Circus K9

Azza

2012-03-04T20:06:00.000+03:00

Azza at about 11 weeks of age.

Meet Azza. I've had her for a month, and she's about 12 and a half weeks old now, give or take a week.

Back before the Saudis got religion, the Arabs used to name their girl children after plants and animals. Azza means "young gazelle."

Azza is a "desert dog." What a desert dog actually is depends on who you are talking to but they are often mixed with saluki or canaan, the former a hunting sight hound with folded ears and the latter a desert herding breed with prick ears. Desert dogs can come in any color combo depending on what was mixed in (doberman, lab, golden, GSD, pit bull, etc.) but a common color pattern for the generic "desert dog" with probable saluki origins is orange or gold on top and white below with white accents, like Azza. I've never seen a "desert dog" with a lot of coat.

Azza the day I brought her home. She's about 8 weeks old here.

Most desert dogs are pretty leggy and lean, although if they have a lot of lab or pit bull in them they can be chunky. Azza's saluki roots give her that leggy, streamlined look and almond-shaped eye holes (her eyes themselves are round like any other dog).

Azza exhausted at last.

So far I'm pretty sure she doesn't have any solid bones but is instead made of cooked noodles. I've never seen such a flexible, floppy dog. Her tail is even more amazing. Whip thin, she appears to have a lot of control over it, holding it high and curved over her back when happy. But it flies around like a wet string when she gets the zoomies.

Harry doesn't actually hate her. As long as she behaves herself, he tolerates her well. They are sharing a quiet moment in the morning sun.

I've been curious about these dogs ever since I saw them. Most of them are aggressive and often bite people. They maintain huge bubbles of space around themselves and rarely tolerate touching by strangers. And unfortunately, most of the people on camp that have one of these dogs don't have a clue about how to manage them. They can't be walked. They have to be locked up when people come over. I wondered if a consistent program of positive training and socialization begun at a very early age would make a difference. So I've been keeping an eye out for a very young desert dog.

About a month ago, Azza landed in my lap. She came from a litter whelped by a feral desert dog who lives at one of the private Aramco beaches.

Azza and Kinky playing. He starts it as often as she does!

The switch in her brain may flip in a few months and she could turn into psychotic desert dog, but for now she's proving to be a challenging but very rewarding training experiment.

Upul's comment upon seeing her was classic: "Ma'am, she's going to be big!" I hope so. How can I say I am a dog trainer if I don't spend some time, truly dedicated and focused time, training something besides a smooth fox terrier (as much as I love them)? Yes, I'm even thinking about agility!

What?

Nothing like a nap in the sun! When I see tableaux like this, I really do hope she doesn't turn into Cujo in a few months. Oh yes, Azza's touching Mimi, who's in turn touching Harry.

Azza gets along well with Mimi and Kinky. Tsingy ignores her. Harry hates her but he has so far applied extremely appropriate discipline when she annoys him. Pesty puppy won't get the message so I let him manage it his way (he's chomped her four times but so far no damage--and he gave her plenty of advanced warning each time!).

Azza and Mimi like to play very rough but I allow it...for now. Mimi seems to enjoy having another dog to play with although she is far from her puppy days.

Azza is all feet and legs right now. I know she looks half-starved but that's how these saluki-desert dogs develop. Really, I'm stuffing her with food!

Looks ferocious and it is pretty rough but they seem to both have excellent bite inhibition.

Azza's training program so far includes sitting to have the leash removed and not running wild until released, loose lead walking, sitting on verbal or hand command, sitting when people pass us while walking, stay, recall, name game, waiting for other dogs to get treats, not jumping on things or me ("off"), pooping and peeing on a schedule (my schedule, that is) and not in the house, bite inhibition during play, and tugging games. She hasn't shown much love for the hand touch game but I'm working on that. She loves all kinds of toys and it's easy to get a three-way game going with Harry on one tug, Azza on another, and Mimi playing fetch with a third toy. I can growl in her face and she'll growl back and tug harder! I love feisty dogs!

For now, I think Azza has a nice home with us.

Lost in Translation

2012-03-02T15:12:00.001+03:00

I received this via email. The back story might be concocted after the fact but it sure is consistent with the photo and how things generally work in this part of the world.

A new fuel tanker arrives on location somewhere in the Middle East. The HSE manager tells the Pakistani fleet supervisor to ensure that the tanker is clearly labeled “Diesel Fuel” and “No Smoking” in Arabic.This is what he got.

Ladies' Kingdom

2012-02-29T21:01:00.002+03:00

It's Wednesday night, I feel guilty that I haven't posted a word for two weeks, I've been drinking some nice red whine (whew, that stuff is potent so I have to cut it with Perrier), animals are fed, dogs have been thoroughly walked. And this is my THIRD post in one night.

I've posted before about how I may think for several days about what I want to write, turning topics and phrases and metaphors around in my head to determine if they are "blog worthy." Well, being on that field trip for a week with limited internet access gave me plenty of time to ponder these big questions.

This post is about the day that MO and I spent at the Kingdom Mall in Riyadh.

The three women on the field trip (the word women is rarely used by Saudis; they prefer "ladies") had to fly to Riyadh 24 hours ahead of the men, who drove from Dhahran. This was ostensibly to avoid any unpleasantness at government checkpoints. ("Mixing of the sexes" is probably the most horrific thing the mutawas can envision and it is actively discouraged in this culture; having women traveling with unrelated men in cars could possibly have sent the entire Saudi system into a fatal tailspin were it to be discovered by the wrong person....) So we were flown out to Riyadh. That's all I'm going to say about that.

