Hello, my name is Ellen and I'm a blog virgin.
That's right. Never had a blog before. Oh, I've had plenty of opportunities, but never a reason. I mean, really...who wants to hear about my boring life? Nobody, that's who. Not that I'm uninteresting, but I don't feel the need to post day after day that I went to work, came home, had dinner, and watched tv. My life is a big routine, and that's just how I like it.
Well, now I have a reason to blog. DOG TRAINING!! Specifically, clicker training. How it's going, what we're working on, how I'm pulling my hair out because I'm fairly green and hope I'm not ruining my dog. Much more interesting than the rest of my personal life, definitely.
Like I said previously, I'm Ellen and I have a 3 1/2 year old pug named Frankie that we adopted in May of this year. She's a girl. Yes, I know, Frankie is a boy's name. But it fits her personality, so that's just how it is. We live in beautiful NW Oregon with my husband, 13 year old daughter, 3 cats, and 2 dwarf hamsters. We did have a red Beta fish until yesterday when he crossed the rainbow bridge. RIP Ralphie, RIP.
So anyway, this blog will be mostly about Frankie and me and our adventures together clicker training. We 'officially' started this endeavor about 2 weeks ago. I say officially because I started what I thought was clicker training a few weeks after Frankie came to live with us. I wasn't consistent with it, and soon found out I was doing it wrong. Now, we have the correct information available and are starting with a clean slate. So far we have worked on sit, down, touch (targeting), go to bed, and gimme five. I plan to add an 'up high' trick after the gimme five one is consistent. My goal in this is to have a well behaved thinking dog that people will love to be around because she 'knows sutff'. We are at about 80% at sit and down, and still working on the rest.
Hopefully I won't bore you to death and someone might actually learn something from our adventure.
Until next time!
Ellen & Frankie