The Lowell Spinners is a local-ish minor league baseball team out of Lowell, MA on the border with NH.  Their games are supposed to be a lot of fun.  I have tickets for us to go on Thursday to see them play “The Scappers” from Cleveland, OH.  I guess they have give-aways every night and play-time for kids and all kinds of stuff.

The girls said they wanted me to take them to see The Red Sox.  But honestly, I think tickets are $35 per person and I don’t think the girls will like it all that much.  THESE tickets are only $7.  And if they end up hating it we can go home at any time without feeling too bad about it.  If it turns out they like baseball games then maybe we can go to the big leagues some other time.

Last night I spent some time training the dogs down at the local park.  I had a 15′ long leash that allowed the dogs to get quite a bit of space between me and them but if they didn’t stay right with me they wouldn’t notice that i had taken off in a completely unexpected direction.  I had Grace go zooming by to distract them.  It worked ok.  but I did it without a slip collar and it left me feeling frustrated.  Their regular collars don’t constrict when I pull up on the leash.  Anyway, I spent about 30 minutes with each of them and the girls came along and helped.

On the way home I will pick up a choke-chain/slip collar and see if that gives me better results.

I also picked up a video from the library on dog training.  I’ve done some reading on the matter and have grown up with dogs so I think I have a good feel for what I want out of them, but it would be nice to have some graphic examples of some solutions to some problems I’m having.

For example, I am trying to get Bucky to “stay”.  He’ll be walking next to me (on my left) and we stop.  Then I put my hand 6″ - 12″ in front of his face and take one step in front of him and tell him “bucky, stay”.  This seems to be Dogglish for “crawl between my feet”.  Following the Koehler Method’s suggestions I pull straight up on the leash but that doesn’t seem to do much except panic him a little.  The slip collar might produce better results in this regard, but I don’t think so.

I think the Monks of New Skete had some similar suggestions, but there’s got to be something I’m missing.  I have to go back and see what they had to say about some of the basics.

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