The Saudi woman on the trip has family in Riyadh: daughter, son-in-law, 4-month-old granddaughter. She spent most of her free time with them.

But MO and I had an entire day to kill...what to do? Well, for women in this culture, there is really nothing else you are permitted to do but shop. So we took a taxi from the hotel to one of the largest, swankiest malls in Riyadh, the Kingdom Mall.

We discovered that the upper floor of this mall was called the "Ladies' Kingdom"...and no men were allowed up there. All of the shops were staffed by women, even the coffee shops. I shouldn't even use the word "shops" as all of them represented the top European designers and fashion houses.

Sounds weird, right? But MO and I ended up spending most of the day in the Ladies' Kingdom...and enjoying it!

It was remarkably refreshing since I find the general atmosphere of this culture to be so oppressive. We saw Saudi women ripping off their head scarves as soon as they passed the entrance barriers (there were male guards at all of the entrances). I think that maybe some of those women find it a bit oppressive on the other side of those barriers too.

MO and I are by our own admission not shoppers even in the real world. But we spent hours fingering couture gowns (mostly hideous), gawking at shoes and accessories that were never going to be seen by any but other women, and generally enjoying the experience. It was all so alien: designer fashion everywhere one gazed (MO and I think Lands End is acceptable office wear) and only young, pretty, fashionable women to be seen (no children; they left the squalling brats at home with the Indonesian nanny).

And while I think that it is a great idea here in this backwards country, I would have been very happy to trade our day in the Ladies' Kingdom for a day in any US mall, no matter how low brow.

Agility in KSA Weeks 15 and 16

2012-02-29T20:35:00.001+03:00

While I was on the field trip, MH had to run the agility class on her own. She decided to give the handlers a special treat and had a friend back in Canada design a NADAC course--MH even included the hoops she had built for her own dogs! By all accounts, it was another very successful class!

Last week I decided to set up a Backyard Dogs sequence from the November Clean Run magazine. It was a simple exercise with a curved tunnel and six jumps. We fudged on the weaves (used open 2x2s) but so what. I showed them the magazine, the article with the course maps, and talked about how I liked to work the exercises in this column each month for a week or two. We used cones to number the exercises so they got to practice their "walk throughs". We only got through a couple of variations but we all had a good time.

MH and I try to introduce our handlers and dogs to new skills but we also want everyone to have fun. So we aren't tracking our progress in terms of "tournament skills" or ticking off specific handling patterns from a list. Instead, we look at the progress of each dog and handler: HD and her shy desert dog Savvy who will now go through a shortened, straight tunnel with only a bit of encouragement; S and her Yorkie Abbie who will work a sequence, any sequence, off lead; PM and her crazy lab Nellie who despite having the zoomies at least once per class shows amazing focus now, constantly looking to her handler for more information; MW with her shepherd mix Boodle who will now go into any tunnel, curved or straight, and who happily goes in his crate in class and calmly waits his turn. The list goes on.

Anxious dogs have become more confident, distracted dogs have become more focused. Dogs who just needed something to do have become agility junkies. Tweaking an exercise, moving a jump or shortening a tunnel, gives such affirming success to dog and handler.

I'll bet that you agility folks already know that agility works magic, that you are saying to yourself, sure, tell me something new. But we aren't focused on titles or ribbons or points here. We are focused on the joy. It is a lesson that I will never forget.

I am so amazed that MH and I have been able to give these experiences to our handlers and dogs here in this crazy country with a motley set of equipment and no experience teaching this sort of class. Blind leading the blind? I don't think so. Neither MH nor I are weak handlers. Back in the "real world" we never saw ourselves as agility trainers. Here in the Magic Kingdom, we can make up the rules as we go...and one rule is, if you think you can do it, then by all means go ahead and try.

We joke with the handlers all the time now about how their dogs are way better than them, and I think that most of them can see that this is true. And I am so proud of them all for trying even harder, to become better handlers for their dogs. They try to control their flailing arms, their multiple verbal commands, their awkwardly veering paths. MH and I smile at each other and praise them all.

None of our small group may ever step foot in a "real" agility ring but it doesn't matter. We have brought the joy and challenge of agility here to Saudi Arabia. And it needs no translation.

Triassic-Mesozoic Field Trip, Saudi Arabia

2012-02-29T20:09:00.000+03:00

I know, I know, it's been two weeks since I last posted something! I've got good excuses, really I do.

Last week I went on a field trip to look at Triassic and Jurassic rocks in central Saudi Arabia. More than 70% of the world's booked hydrocarbon reserves are in carbonates...and most of that is in Jurassic shallow marine platform carbonates in Saudi Arabia.

Geologic map of the Arabian Plate. The colors correspond to the age of the rocks exposed at the surface.

Because the Arabian Plate tilted a bit to the east when the Red Sea opened between it and Africa around 40 million years ago, give or take 5 million years, nearly the entire succession of rocks from Neoproterozoic basement to Paleocene is exposed in a series of bathtub rings that get younger and younger as you go east.

This particular field trip is designed around exposures of the very proximal (more landward) parts of the Triassic and Jurassic reservoirs that contain so much oil and gas here in Saudi Arabia.

We stayed in the Sheraton in Riyadh and drove out to the various outcrops and road cuts in a series of very long day trips (we were often out for 10 to 12 hours, which are unusually long days for a show and tell sort of trip like this).

