with her head in her companion’s lap looking very sick.  I felt awfully sick, but I knew it wasn’t close to what she was feeling.

I got my time with the doctor who gave me antibiotics and prescribed lots of liquids and bed rest.  I could have told him that, but he held the key to the antibiotics I needed.

It was back to the motel for a rest before taking the bus out to meet my husband.  It felt good to just crash for a while.

At the time I was a Kaiser Permanente patient.   I knew there wasn’t a Kaiser hospital within reach and I wondered if they would reimburse me for the bill.  I was glad now that I had used my Visa because they paid the doctor in Australian money and I paid them back in US money.  Both sums were on the statement.  By providing the receipt I got from the doctor and my Visa bills, I was able to point out to Kaiser that no hospital was even close, that calling in for permission to be treated at a non-Kaiser facility was not practical, and that they should pay for my treatment.

I’d heard so many negative things about Kaiser, but in this they were totally fair and paid the entire bill.

You’ve already read about my going to Uluru to wait for my husband.

Now I have to tell you that I’m suffering from a strained muscle and must opt out of blogging for a few days.  Wish me luck because I will suffer from not being able to blog.  I’ll be gone for up to a week.  After that we’ll talk about our trip to Cairns, the Great Barrier Reef, and Karanda.

Meanwhile, you can continue to read about Australia by letting Roz tell you about life in Australia today, as she lives it.

Marilynne

We trained for months so we could climb Uluru (Ayers Rock).  Now we were in the bus and headed there.  We stopped at an outlook so people could see Uluru from the distance.  It looked like a giant loaf of red bread waiting for some mega giant to come and eat.  It was beautifully shaped and rose from the flat desert floor.  Everyone took pictures, of course.

I’m going to have to insert the pictures here long before I write about them.  Just have a look and come back to read.

Back into the bus for another bit, then the driver had an announcement.  It seemed that this particular bus didn’t go to Uluru.  He told us he would be dropping us off and the Uluru bus would come and pick us up.  The catch was he had talked to the driver, and it would be about 15 minutes before he arrived.  Our bus, however, had to continue north - without us.

So we found ourselves - about 12 people and our luggage - standing at the intersection in the middle of the Outback with no civilization in sight.  At first we clustered together, then a few brave ones began walking about.  It was so quiet there.  There was nothing much to look at.  We were all aware of how alone we were.  So, when our bus did arrive to take us there, we were all eager to get on it and go.

There is a huge park a few miles from Uluru run by the government.  We had reservations at a medium-priced motel.  Others in our group were back packing and staying at a hostel there.   I had a problem.  I was sick.  I just wanted to stay in bed with my cold pills and my Coke (it cut the phlegm) and be miserable.  All this planning and I didn’t want to go anywhere.

We went to a barbecue for supper.  The backpackers were there, since it was all you can eat.  We had our choice of meat (beef, kangaroo, ostrich, crocodile, to name what we remember).  Then there was all sorts of other stuff to go with it. I mention this because we had never thought of some of this as meat.  I couldn’t eat the kangaroo because I had recently been charmed by them.  I think I chose ostrich, which was tasty.  My husband says he later wished he’d tasted the crocodile.

It was obvious I wasn’t climbing “The Rock” the next day.  I was really sick and my husband offered to stay with me.  That was so sweet.  His big thing, his big to do in Australia was to climb Uluru.  I told him to plan getting on the climber’s bus.  He was going. I told him I’d take the bus out there to meet him on his way back and I did.

So, he left early the next morning for the climb.  I went to the desk and the motel and asked if there was a doctor.  There was, they told me, the Flying Doctor was in town today.  (More about the Flying Doctor tomorrow.)

I went out to Uluru to meet my husband.  I hoped to see him on the rock,

but I didn’t make him out until he was nearly down.  To pass the time while I waited, I decided to walk as far around the rock as I had the strength to do.

