u/Voyage_Sailor

I’m posting this because I am still just so goddamn mad.

My boyfriend and I wanted to go out to dinner. Had never been to Juniper, decided to try it. Walk in, place is clean, smells great, there’s a little paper sign on the register that says “this is not a fast food place, food is cooked to order, thank you for your wait, etc” so I think it’ll be somewhat good.

Order two cheeseburgers. $50 for both of us. Fine, Center Street Grill is maybe about that much and their food is worth the price. Wait probably 20 to 30 minutes. Food comes out.

Two motherfucking cooked-from-frozen patties. Like perfectly circular, processed grain pattern burgers that are so bland I legitimately could not eat them. The food tasted like nothing. I even added salt, specifically the seasoning salt on the table and that made it taste like salty nothing.

Frozen fries, frozen mozzarella sticks, everything was frozen and just reheated. I left hungry and incensed that my boyfriend had spent $50 goddamn dollars on that. It should not have been more than $18 for the both of us. We could have gone to Center Street, Chili’s, Ruby’s, Morty’s, or literally just gone up to campus and paid $11 each to have all you can eat cooked-from-frozen food that actually has a flavor to it.

Biggest rip off in the valley, hands down.

I’m thinking of trying to make these mittens as a Christmas gift for my sister. I’ve been knitting for years but I have never done colorwork or mittens before, only baby blankets with stitch work.

Is this too ambitious for a novice knitter?

I adopted my MAS girl in 2021 from the shelter. She was five months old, my first dog, and I had no idea about the teenage phase. Safe to say, I did not do her justice.

It took a while, but we’ve fixed a lot of our problems and she’s at the point where I think we could go for the CGC and I think she would benefit a lot from the classes. However, we still have a few specific struggles that make me pause before signing her up.

I just don’t know what an acceptable level of excitement would be for a class environment. We struggle with excitement reactivity, where she gets so excited at seeing another dog she starts pulling and barking. She’s gotten much better, we’re at stopping and staring before continuing on right now, but that’s from a distance not in a class.

We also have always struggled with being pet by strangers. Before, when she was a puppy, she would startle and attempt to flee before turning to bark at the person who tried to pet her. Now, she will balk, but she knows that she can just move away and I will advocate for her. Right now she’ll even let people pet her on the shoulder, chest, or back if she’s distracted or interested in the smells on their shoes!

I’m just not certain if the progress we’ve made is enough for a CGC class or if we need to keep working before I can sign her up.

Did anyone go to the town hall that was happening at the Logan City Library tonight, and if so what did you think of the candidates?

I got my girl from the shelter during Covid when she was five months old and we’ve always struggled with being around strangers, meeting dogs, fast-moving objects, and relaxing outdoors in general. Some days it feels like we’re going nowhere. As I post this she is five, and I’ve sort of just realized how far we’ve come.

Today was amazing. We walked to the park and she was doing much better walking in leash in the neighborhood than during her last few training sessions. The park was so much busier than I thought it would be, but after a little sniffy tour on her long line she was pretty happy to be there.

We threw the ball and she was doing great at stopping while chasing, waiting for permission to depart, and leaving the toy to come back to me. While doing this she was ignoring strangers, unattended plates of picnic food, and kids on bikes. A kid asked to pet her, something she does not usually allow, so I said he could give her some cheese I had with me. She took the cheese very calmly and gave his shoes a sniff, and he was able to give her a pat on the shoulder. Amazingly, she didn’t even flinch. She didn’t care at all that the kid touched her. This is a dog who used to bark at strangers as a puppy when they approached me, and she would try to bolt if they reached out to pet her!

We walked the remaining half mile of the park, then turned back and encountered a puppy. She bolted to greet him, like she typically does, and hit the end of her line. Although she was *very* excited to encounter the puppy, after a moment of whining in frustration she self-corrected and looked back at me. It took a while, but she eventually turned herself around and came back without me calling her. I was eventually able to get her calm enough that she could meet the puppy, and once she gave him a snoodle she promptly went back to not really caring if he was there. She actually did very well because the puppy was overly tired and started throwing a tantrum, which she just ignored.

We jogged back to the creek, some kids on motorized scooters and bikes flanked us as we ran, and after a little barking she did the same thing that she did with the puppy and reoriented back to me on her own.

Then in our second hour at the park I sat down and threw the ball for her. It was pretty quiet, not a ton of people passing by, so she just scampered after the ball on her long line. At one point a woman and her small dog walked by. I threw the ball before I saw them and it landed about three feet away from where they were passing. I do feel a little bad because the small dog got scared when my girl ran up, but my girl was only trying to get the ball. Once she had it, she looked up and saw the little dog, but she only watched for a couple seconds before turning around and running back to me with the ball. I praised her, gave her a treat for giving me the ball, and then we walked home. She was on a near-perfect loose leash heel, and aside from a bork at a neighbor she was excellent.

Today was an amazing day. It’s proved to me that we can have nice outings. It’s made me feel that our problems are not only manageable, but perhaps even fixable. I feel like I can eventually get her to a point of feeling calm and comfortable outdoors. That she can eventually be okay taking a nap beside me in the grass if she doesn’t have something to do. I feel hopeful.

TLDR: My dog was summarily faced with every trigger she’s had for the last five years of her like today. She wasn’t perfect, but she was better, and that’s given me hope.