This was my first trip to Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia (the administrative capital that is, since Mekkah is the religious capital). I'm sure glad I traveled there on Aramco's dime. It was just as dirty and half-constructed as Khobar, only much, much larger. So there's no need to go back!

I learned some really amazing things on this trip. For example, there is "local Saudi beef" sold in the markets but you never see cows grazing. What would they graze on that the sheep and camels hadn't already eaten? So where does this "local beef" come from? It turns out that cows are indeed raised in Saudi Arabia...in underground farms, stacked level upon level. They never go outside. They only see artificial light. They shit and piss on the next level down. Basically all of the "local beef" is veal since the cows never really move. Thank god I only bought imported beef from Brazil but this story has turned me off beef in a big way.

Then we learned that there is a small "high quality" cement plant outside Riyadh. Nearby is a significantly larger "low quality" cement plant. It seems the demand for "high quality" cement just isn't there. This explains a lot...every building that you see under construction is made of cinder blocks that look like they have been stacked together by children: blocks pointed every which way (hole side in, out, to the side), irregular spacing, gaps plugged by rags, newspaper, rubble. Low quality cement will do just fine when that is the general standard of construction.

The lunches were provided each day and for the most part were reasonable. However, the logistics coordinator decided to do a Saudi lunch one day. He showed up with bags of canned tuna, canned olives, peanut butter, honey...and canned cream, canned cheese, and white bread. The Saudis apparently love them some canned cheese. Grab a piece of it with a hunk of white bread, dip it in the canned cream and then honey...yikes! The four westerners on the trip (including me) were pretty appalled by this discovery--the amount of chemicals required to stabilize "cream" and "cheese" in cans is appalling. We stuck to peanut butter. At least we weren't going to starve.

There were three women on this trip, two westerners (me and a Brit) and a fairly westernized Saudi woman. So you might be wondering about bathroom facilities. There are truck stops in Saudi Arabia and they usually have a women's facility. And the mosque in small towns often has a small female prayer room and toilet (except in Mekkah, women are either discouraged or actively prevented from going into mosques in Saudi Arabia). Most of these places were not very clean (the one on the first day was downright appalling) so I tried to pee at our field stops as often as I could. Thank god for hand sanitizer and personal packets of Kleenex.

The fact that women were permitted on this trip is a bit unusual. Government Affairs turned down female applicants for this trip for all of 2010 and 2011, then suddenly relented (actually, our logistics team probably found the right guy to bribe). I knew that I had to go because the opportunity could be pulled away with no warning or explanation.

I'm still working on captions for a Picasa album of my field trip photos. But I'll stick in a few here to give you the basic idea.

Looking at the Triassic Jilh Formation (the dark brown stuff in the hill to the left and the stuff we are standing on). Here in central Saudi Arabia, it is composed of fluvial (river) clastics. In the subsurface, the Jilh is a restricted, hypersaline, lagoonal carbonate.

This is some middle Jurassic carbonate that I can't identify from the photo. Field notes are not at hand.

There is a sword on the Saudi flag, and swords figure heavily in religious and civil government iconography. Islam, the religion of peace. I took this from a moving car and that's all I'm going to say about it.

Some crappy middle Jurassic carbonate that has absolutely no resemblance to its reservoir equivalent to the east. The faint trails are made by camels. Saudi Arabia is lousy with camels, which are free range for the most part. Oddly, I have no photos of them although we saw plenty of them every day.

A suspension bridge over a very large wadi to the east of Riyadh. One of my few attempts at "art."

Dalh Hith. The only known exposure of the Hith anhydrite, an extremely important regional seal for the Jurassic hydrocarbons. Anhydrite is an evaporitic mineral and quickly dissolves when exposed to water. Even though it doesn't rain much here, it rains enough to dissolve most of the Hith exposures. Most of what you see in this photo is the earliest Cretaceous Sudair carbonate; the Hith anhydrite is that darkish material at the base of the cliff.

We were looking at Late Cretaceous Aruma braided fluvial clastics in this quarry exposure when suddenly this Bedouin showed up with his two donkeys (the dark one was the offspring of the white one), his flock of sheep, and three dogs which appeared to be just hanging out with the group. They had absolutely no function in moving the sheep. The Bedouin moved the sheep by throwing rocks at them and waving a staff around.

Useful Survival Tips

2012-02-15T09:07:00.001+03:00

Everything you buy here, unless it is imported, is shoddy, already broken when you take it out of the package or will break upon first usage, never the correct size or shape or material, often gaudily colored and chemically scented with odors that can never occur in nature. An example: rubber gloves. Such a mundane item, right? They often come out of the box with tiny holes or tears in them. They are so thin that the slightest pinch or bang against something will tear them anyway. And they are so short that water runs down then back inside them no matter how careful you are. So suck it up and ship it in. You'll be happier in the long run.

Always check flour, pasta, grains, and beans for insects before purchasing. Yeah, what else can I say here? It's scary to see ...things...crawling in that bag of elbow noodles.

Check expiration dates of cans, bottles, boxes. Food often spends a lot of time in customs and by the time it makes it to store shelves, well, it can be a bit past its prime.

Never buy fruit or vegetables that have been stacked in a box or container then sealed. The top layer may look okay but the ones below that will be green, wormy, bruised, or moldy.