Even up close, there is the desert and there is the rock rising out of it, and nothing much in the way of transition between the two.  Where the rock and desert met I found a small pool of water.  This pool, the signs said, was not to be touched by anyone but the aborigines and that meant us.  It was the only natural water for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles and it had been used by the aborigines for time untold.  Uluru was a religious place for the aborigines and signs told us that they would prefer we not climb the rock because it had religious significance for them.  However, if we chose to climb the rock, be aware that the climb was strenuous and there was no place to rest until you got to the top.

I had been reading a book about a woman who was kidnapped (or so she said) by the aborigines and taken by them on a walkabout.  I can’t remember the title, but it was fascinating reading.  One of the things she noted was that aborigines were not bothered by the flies that so plague the tourists at Uluru.  She was right about the flies.  I bought a had with a netting on it, and that helped, but it was hot and uncomfortable.   In the book, this woman said that the flies in the outback are different from the flies in other places.  She said that these flies are harvesting the dead skin and sweat from your body.  She said that if you let them clean you, they’d leave you alone.

I tried it!  I waited until I was good and sweaty, then closed my eyes, took off my hat and netting and let them at it.  It felt like dozens of tiny scrapers on my face.  It tickled.  It was an adventure of the outback sort. I batted them away from my ears and nose, but otherwise I let them work until I could feel they were losing interest.  They hardly touched me after that.  When I started watching the Park people, I saw that they too weren’t bothered by the flies.  I suspected it wasn’t Bug Begone.

If you look carefully at the picture just above and the one above it, you can see the wind channels carved from the rock by the wind.  If you think a bit, you’ll realize that these carvings  were done by the wind throwing bits of sand at the rock for eons.  They’re large and small.  It seems like once the wind makes an opening, it keeps working away at the rock.

I met my husband as he came down.  He said he’d taken pictures of Japanese tourist at the top with their camera and they had taken a few of him with his camera.  International cooperation.  He said that the wind had worn channels in the top so that it was hard to walk on the top.  Pictures of that tomorrow.

Marilynne

To me Coober Pedy sounded like a fantasy.  Mining for opals underground and living there as well?  You’ve got to be kidding.  I put it on my list of places to visit when we traveled to Australia.

So, our Best Western host picked us up and took us to his underground motel.  Uh Oh!  I was going to be living underground myself?  I had some misgivings until we drove up to the motel.  It looked - - - interesting.

Our host explained that the same rock grinders they used in the mines were used to dig holes into the side of the cliff to use as hotel rooms.  The holes in the left of the picture are waiting for future expansion.  Our motel room/apartment is about the center of the picture where the car is.  We had two bedrooms, a sitting-dining room, a kitchen and a bathroom.  The kitchen and bathroom were in the front, our host explained so it was easy to bring in water and sewer.  The entrance to the room was shaded.  It was comfortably cool inside.

I had been mostly awake all night.  I didn’t quibble.  I ate my breakfast and crashed in one of the bedrooms.  I woke up hungry and roaring to see this place.  Unfortunately, the restaurants were a good walk downtown.  Our host drove us there and promised to pick us up later.  Sorry, I don’t remember what I ate.

Some of the shopping was above ground, but a large percentage of it was underground like our hotel.  There was a large underground hotel that looked posh and I supposed it was.  Inside there were corridors lined with shops.  Residents here didn’t even have to go outside in the heat!

Something was nagging me as I returned outside.  Was that a path leading up over the hotel?  Indeed it was.  I followed the path to the top of the hill where I could see all the vents and things for the hotel.  You see, the thing that keeps the indoor living areas comfortable is a system of vents up to the surface.  Underground there is always a pleasant flow of air and these vents are the reason it works.

The vents showing in the picture belong to that hotel.  Isn’t that something!

I also toured a home while I was in town.  A couple would show their home for a few dollars.  They seemed to love showing me around.  Like our hotel, the bathroom and kitchen were in the front.  Unlike my hotel, their house stretched along the front edge of the rock, being inside the rock, but close enough to the outdoors to allow for windows cut into the rock.  I wasn’t tempted to have one like it, but it was nice being able to see where people lived.

We took a tour of the opal mines.  I wanted to see how they dug the opals out of the ground.  Having been underground several times already, I was wanting to see a place where work was still going on.  The next picture shows the tunnels of an opal mine.

