My run was already supposed to be pretty short—about 2.5 miles, across Dohme Park, up First Street to Windsor and then back—but it ended up being even shorter than that, because Ashley wasn’t up to running even that far in the heat of the day.
According to my weather app it was already 75℉ when I got home, and I’ve noticed previously that starting at about 72℉ the dog starts to suffer.
You can see on the map a short spur off to the west just after I started north on First Street. That was where we saw a groundhog, and Ashley really wanted to chase it. I indulged her for a minute, hoping the groundhog would quickly find a place to hide, but it wasn’t to be, and I eventually had to drag Ashley back to the First Street path very much against her will.
Anyway, 1.3 miles is a very short run indeed, but I still spent most of 20 minutes with my heart rate up (average was 141, peak was 169). So, a good workout.
My brother sent a selfie he’d taken in the coffee shop where he’s staying for the SFWA board meeting and Nebula Awards conference. I wanted to reply, but I was out walking the dog, so I quick captured this image.
In my experience cats are much better than dogs at realizing when you’re sick and need some rest and comfort. So I’m a bit surprised that Ashley is doing such a good job of it today.
Some time ago I made a mistake. Ashley was out on the patio, and didn’t want to come in, but I needed to leave. So I bribed her back in with a treat. This turned her into a monster. Knowing that she could get a treat for coming back in, she started resisting ever coming back in without a treat.
Breaking her of that behavior by just not giving her treats to come back in would probably have worked eventually, but it seemed like a lot of difficult work.
So I came up with an alternative that has worked pretty well.
What I do now is never bribe her back in with a treat, but if she comes in when I tell her to—if she does what I want without resistance—once a day I’ll reward her with a Greenie (one of her favorite treats). (My wife does the same, so Ashley gets two Greenies most days.)
This puts us very much on the right side of behavioral conditioning. Since it’s an intermittent reward, it’s powerfully effective. And as long as we’re pretty good about only giving her the treat when she does exactly the right thing, she’ll start doing exactly the right thing every time, in hopes of getting the rare reward.
As I say, it has worked pretty well. There are a couple of things that aren’t quite perfect.
First, since she has learned that what she needs to do is go out and come back in again, she has started asking to be let out and then coming right back in again, hoping for a treat. We can deal with that simply by not giving her a treat when that’s what she’s done.
Second, and this is more a source of amusement than an actual problem, when the weather is bad and she doesn’t want to go out, she’ll go to the door, wait for me to open it, refuse to go out, wait for me to close the door, and then sit down to get her treat. I can totally understand her logic here: Isn’t just not going out the same as going out and coming right back in again?
She’s a good dog.
Anyway, shared in case other people are trying to cure their dog of demanding a bribe to do the right thing. Wait for your dog to “do the right thing” on its own, then give it a treat very occasionally. The dog will catch on pretty quickly.
For years I worried a lot about daily routines. (Just click on the tag for “daily routine” and you can find literally dozens of posts on the topic.) Of late, that seems to no longer be the case. It’s been years since I posted on the topic.
A few days ago though, my brother mentioned me in a toot on daily routines, which prompted me to wonder what my current daily routine actually looks like. Turns out, I do have a daily routine, that I stick to pretty well (with minor adjustments for errands, medical appointments, etc.).
Unsurprisingly, it’s rather sun-aligned.
(6:00 AM) I get up around dawn, which is at different times at different parts of the year, but is around 6:00 AM right now. I drink a (ginormous) mug of coffee (or two). I spend some time dicking around on the internet, check my social media feeds, chat on-line with my brother, and get an update on our mom (who lives with him). I also check my Oura ring, to see how well I slept. (That’s a joke. Of course I know how well I slept. But the information my Oura ring provides is nevertheless sometimes valuable.) We usually do the Jumble via chat during this time as well.
(6:40 AM) Around sunrise I take the dog for her first walk of the day. That’s been around 6:45 lately, but is getting earlier every day just now.
(7:00 AM) After first-walk I might have a third cup of coffee, but I proceed to fixing and then eating breakfast.
(8:00 AM) After breakfast it’s time for the dog’s second walk. This is the long walk of the day. In bad weather it might also be just 20 minutes, but is usually at least 40 minutes, and in really nice weather might be an 90 minutes or longer.)
(9:00 AM) Once I get home from second walk, I proceed to my morning exercises, which I ought to be able to do in 20 minutes or so, but which often stretches out to twice that long. I’m working to shorten it, so I have some hope of getting something else done during the day.
(9:30 AM) After morning exercises (which is really a stretching/flexibility/mobility routine), I proceed to my workout, unless it’s a rest day. That takes 40 minutes to an hour.
Since I started drafting this post three or four days ago, I’ve been tracking the start and end times of my morning exercises and my workouts, with an eye toward collapsing the total time for this stuff down to the 60–80 minutes that it should be. If I can do that, I should be able to finish no later than 10:30, which should give me most of three hours available to get work done, before I need to break for the main meal of the day.
(10:30 AM) Get work done!
(1:00 PM) Jackie and I have moved our main meal of the day to 1:00 PM or 2:00 PM, which provides just a bit more flexibility for getting work done in the morning (although that time gets used up if I need to run an errand, or if I’m fixing lunch that day). Ashley usually gets her third walk of the day either right before or right after lunch.
I generally don’t even try to get anything useful done after that. I might take a nap. I might read. I might spend some more time dicking around on the internet. Just lately, I’ve been trying to get a backup server configured so that my brother and I can backup our backups to each other’s servers, meaning that we’ll have off-site backups.
(4:15 PM) At 4:15 PM we have our cocktail hour call with Steven and my mom. We’ve all cut back on alcohol consumption, so we usually drink water rather than a cocktail, but we’re sticking with the call. It means I get to talk to my mom nearly every day.
(4:45 PM) After cocktail hour I take Ashley for her fourth (and now, finally, last) walk of the day. When she was a puppy I had to take her for eight walks a day (to keep her from peeing in the floor). That ramped down pretty quickly to seven and then six, but it took a long time to get her down to five and then four. But this is actually much more convenient for me, as well as being enough walking for both of us. (I average over 12,000 steps a day, even in the winter. In the summer it’s more like 15,000.)
(5:30 PM) After fourth-walk I usually sit down to watch some video entertainment with Jackie, or else read some more.
Jackie goes to bed quite early most days, a remnant from her days working at the bakery (when she had to get up at 4:00 AM).
I generally like to go to bed a couple of hours after sunset, although not that early in mid-winter nor that late in high summer. Just lately I’ve been aiming to take Ashley out of the patio for one last peeing opportunity in time for me to get to bed around 9:00 PM.
There’s some variability, of course. Mondays I do Esperanto in the early evening. Wednesdays there’s (just recently) a gentlemen’s lunch. Thursdays there lunch with some former coworkers, that’s been going on in some form or another for decades now. Sunday afternoons (and when I’m feeling fit enough, Tuesday and Thursday evenings) there’s sword fighting.
As I said above, the main value of this post to me seems to be around how I might get my warmup and workout done more compactly. I think I’ll write about that soon, and if I do, I’ll link to it here.