Get on an email news chain. I'm on three. You can find out about events in camp, air fare deals offered by this or that airline (I got an amazing deal on my flight to Scotland in May this way), information about all of the little service shops run out of their homes by the so-called "dependent wives."

Learn to make your own whine or beer. It's easy, makes a nice hostess gift, and gives you something to talk about at parties.

Keep plenty of cash on hand--this is very much a cash economy. You need small bills to pay taxi drivers and larger ones to pay your domestic help each month. The Aramco dining halls only take cash. The Aramco gas stations only take cash. Small stores in town only take cash. Credit card theft (theft of the number to be precise) is a thriving industry in this part of the world (I've already had it happen to me once). The bigger stores in town take credit cards but it is often faster to pay cash.

Learn to live without things. You really don't need El Paso brand refried beans to make tacos. The UK Waitrose brand will work fine. Or perhaps forget the tacos and try whipping up an Asian-inspired dish with fresh ingredients.

Get names and mobile numbers of craftsmen from friends. Even if you can't find something here, you can often have it made for you: furniture, metal work, windows, doors. But be careful--refer back to the first paragraph! Some of the stuff made here is horribly shoddy and gaudy.

Sharing the Moment

2012-02-15T08:40:00.003+03:00

I'm running another session of the basic obedience class. I try to limit the class to eight handlers and dogs but for a variety of reasons, enrollment in this one crept up to 10 before I told Community Education "no more!"

It's a fun group of handlers this time with some very interesting dogs. My agility friend MH dropped by last week and was amazed at the variety of dogs: two cocker spaniels (siblings), a Cavalier spaniel, a variety of terrier mixes of various size and hairiness, a "desert dog" saluki mix, a husky (in Saudi Arabia, of all things), a wire fox terrier (named Seamus; he's very cute), and a Rhodesian ridgeback.

The ridgeback, a bitch puppy about 9 months old, is named Sinuk. It is hard to look at her and think "puppy" because she is a massive animal. Then you see her move and you realize, oh, yeah, puppy, just gigantic and powerful! Sinuk has a wonderful personality, very open, friendly, and curious, which is not how I've generally perceived ridgebacks to be. She's also got lovely conformation.

Sinuk's family apparently had done some training with her. This trainer told them that they had to use a heavy metal choke collar and leash corrections. They walked in the door and I saw a pup with no self discipline or control who ignored her family for the most part. Those leash corrections were as effective in changing Sinuk's behavior, or even getting her attention, as a fly on an elephant's back. But a dog that powerful does require firm handling. Still, as you all know, firm doesn't mean punitive. More than anything, it means consistent. And that choke chain had to go!

It took me a couple of weeks to convince them that leash corrections were a battle they were never going to win, especially once Sinuk filled out with her adult musculature.

To my great pleasure, they have been doing all of their homework...and even though I already know that positive training works, it was nice to hear them reporting significant improvements in Sinuk's behavior. For example, the mom emailed me a couple of weeks ago to report that she was able to recall Sinuk back to her for a hand touch...even though Sinuk was taking off to chase some feral dogs. She said she nearly fell over because Sinuk had never come when called before. Now that's a demonstration of the power of reinforcement (I introduce the hand touch game in the first week of class).

Last week, Sinuk was particularly wild in class. The weather was unsettled and some of the other dogs were acting up a bit too. Also, most of the dogs quickly become comfortable in class and do things that they might not do the first couple of weeks when they are still scoping the scene. I anticipate this and don't get too wound up about it. Dogs are animals. They have their own agendas sometimes. I respect that and work around it. Plus, I've found that if I help the owners stay patient and consistent, the dogs usually settle down. In class, I usually spend much more time watching the owners anyway.

After Sinuk's happy day in class (happy for Sinuk, a bit frustrating for her owner), this email was waiting for me when I got to work a couple of days later:

Soo, I think I figured out why Sanuk was such a maniac today..... So far today she has shredded her blanket, eaten a tennis ball (literally shredded it leaving teeny tiny rubber bits allll over the house), whipped her ball on a string across the room andknocked over a lamp, turned over every carpet in the house and gotten stuck under my bed requires extreme extrication measures. This is AFTER an 8km run this morning....

My daughter bought a small bag of sugar cane from the commissary the other day, and apparently left it within Sanuks reach- I went to clean out the shredded blanket out of her bed and there it was- a whole bag of chewed up sugar cane. Just waiting forthe crash.......

Frickin' hysterical, especially when you remember Sinuk weighs around 100 lbs and can put her front paws on my shoulders.

There are lots of subtexts to explore here but I'll just focus on two. First, my goal is to help owners understand their dogs a bit better than before they took my class. Not to brag, but I usually succeed more often than not. Of course not every dog and owner who takes my class becomes an obedience success story. I aim for a different target: dogs who pay attention to their owners and owners who pay attention to their dogs. Everyone ends up a bit happier.

The second subtext is that owners now experience these events such as Sinuk's crazy day, notice them and think about them, when before they may have just gotten mad or ignored the dog, and then take the time to share the stories with me because they know that something significant has happened, good or bad.

And this is why I teach the dog classes, including the agility class. It's about sharing the joy of the moment with dogs and their handlers.

Agility in KSA Weeks 13 and 14

2012-02-10T16:19:00.001+03:00

With such a full class, I haven't had time to take any pictures the past few weeks. Fortunately, PM brought her camera for the week 13 class and shared these pics with the group. I've scattered those photos in this post so you can see more happy handlers and dogs doing agility in Saudi Arabia.