We entered this one from ground level.  We also saw just holes with ladders leading down indicating that there was a working mine in that hole.  It must be a problem trying to not fall in with all those holes dotting the landscape.

Our guide pointed out how essential it was to leave supports for the rock above you.  He said that no matter if you saw a huge chunk of opal  buried in those supports you couldn’t dig it out or you risked having the roof cave in on you.  After that I imagined untold riches hiding in those supports.  They have a formula for deciding where to leave the supports and how big around they should be.

We also saw a mine where the miner was living in the spaces he’d already mined out.  He had lots of rooms, some cunningly shaped and decorated by his own hand.  The wall paintings and decorations left me wondering if he’d inhaled too much opal dust.  He was good hearted about letting us wander about in his tunnels though.

At the end of the tour we were allowed to go through some mine tailings and look for opals.  Our guide told us what to look for and said we had permission to scavenge.  My sensible brain told me that tourist groups dug in these tailings daily, but the other part of my brain wondered if I could find something others had left behind. 

You can see by the picture that my fellow lookers were equally intrigued.

I found a handful of white chips with “color” on them which I saved carefully and still have.  They wouldn’t make jewelry.  They’re useless as anything but a memory, but I found them in Coober Pedy and I treasure them.

We saw loads of opal in all sorts of shapes and colors in the shops in Coober Pedy.  I was on overload.  I wanted some opal to take home, but I was overwhelmed by my choices.  In one shop a huge chunk of amber to gold opal sat unprotected on a glass counter.  We are talking humongous!  I asked the shop keeper if he wasn’t afraid someone would take it.  He asked me “Are you going to pick it up and run with it?  If so, where are you going to run?  We could pick you up before you died in the desert - if we wanted to.”  There was no way I could lift that opal, no way to hide it, no way to get it home, unless I wanted to buy it and have it shipped home. 

By the time we left for Ayres Rock (Uluru) I had bought some opal and left it with a jeweler to be made into jewelry and shipped to me at home.  I loved that I could design it myself and they would make it as requested.  I also had my little bottle of opal chips with me.

We left once more in a Pioneer bus filled with a new set of back packers.  This time we were the ones that got on to ride.

Marilynne

There is a highway that bisects Australia north and south.  We started at Adelaide and the bus was headed for Alice and maybe points beyond. The Pioneer Bus we traveled the outback on was just a bus, not a tour bus.  Just ordinary people going their ordinary ways and a few lost tourists added in.  It was daylight when we got on the bus with a lot of Aussies on holiday.  They were backpacking and carrying a lot of gear.  A holiday mood filled the bus.

So long as it was daylight the terrain looked pretty much as it had since we entered Australia.  As night fell, we got as comfortable as we could and tried to sleep.  I listened to people talking and laughing and just passing the time.  It was cozy.  I was getting a sore throat and so I was taking sips from a large bottle of water all night long.  Soon everyone settled down, except for me.

I just didn’t feel well and I needed to travel to the back of the bus a lot.  We were about in the middle.  To get to the back of the bus involved picking your way over feet and around heads and pillows until you finally had to excuse yourself to the person sleeping on the big seat at the back.  No one seemed to mind my frequent trips.

Because I was awake, I saw the lights come on at the first ranch/station we came to.  Sleepy people struggled out of the building.  A few people got on, a few people got off, and some stuff was delivered.  As the bus left,  the lights went off again.  I was so glad we were on this bus.  Here I’d gotten a real snapshot of life as it was lived on the outback.  A tiny glimpse to be sure, but a real look into people’s lives.  I began to look forward to the next stop.

The night wore on.  Total darkness, then a quiet stop to deliver people and supplies, then off we went again.  I snoozed a little, ever alert for the next set of lights.  Some time during the night we stopped for a break at a restaurant and most of us got off to eat a little and stretch our legs.  Like the stations, the restaurant had opened up as we arrived and closed when we left.

Toward dawn, I woke to find a large kangaroo racing the bus.  For a while it looked like the kangaroo was winning, but it saw something else interesting and hopped off into the brush.

Later, I saw parrots again, high in the trees, flitting about in pairs.  These parrots had yellow under their wings.

