Is my head attached?

I know that I haven't posted very much. There are have been some stuff that I didn't want to talk about on here going on and I didn't trust myself to blog without bring it up. On top of that, every time I think of something to blog about, I'm not near a computer. And when I do find a computer I can't remember what I was going to talk about.

My first of my summer classes is over. I wrote the final for it on Wednesday evening. Courses that are easy As are good for your GPA. At the end of the test, I thought "There. That's done." Unfortunately, this idea carried forward and I managed to forget that I had class this morning. So silly. I've had the same schedule every week for the last 2 months and I've done stuff like this a few times. Grr! I'm writing every day I have class in my day timer. I'm NOT missing anymore classes over this stupid reason.

In other news: I've joined the list-serve on www.psychdog.org. The information and support that has come from that have been huge. It joins a community of very special people with something so profound in common who live over a very large geographic region. It's so nice to not feel like I'm in this alone.

I have other big news that I'm dying to disclose but I haven't received the go ahead yet so you'll all have to wait to hear it.

On the training front: Paige is so smart! We've got targetting with her nose down cold. It doesn't matter where we are or what I hold up, she's smacking it with her nose. She'll run across the room to hit my hand. I'm starting to work with this for positioning. I can get her to touch my hand by crawling under my legs or under a table. She won't settle there yet but she'll go. Now we're putting the touch on command because she's starting to nose me just to get a treat. I'm also going to be making this into a touch-hold (a long touch) and a nudge (touching my hand repetatively quickly). She is sitting every where and laying down every although she is a little slow at times. Almost as if she's saying "are you sure you want me to do this?" Yeah, I am. Her wake ups are starting to become persistant. Giving her a reward is like hitting the snooze button but it will only buy me a couple of minutes. Yesterday, in 20 minutes, we got paw targetting - hitting a target with her paw. I haven't tested it today to see if she really got it. It took me a bit to think of how to train this then I realized that she'll paw at puppy when we're playing. So out came puppy and everytime she pawed him, "click". She understands what the click means and caught on really quickly. We've also been working on watching me more closely when we're walking. We've also been trying to work on her reaction to other dogs. This is a negative punishment/positive reward situation for us. If she can't behave, we're walking away. If she is calm and polite, she can meet the dog. We are looking at taking Marni's basic obedience class for this. I suggested it to Marni and she was doubtful because Paige can do it all. The class would be very simple for her. I countered with the fact that she needs to be able to do the simple around other dogs. Marni agreed. The class starts in late July.

Um... Crap... Forgot what else I wanted to talk about. Damn short term memory. Hopefully this clears up some soon. It's kind of bugging me.
If I think of it, I'll be back later.