And yes, I admit, I've been a bit lax about posting the past couple of weeks. Check back soon--I'll put up some posts explaining why in a few days.

HD and her desert dog mix Savvy. Savvy is very cautious of new things: new people, dogs, situations, obstacles. But HD is very patient and helps Savvy be quite successful.

Having handlers of two different skill levels in the same class is a bit easier than I thought because it isn't like we are dealing with Masters level versus Novice level. They are all still novices but some are a bit more advanced than the others. The new handlers are progressing forward very quickly because they can watch the more advanced handlers and get a clear mental picture of where they will be going. When I instruct the handlers on what they will be doing for that particular class, I talk to the entire group at the same time, no matter what their level.

For the past two weeks, I've had the more advanced handlers work RFP challenges such as obvious yet off-course tunnel entries staring their dogs in the face. After a bit of practice last week, they managed that very well! Because I decided that their dogs knew what the RFP move meant even if the handlers were a bit shaky on the concept, I upped the ante on them this week: I introduced the serpentine with three jumps.

For you non-agility folks, a serpentine is a sequence of three obstacles oriented in a line such that the dog's path is away from the handler, towards the handler, and then away from the handler. In the olden days it was done with only three jumps but now you can find serpentines in Master courses that include teeters (seesaws), tunnels, tires...any obstacle is now fair game for judge to design into a serpentine. But you will only find serpentines in Masters courses--they require sophisticated handling and solid communication between handler and dog.

It took a while but we convinced PM that she didn't need to babysit the obstacles! Look at Nellie's focus!

So this morning, as I said, I decided it was time to challenge my more advanced handlers, because it is important that you train at a level above where you are actually competing (not that we are competing, but you get the idea). As I described what they needed to do to handle this exercise, my advanced handlers were skeptical to say the least. One of them said rather emphatically, "that's all well and good but my dog won't send over jumps." You agility folks know how that went, right? If we train with consistent body and verbal signals, our dogs figure this game out long before we do. And I had really been working their RFP for the past two weeks. I knew they could do it with the right coaching and encouragement. Thank goodness both of them trusted me enough to give it a go.

A serpentine can be handled in several different ways but the most efficient way is for the handler to do a RFP at the second obstacle to turn the dog into them, over the jump, then return to regular handling with the inside arm for the last obstacle. In other words, the handlers sends the dog over jump 1, does an RFP to get the dog to turn into them for jump 2, then sends the dog over jump 3. The handler runs down a line parallel to the obstacles while the dog does all the work. There is still some fancy handler foot- and armwork involved.

I had the two handlers practice this footwork on their own without their dogs then I pretended to be their "dog." I know this sounds really silly but playing "dog" is a more effective training tool than I thought it might be. It helps a lot that I don't give a flying leap if I look stupid--I'm jumping 8" jumps saying "oh boy, mom, here I come!" I go into the hole, I veer off course, I run past obstacles, and by doing all of this, I can correct their timing and position. A dog that can talk! Okay, maybe it's good there is no video of this. Still, it's proving to be an effective training tool for these two handlers because they listen. Plus it provides a lot of laughs for the class.

CJ and Webster. Look at that attention on his handler!

CJ and her agility star Webster. I had to put in a second picture of him because he's so darned cute!

So you can probably guess what happened. On second thought, I'd kill for video of this, I really would. Those two handlers and their dogs totally nailed that serpentine exercise! It was amazing and beautiful and awesome. I am so proud of PM and her lab Nellie and JH and her old terrier mix Aris. They may not realize that I am feeling my way through the "how to be a fun and effective agility instructor" maze or that they are my guinea pigs, but I will always remember the joy I felt this morning for being able to give them such a fun and successful agility experience!

And what about all those newbie handlers? We've been working them on tunnels for a couple of weeks, culminating this week in the ever popular jump-curved tunnel-jump sequence. This sequence is used in every novice agility class on the planet. Now just pause for a second and think about this...I've got totally green handlers and dogs successfully sequencing in just three weeks! It's amusing to see all of the typical newbie mistakes: repeating "tunnel! tunnel!" over and over; putting their hands into the tunnel then pulling them out, which pulls the dog out; not having reliable stays and lead outs; running out of room and coming to a halt which causes the dog to stop too. But we help them improve by showing them that they need to give the dog consistent signals with handler body position and timing of their commands.

Cherie and Xena. I keep the leash on the new dogs for a couple of weeks until I see how they are going to behave towards the other dogs. Nice drive to the tunnel!

We had some major breakthroughs this week with a couple of the dogs. One of our returning, but relatively green, handlers has a dog who was very reluctant to go through the tunnel. MH, my co-instructor, had him doing full length straight tunnels this morning after just a few reps with a shortened tunnel. I'd also mention that MW wasn't able to get Mr. B into his crate either... but this week he was happily going in and waiting his turn quietly! She's clearly been doing her homework! And one of our brand new handlers, HD with her desert dog mix Savvy, actually got her pup to sequence from a jump to a shortened tunnel--a miracle given that Savvy wouldn't even put more than front paw in the tunnel last week.

Sometimes MH and I hold dogs at the start to help teams be successful. Here's Cherie with her other dog Jake. That's me with a mug of coffee in my hand, thoughtfully provided by my co-instructor MH every week!