I saw places in the outback where it looked like a caterpillar tractor had just gouged out a hole in the ground.  I was mystified.  Later I was told that those places were created to catch water when it rained so the stock could drink.

We pulled into Coober Pedy around 6 AM.  Our Best Western Host was there to greet us and drive us to the hotel.  I guess it was pretty common to be up in time to meet the bus.

Breakfast was waiting at our underground motel room.  We ate and crashed.  I slept so soundly the whole time in Coober Pedy.

More about that tomorrow.

Marilynne

Adelaide looked like a nice place to live, but I don’t have a lot of photos from there.  I’m using postcards for pictures today.  We arrived just before the Easter holiday.  We later discovered that Easter lasts a long time in Oz.  (I like that name for Australia because when we were there, it felt like we had traveled to Oz.  Things nearly the same, but different.)

I had a problem with food while we were there.  On Easter Sunday our hotel had a huge, and very expensive buffet at lunch time.  I wasn’t ready to eat when I saw the sign at the restaurant there.  I was on my way for a walk to see Adelaide.

We were just off downtown and it was very quiet that Sunday.  Hardly anyone about.  While I walked I wondered what my friends were doing then.  I’m a religious person and I really missed church that day.  Or should I say I almost missed church that day.  In my wanderings I stumbled upon a Lutheran church (my denomination) and church was nearly ready to start.  I was just in my jeans and T shirt, but I went in and took a seat.  I had a feeling of connection with my friends in the US, even though I knew there was a day’s difference in the time.  That didn’t matter.  I was in Australia celebrating Easter just like my friends would celebrate Easter at home.

When I returned to the hotel, tired and hungry, the buffet was closed and the staff had left the hotel to the guests and gone home.   I already had walked around the general area and not seen restaurants or even small shops.  The diabetic in me screamed HELP!

I walked the three flights up to our room and rummaged in the suitcase for emergency food.  I had food bars and water that day for my Easter dinner.

We were totally unimpressed with a hotel that filled the window with a huge air conditioner (I couldn’t see outside at all), and a staff who abandoned their guests.  We decided to change hotels the next day.  So my hubbie left on foot to find another hotel, and I left on foot looking for an open restaurant.

I now began asking people I met if they knew of a restaurant that was open that day.  People were few and ideas were fewer.  I felt so lonely.  I knew that I’d be hungry in a few hours and need some real food, not just food bars.

I walked so far that day.  Finally I found a Hilton Hotel.  It had a restaurant!  It was opened!  It was expensive and I didn’t care.  I fairly stuffed myself with veggies and fruits and everything else I could find.

I was tired walking back home.  I’d not seen a taxi and I didn’t know where the busses went, so I just kept walking.

Back at the hotel, my husband triumphantly announced we had a room in a downtown hotel for the rest of our visit.  I had planned to tell him about the Hilton, but I was just happy to have a new place to stay. When we told the staff we were leaving, they seemed to be put out that we hadn’t stayed for our full reservation.

Things picked up the next day.  Before leaving for Australia we had purchased matching wheeled suitcases.  These saved us so much effort.  We walked over to the new hotel, settled in, and set out to see Adelaide.  However, keep in mind it was still Easter holiday (on Monday).  Not everything was open.

I was intrigued by the modern O’Bahn bus and the Gleneg-Adelaide tram.  One was very sleek and modern, the other a refurbished old tram.  The bus was interesting because it ran between concrete berms.  It could go very fast and was cost-effective because it held a constant speed.    You can see the bus road in the picture.  We rode it to the end, then got on the tram and rode it out to the beach.  It was fun to poke around the shops.  The beach reminded us of home.

Back to the new hotel, we enjoyed walking around the city.  I enjoyed the easy access to FOOD!  I was still suffering the effects of fear of no food - psychologically, of course.  I had never been in danger of starving.

The following day we went to the Pioneer Bus station to get a reservation for our trip into the outback.  I had heard so many stories of the outback, now I was going to see it in person.  One hitch!  The bus, which drove straight north only went at night.  I thought I wouldn’t see much at all.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about the bus ride and what I did see.

