Find It!

you can see the declension in both the hay field
and the rougher creek area
(Oh how I miss the lovely ponies)

Today's word of the day is declension (dih-KLEN-shun noun - 1a : noun, adjective, or pronoun inflection especially in some prescribed order of the forms b : a class of nouns or adjectives having the same type of inflectional forms ; 2: a falling off or away : deterioration ; 3: descent, slope). The hay field has a gradual declension on two sides which in effect causes a bowl near the middle. This makes the top parts of the field very well drained, but does cause a watery bit near the middle. The water does drain away from here eventually as when we were building the house our builder, Nick, had the shovel guy sculpt a gentle wale to move the water. All of these land contours have ensured that our basement has stayed dry as a bone without the need for a sump pump. This was much appreciated during the ice storm of 1998 when we were out of power for 9 nights. Some of our friends went crazy trying to keep water out of their basements without power.

at school last winter

The last few days Spike and I have been playing the "find it" game where he has to use his nose to find something that I've hidden. We haven't played this for months but he hasn't lost a step and in fact may even be a bit better at it. The other day, instead of asking him to "find Carm" I showed him an object (and let him sniff it) then hid it in another room. Off he went sniffing and snuffling around till he actually found the object. We tried it a few times since I was actually hoping he'd find the matching object that I'd misplaced, but no such luck. As it turned out he had zero chance as it was in the freezer where it belongs. But he found the one I hid each time.

Today we practiced with another object that we hadn't played with before. Again I let him sniff it first, then I hid it. Away he went and you could see his nose working - he found it quickly. When I hide the object I go into every room to make sure it's not just my scent that he is following - I suppose that might still be the case, but he does figure out which object to pickup when he finds it (and believe me there are lots of objects on the floor for him to choose from). Maybe that will be our next training exercise, picking out the object from a group of others. Hummmm. I think a class is in order - maybe he could be a Search and Rescue dog - the first SAR Miniature Poodle ever!

My pleasures today: watching Spike find the hidden object - he just loves this game and prances around happily on his search ; the melon we had for dessert at lunch - it was the juiciest, sweetest honeydew melon you could dream of ; staying on the treadmill for a whole 45 minutes - still a ways to go but one step at a time :-) ;

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Today I'm going to give a shot at the "The 31 Day Photo & Prompt Challenge" that I read about over at 2takinga5th blog. She picked it up from itsgravybaby blog. It looks fun so I'll give it a shot, even though I'm a few days late.

Today's 31 day challenge is: What is Your favorite show?

This required a bit of thought as I'm not a big TV watcher and I don't have any "Must See" programs. So here are a few of my favorites these days:

      Diners, Drive-In's and Dives (not helping the diet at all)

      the Office

      shows about dogs like Top Dogs, Dog Whisperer

      Jeopardy (I get to find out how narrow my range of knowledge is)

      2 1/2 Men (there - I admitted it, its a funny show)