I'd also like to mention S and her yorkie mix Abby, graduates of my basic obedience class. S was really worried about Abby running off but it was pretty clear to me that Abby was totally focused on her handler. So I convinced S to leave the leash behind and run a jump-jump-tunnel-jump-jump sequence "naked." Once again, the handler trusted me enough to try it...and of course it went great. Abby never took her eyes off S (sorry, no pics of Abby; we'll try next week).

CM, one of our new handlers, and her JRT Obie. He loves this agility game and is doing great!

In the end, it's all about sending home each week happy dogs and handlers who are more confident, more trusting of each other, and always feeling like they've accomplished something really significant!

No team is happier than me and Mimi!

Feline Detente

2012-02-04T18:41:00.000+03:00

I'm so glad that at last the cats have reached some sort of understanding. First there was Tsingy's 5-day hunger strike (I kept putting the same darned bowl of food out twice a day; I figured she'd get hungry eventually). Then I discovered that they were taking turns trapping the other in the litter box--and not as part of a game. That was not pretty at all.

Kinky stretching and yawning after a nap.

I supposed some line was crossed a couple of weeks ago because they started screeching and howling at each other, escalating up to some short but rather vicious fights (these usually took place around 1am so I didn't see many of them although Mimi would shoot out of bed to go investigate). Both cats ended up with shallow bites on their necks and shoulders. Just like with dogs, those aren't killing bites but mutual attempts to sort out their issues.

Even though I thought it was all excessively dramatic, they needed to work it out on their own terms. And so they have. This weekend was noticeably drama-free. Tsingy is strolling around like she hasn't a care in the world. Both cats came upstairs with the dogs when I went up there to change after work. No yowling, no puffed tails, no fleeing the scene. They hung out while I played a quick game of fetch with the dogs, then we all trooped back downstairs again.

Kitty attacks sisal post: news at 11!

I've tucked into the post some pictures of Kinkajou playing on their new cat castle--both of them like it but I only managed to snap pics of him.

Kinky likes the new furniture.

Settling In

2012-02-01T15:36:00.000+03:00

I find myself settling in here despite my dislike of the culture and my curmudgeonly view of humanity in general. For one thing, I can comfortably weigh in on all of the topics that expats like to gnaw and worry over in social gatherings (MENA geopolitics, housing, Aramco politics, to name a few). That's not much of a stretch as I can schmooze with just about anybody on any topic if I am motivated to do so. But sometimes my opinion is even sought out, pretty flattering to a curmudgeon.

But what surprises me the most is how many people I know and greet as I go about my tiny, circumscribed life. At work, at the commissary, at the gym, walking the dogs, even in stores and malls in Khobar, I constantly run into people that I know. Well, so what, you are thinking. I'll tell you, I probably have never actually been recognized by so many people in my entire life. It is kind of weird because sometimes these people even come up and greet me first. This has simply not happened to me before.

I now have all of you thinking that I'm some sort of social misfit, and I suppose there is a grain of truth in that, but the larger point is that I seem to have become a member of the expat community without noticing it happening. I'm not notorious, that's not the right word, but I seem to have become someone that people recognize...in a good way.

The dog training classes of course play a large role here. Last weekend, I volunteered at a fund-raising event held annually by the Dhahran Running Club. It was the second year I helped them out, happily sitting at the registration table taking money and names. The community event is called the "Doggie Dawdle"--it's a 1-km run/walk/stroll with the goal of raising money for the local animal rescue group. People are welcome to bring leashed dogs, although a dog isn't necessary to participate. This year I knew, sometimes even knew the names of both people and dogs, around half of the 65 or so participants. And the common thread is that they all took the dog obedience classes from me.

The second contributing factor is my role at work. I oversee the construction of training programs for all of the geologists at Aramco. In the process, I meet geoscientists from every department, including a lot of Saudis. And here I have a fairly distinct advantage: there are still only about a dozen female geologists at Aramco, so I stick out. It is easy to pick up the phone to call someone to ask for something because even if I haven't met the person I'm calling, I'm pretty sure they already know who I am.

Although Dhahran has changed radically since its founding in the 1940's, it still retains many characteristics of a small town. It is hard to hide yourself away in this kind of environment. In a way, this is all probably a good thing although I hate that I had to come to Saudi Arabia to experience this.

Agility in KSA Week 12

2012-02-01T15:03:00.002+03:00

The other instructor for the agility class, MH, has been OOK since before Christmas so I've been running the class by myself. Getting the equipment to the field and getting it set up on my own requires a lot of effort. I also found that running the class, currently with 8 dogs and handlers at two distinct levels of experience, is really challenging. Arranging exercises suitable for each set of handlers and moving through them quickly enough so that no handler has to sit and wait for too long is harder than I expected. But MH emailed me this morning--she's back! Whew! With two instructors, we can keep two stations going all the time so the pace will pick up a lot.

Since we have such an avid group in the class, and since I see them all trying really hard to learn everything we throw at them, I thought I would select some videos of great handling and share those with them with the goal of inspiring them even more. There is a lot of poor, inconsistent handling out there that has been preserved forever on the internet, but I figured the FCI World trials would be a good resource. Indeed, there is a highlight video about 9 minutes long from the 2010 trial. I also found a video of American Ashley Deacon and Luka from 2011, and Austrian Lisa Frick's end-of-tournament 2011 run with Hoss in which he dropped the very first bar but she kept going like the gold was still in play--amazing sportsmanship.