Marilynne

Looking at my pictures helps to bring the memories back.  We had such a good time bumping around Australia.  Tasmania was special because it’s a special place.

Note to Roz :  You can take a ferry across the passage from Australia to Tasmania, but go east and south before you start touristing.

We rented a car (a Holden) and first tried to drive to the southernmost tip of Tasmania.  The part closest to Antarctica that we could go.  We were stopped less than 20 miles from there because there was no road.  In the US there’d at least be a state park with signs pointing to interesting things.

We drove up the east coast.  If you look at yesterday’s beach picture, you might be able to see the brown edges on the close waves.  This root-beer-like color comes from the tanin washed down the rivers into the ocean.  The tanin comes from decaying trees far up the river.

We stopped here and there to look.  While gawking around we began to see parrots flying in pairs from tree to tree flashing the yellow undersides of their wings.  They were so utterly at home with their treetop world.   After seeing them in Australia, I couldn’t bear the thought of bringing one home and giving it a big cage with a little perch and a bell to play with.  These birds mate for life and they belong in the tops of trees, not inside as pets.  My picture is of a lorikeet.  The parrots fly too high to take their picture.

We saw other private zoos and lots of animals including koolas, but they were sleeping and I don’t have a picture.

We eventually arrived at the northern part of Tasmania and a city of sorts.  I was aching to walk again, so I walked all over that town too.

The next day we drove south again through the mountainous backbone of the island.  While the coast is well inhabited, the center of the island and the western rain forests were not. We drove through quiet high forest and discovered a lake in the middle that looked to be as large as Lake Tahoe in California, but it was isolated.  Hardly a soul lived there.

We didn’t have time to take a look at the rain forests, it was time to catch the plane for Adelaide.  Read up on it tomorrow.

Marilynne

I know I’m supposed to write words in this post, but this koala rescue is so heart warming, I just have to put it in.

These are firemen working the Australian wildfires.  They found a scorched koala and befriended her.  They called her Sam.  You can read more of  her story at  http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090211/od_nm/us_fires_koala_1 .

Doesn’t it warm your heart to see such gentleness in the midst of tragedy?  So very many burned acres.  So many dead.  And yet a fireman has the time and the inclination to help a hurting koala.  Koala’s are awake in the night time and usually sleep through the day, so you can see it’s confused and hurt.

I love this story.  I hope you enjoy the video.

Marilynne 

I propose that for Valentines Day we not only give gifts and cards, but we also express gratitude for those who hold our hearts.  It’s a wonderful thing to love and be loved.  If we’re in a loving relationship we often take such things for granted.  But being loved satisfies something deep in our core.  It’s an important part of our relationships.

Don’t hold back your love and gratitude for husband, wife, lover, or significant other.  Be grateful to those who love you as well.  I’m thinking of two kinds of love:  the love my parents had for me, and the simple, uncomplicated love of a child.

My parents loved me, but they weren’t sure what to do with me.  My mother dressed me in ruffles and bows and curled my hair into long blonde curls tied with satin ribbons.  My father taught me about the world.  He taught me that no one is unimportant.  (That’s a big one to swallow, but that’s what he taught.)  He taught me to respect others, particularly the adults in my life.  I liked my father’s teachings better than my mothers, but both had a strong influence on me.  Both offered me their love until their dying days.

My children loved me unconditionally.  When they stamped their feet and told me they hated me, I would say calmly “Well, that’s too bad because I still love you.”  We grew together in that kind of love.  The kind of love that was steady.

Of course, I wish everyone could have that kind of love, but the world isn’t always the way you want it to be.  It usually isn’t.  For me, it’s enough that I’ve experienced it.  I try to hold out for a better world for everyone.

Roxie of Recovery Rocks has nominated me for the Life is Grand Award.   In return I will list five reasons why I think that Life is Grand, and pass the award on to five people.

Here are some reasons why I think life is grand:

• Life is grand because today the sun is shining, the grass (and the weeds) are growing so fast the little bunnies can’t keep up with it, and the birds singing merrily in the trees after several days of wind and rain.  Life is grand because these things occur without any effort on my part.  They just are.
• Life is grand because I have people who love me  and I love them back.  You don’t know real love until it goes both ways.
• Life is grand because right now, everything seems to be going my way.
• Life is grand because its challenges are usually manageable.
• Life is grand because I can blog all day long and no one ever makes me stop.

Here are my nominees for the Life is Grand award:

Journals of a Hotel Manager.  This is because this person needs it.  He lives in a stressful situation and he needs to know that life is grand.  He insists that he will never be pushed into a pool by the staff.

• Monkeys on the Roof.  I’m grateful because this person has a fine sense of humor and lives and interesting life and she shares that with us.  Today she’s photographed some sort of lizard climbing a tree.  I’ll have to go back and have a good look.
• Winnie The Pooh’s Guide to Copywriting.  If you want to do the right thing when it comes to words and blogging, this is the place to come.  I’m grateful because he puts this information out for free, using Winnie The Pooh to illustrate his points.  He has a sense of fun.
• Life in Australia .   I went to Australia once and I had a fine time.  I have so many good memories about my visit there.  In this post, she is telling us how it is to immigrate to Australia from the UK.  I’m grateful to her for keeping me in touch.
• Exchange of Realities .  Today’s post is about How to Keep Couples Spicy.  She has an interesting take on life.  I’m grateful because Ravyn gives me a different point of view.  She isn’t one to put sugar on her words, either.  Check her out by reading About on her site.  Watch the video.

Thanks to Roxie at Recovery Rocks for causing me to think about why life is grand.  I’m particularly grateful for the bloggers who are becoming my friends.  I never expected that.

Marilynne

Thanks to Pastiche Family Portal for the Valentine clip art.

I know that question makes you wonder if I haven’t had my coffee yet.  Well, I’ve got it in hand.  I awoke this morning thinking about the book Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski.  (Harper Collins 2008) 

If you haven’t read this book yet, it’s about a young boy who is handicapped by an inability to speak.  He’s smart enough.  He lives with his family in the backwoods of northern Wisconsin where his family raises a special breed dogs.   These dogs are much in demand because they’re trained for a year before they are sent out to families.

So, Edgar learns sign language so he can talk to his family without having to write it all down.  I am reading the part now where Edgar is training a litter of his own, learning all about the dog breeding business from his Dad.  Edgar has a puppy, Almondine, who was given to him on the day he was born.  Almondine has always understood sign language because that was the language of his boy.  Now that Edgar is training dogs, it’s only natural for him to train the dogs using signs.

The question appears:  Do dogs understand sign language?    Or hand signs?  My answer is a definite YES!  We used to live in a townhouse clustered with many other townhouses.  If you were outside and you talked at a normal volume, everyone nearby could hear what you were saying.

At the time I got Honcho my children were grown, my husband was working out of town during the week, and I came home from work every day to a very quiet, still house.  I told my surprised husband that I wanted a dog for Christmas.  You see, I had always been afraid of dogs.

So, we lived in a townhouse in a complex not exactly ideal for a Norwegian Elkhound.  In the back we had a large patio, but that’s what it was, a patio.  It was clear he needed to be walked at least twice a day, maybe more.   Our complex had an area set aside for walking the dogs, but that’s not enough exercise for Honcho.  He needed 4 miles a day (and rarely got that much, poor puppy).

The question became:  How do you train a puppy to walk and behave when you’re walking him at 6 AM or in the evenings, or any time at all, without the neighbors complaining loudly? What about barking?

SHUTUP!  One of the first commands Honcho learned was SHUTUP!  The command was given by a quiet scratching on the window above his head.  If he wasn’t quiet, then I put him in the laundry room for the night, and he didn’t like that at all.  So, I told him to SHUTUP! by scratching on the glass.

Come.  I taught him to Come.  Norwegian Elkhounds are real blockheads when it comes to allowing anyone to control them.  Come?  For most Elkies it means “let’s play catch me if you can.”  I taught him Come on a leash by walking away from him, then holding my arms out wide.  If he came into my arms, he got a good and thorough rubbing and lots of whispered Good Boys.