I guess I overfaced my class participants a bit. JH, Aris's handler, came back in about an hour with this classic line:

I’ll hang me treat bag up now then…

No, no! I wailed to them in a reply. I wanted you to be inspired by the great handling and athleticism, not freaked out!

I'm trying to start their agility obsession. No better way to do that than to give them a chance to watch the best in competition.

Adventures in the Kitchen

2012-01-21T17:25:00.000+03:00

Friday morning greeted us with cloudy skies and a bit of rain, not enough to get the pavement wet under trees and cars, more like a very heavy dew. But moisture falling from the sky usually means something is up with the weather. By Friday afternoon, a front started sweeping down from the north bringing very cold winds and of course dust. Twenty-four hours later, it is becoming a proper dust storm out there--you can feel the grit on your teeth and in your eyeballs after just a few minutes outside.

A perfect evening for cooking. Inspired by the colder weather (certainly colder by our standards; I was lounging on the porch in shorts and a Tshirt two days ago; tonight I need long pants and a sweatshirt just to take the dogs out to pee), I decided to cook up some chicken in red whine.

I've been wanting to try cooking with my whine for some time but only recently have I gotten production organized to the point that I have extra bottles sitting around when I bottle the most recent batch, i.e., I usually drink it all.

I had set aside the last few inches of a bottle of okay red (I know how to make fabulous whine but I can't help experimenting with each batch and sometimes the results are less than fabulous) just for this purpose.

Saudi chickens are smaller than their US counterparts and not all of the chicken parts that you buy are very well butchered or cleaned. But I have found that one Saudi company in particular reliably produces good quality chicken parts--I usually buy the thighs or whole legs as I don't care much for chicken breast.

I took three thighs, ready after a lot of cleaning and rinsing and trimming (I'm very thankful for my ultra high quality kitchen shears; never skimp on good equipment in the kitchen), and browned them in liberal quantities of rosemary, basil, fresh ground black pepper, fresh ground salt, fresh chopped garlic, and olive oil. I then added the red whine, a coarsely chopped onion, and about two handfuls of baby carrots (I used the regular adult carrots in the dog food meatloaf that I made yesterday). The pot is simmering away as I write this.

I'm going to dress some fresh mixed greens (baby spinach, yum!) with some olive oil and balsamic vinegar and serve with my chicken in about half an hour.

Agility in KSA Week 11

2012-01-20T15:40:00.000+03:00

The new Community Education session started this week and today was the first of ten agility classes that we will run until the end of March. By then, it will be getting too hot for the dogs to be working outside, even at 6:30 in the morning, so unfortunately, that may be all the agility we will do until next September.

Five of the handlers who took the class in the fall signed up again plus I managed to round up three new ones. Tomorrow is an Aramco holiday so a lot of people went OOK for the long weekend but this morning for our first class, JH and Aris and CJ and Webster both showed up along with new handlers HD with a "desert dog" mix Savvy and K with JRT Obie.

MH is OOK too so I had to run this class by myself. It took me three trips with my dolly to get the equipment down the hill to the soccer field but with plenty of willing hands pitching in at the end of class, we hauled everything up in one trip!

I spent my Christmas weekend building a pause table. I've built one before and knew that I had a good design to work from. But acquiring the materials to build it represented three trips into town over a period of about a month to different local shops--no such thing as Home Depot around here. These local shops are dusty, dirty holes literally crammed floor to ceiling with whatever goods they specialize in. A Saudi in a thobe, usually the owner or the owner's relative, sits at a desk near the front and directs a crew of small brown men who climb and crawl over the piles of stuff to get the items that customers want. No browsing shelves, no comparing prices, no selecting items for yourself.

The wood that is available to me here is extremely poor quality. I was looking for 1x1 strips to use inside the table to strengthen the frame but couldn't find any. I ended up getting "1x2" strips that had been ripped from larger boards. Unfortunately, the laborer who did the ripping didn't bother to rip the original boards down the middle. The "1x2" strips were randomly sized in all directions. I wanted to make the sides of the table out of 1x8s, a common board size in the US, so that without its PVC base the table would be the minimum 8 inches tall. The best I could find were two curved, knotty pieces of wood that were approximately 1x6 inches. The top was supposed to be made out of plywood. All I could find was extremely expense marine-grade plywood, not the cheap composite stuff. And I had to buy an entire 4x8 foot piece of it, although they did cut it down to size for me, sort of.

So this table was cobbled together out of semi-random bits of wood, none of which were true to size or straight. And I did this without a workbench or even a garage. Stubbornness is a great asset in such situations.

Look at this corner! What a mess. Fortunately, the really ugly bits are on the underside.

I managed to get some acrylic primer at another store. For the final color, I chose to go with high gloss fire-engine red spray paint because it was easier to apply.

Now for the top of the table. Rather than go with a rubberizing kit, which I could have ordered online, or with paint mixed with sand, I decided to put green astroturf carpeting on top. I had my mother pick up some at her local home improvement store and in the best of all timings, the package arrived on Wednesday. I spent my Thursday afternoon cutting then glueing then screwing the carpet to the table--just in time to use for class this Friday morning! You can see the results in the photos below.

Even though I had two new handlers, I jumped right into some interesting exercises. I set up a jump box (four jumps arranged in a square) with a curved tunnel and pause table arranged outside. I had my experienced handlers work their dogs straight through the box, practicing good body language so the dogs didn't take the off-course jumps, then I introduced them to the reverse-flow pivot or false turn to help their dogs to the correct tunnel entrance. I had the new handlers work one, then two jumps, starting them sequencing in the very first class!