Walk nicely.   This one is really hard for any puppy.  They want to run and play freely.  But in a Condo Complex near two busy streets?  No way.  I taught him this one by domination.  Domination is a nice word when teaching dogs.  Simply, it meant that when he eagerly tried to drag me down the street, I simply put the brakes on.  I stopped, and he was left pulling uncomfortably on his collar.  You may think this is cruel, but the only thing he needed to do was to stop resisting.  Did it break his spirit?  Not at all.  WE learned to enjoy our walks.

I’ve had it!   This is a good thing for a puppy to know.  How is he going to learn to please his mistress if he doesn’t know what makes her angry?  (I wish I’d known this when I was raising the girls.)  If we were in a public area and he simply wouldn’t be good (my definition of being good, not his), I would pin him.  We are talking about a very large puppy.  I would simply roll him over on his back, hold him down by his shoulders (gently) and yell at him quietly.  (Like your momma did in church.)  When he quit fighting me, I’d let him get up.  Pinning didn’t hurt him, but it surely let him know who was boss.

So, now I had a large dog who knew how to SHUTUP!, Come, Walk Nicely, and read my moods and most of it was by hand signs or body language.

People would laugh when I made my dog sit quietly with only a hand sign.  Imagine stopping to talk to a friend and having a busy puppy wanting you to continue the walk.  Imagine stopping his pulling and whining with a hand sign.  I didn’t even have to interrupt my visit, though I usually made a stern face with the sign.

I have a lot of theories on how to raise a dog to be a pleasant companion.  When people asked why I didn’t just take him to classes, I told them I didn’t want a show dog, I wanted a dog who was my companion.  I wanted him to study me and know what I wanted.

Now days I always train my dogs with hand signs.  By nature dogs are observers of body language.  It’s easier for them to respond to body language and hand signs than it is to figure out words that have no meaning to them.   The only words they need to know are their names and NO! 

Honcho has since gone to doggie heaven and Jake is my companion now.  (That’s Jake above.)  He’s a hundred pounds of loving dog.  Even though we now live on a big lot, he knows hand signs.  He will sit by my just looking expectantly at him.  His worst command is SHUTUP! 

I have a training problem.  I have a neighbor now who goes out about 6 AM to feed her animals before going to work.  She can’t resist giving Jake a treat every morning.  Every morning, while I’m still in bed, Jake wakes the neighborhood up with his happy barks at her coming with the treat.  I could change that behavior if I was willing to get up at that hour, go into the cold, and run around the garage to give him his sign.  It’s the neighbor I’d like to change.  She expects the barking, probably smiles and encourages him while she gives him his treat.  He gets so excited.  That’s the way she expects a dog to be. 

It’s the only time of the day Jake isn’t disciplined by me.  For the rest of the day, Jake confines his barks to announcing that someone is coming.  (That’s a loud, “listen up” bark - one or two of them while he runs to the gate to greet our visitors.)

Well, that’s a long, long post.   Happy hand signing.

Marilynne 

Star fruit is one of the prettiest fruits I’ve ever seen, and also the most mysterious.  We were at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday and bought several fruits there. Star Fruit are grown in Thailand, Southeast Asia, Australia, and South America.  They are also grown in Florida and Hawaii.  I wonder where my star fruits came from?  Were they grown here in Southern California?

They are so pretty!  If you cut off the ends, you can begin slicing through them and you get beautiful stars with every slice. They’d be a treat to decorate a salad or on top of a cake.

They’re low in calories (30 calories).  You can eat them raw, cooked, or juiced.

I had one for breakfast this morning.  It was tart and a little citrussy.  That left me curious.  The taste they gave me at the Farmer’s Market was sweet.  I wondered if mine was ripe.  My husband skinned it and said it was a little sweeter that way.  After reading the site below, I think we need to give the rest of the star fruit a little more time to ripen.

Check out the information below.  They tell you a lot about the more exotic fruits  we have in our stores.  Most of the time I see them, but I don’t know how to fix them.  The site below will fill you in.

If you want to know more about star fruit, I recommend the following site:

http://thaifood.about.com/od/introtothaicooking/ss/starfruithowto.htm

 Marilynne