Savvy, the "desert dog" mix is Saluki as well as lab and pit bull. Pit bulls are banned in KSA but there is a big dog fighting affair up north of here and they smuggle pit bulls in for that purpose. Puppies mixed with pit show up all the time, discards that escaped being used for bait. Savvy is a very cautious dog but her owner is patient and follows instructions well so we had Savvy jumping 4" jumps and even getting onto the table after just a few attempts. It's not right to take credit since HD and Savvy are doing all the work, but I am really proud that I am able to help all kinds of dogs and handlers be successful.

Since all the dogs were extremely quick to pick up the table, I next had them work two jumps and the table, first in a straight line across the box then in a curve.

CJ and her little star Webster. We introduced him to 4" jumps this morning. Doesn't look like he has any problems with that!

What a pretty sit on the table!

JH and her little OLD star Aris. She emailed me and MH last week to say that she was concerned that Aris had been acting a bit old of late (he has a bum hip and arthritis and we leave the bars on the ground for him). But he had plenty of pep in class this morning for the full hour and a half!

One of the new handlers K and her JRT Obie. He's a bit too focused on her hands but he had no problem with the jumps!

Nice table landing!

Savvy and HD.

Savvy began class a nervous wreck--worried about the crate, about all of the strange dogs, about all of the strange people. But once we got HD and Savvy going, they started having a grand time! You can see Savvy looking ahead to the next jump and to the table after that.

Another extremely positive training session for all the dogs and handlers, and two excited new agility converts!

Adventures in the Kitchen

2012-01-14T17:43:00.000+03:00

Being sick is never fun. Last night the gombu moved from my throat to my head. I lasted three hours this morning at work (I spent the entire time running around getting some consultants set up) before stumbling home to sleep most of the day. The dogs have an infinite reservoir of patience for daytime naps and happily stretched out beside me.

After sleeping all day and taking some non-drowsy cold medicine, I was feeling a bit buzzy and decided to do some cooking. Fussing around in the kitchen is one of my favorite ways to relax.

Eggplants have always defeated me. They always have a bitter edge no matter how I prepare them. But at last I found the perfect way to manage them: a Middle Eastern eggplant dip called baba ganoush. It takes a bit of prep on the front end but you can make this as a side dish for any grilled meat, curry, or green salad.

Select some firm eggplants. Wash thoroughly and cut off the top. Slice the eggplants lengthwise into three or four slices no more than 1 cm thick. Drizzle them with olive oil (both sides). Now here's my twist on the recipe. Most cookbooks will tell you to roast the eggplants in your oven but I use my grill whenever I can so I roast them over a propane flame. This gives them a nice char as well as a tasty smoky flavor from my well seasoned grill.

The eggplant is done when the flesh begins to turn yellowish and smooth. It took me about 20 minutes to roast slices of four large eggplants on my grill on medium heat, turning frequently.

Let the slices cool then remove the flesh from the peel. If you have properly cooked the eggplant, you can separate the flesh from the rind with a spoon. Place the eggplant in a food processer.

Add fresh lemon juice to taste, and coarsely chopped, peeled garlic to taste. I used three large cloves for my four large eggplants.

Now here's the part that makes this dish really great for parties or potlucks: add a volume of plain, unsweetened yogurt equal to about half of the volume of eggplant.

Pulse until smooth.

Serve with whole grain crackers or bread or as a side dish.

What's not to love here? If you are a bit stingy with the olive oil and use low-fat yogurt, then the fat content doesn't have to be very high. You've added no salt or sugar. And eggplants have good fiber. Enjoy!

I'm eating my eggplant dip tonight with oven-roasted chicken and potatoes. Yum!

Catching Up

2012-01-12T17:33:00.000+03:00

I was just sitting on my porch with the dogs, drinking a glass of whine (white flavored with powdered ginger; surprisingly successful), and enjoying the evening. It's nearly 80F here at 5pm although the sun is already below the western horizon. I've been wearing shorts and a Tshirt to walk the dogs for about a week now, mornings and evenings. Our winter came early this year and sneaked away without any notice. There aren't really four seasons here, but we'll be generous and call this spring.

I'm sick with the same gombu that I had in France last July but this seems to be a milder case. The symptoms are most consistent with a strep infection: persistent fever (can alternate with chills, how nice), difficulty in swallowing, swollen lymph glands, etc. I'm taking it easy this weekend. (And before you get all wound up, yes, I know, you aren't supposed to drink alcohol when you are sick but here in the Magic Kingdom we get to make up our own rules. So there.)

Kinky has made himself right at home. He and Tsingy are apparently going to maintain this detente for some time but at least they aren't showing overt aggression towards each other. If anything, Kinky tries his best to entice Tsingy down from her perch. I think he'd like to get close to her but right now she isn't allowing it.

In desperation, Kinky has turned to playing with Mimi. He has already learned to give Harry a wide berth at all times, which I suspect was due to a chomp Harry gave him one day last week. That's a fundamental rule of this household so the earlier Kinky gets in line, the better.

But back to the Kinky and Mimi show. He will flop down on the floor and start biting her rear feet and legs, but ever so gently. She will respond by grabbing his entire head in her mouth, or take darting nips at his neck. When she jumps back, he will scoot over and bite her rear legs again. This game can go back and forth for quite a while but usually ends when Mimi gets too excited and starts stepping on Kinky, which of course is no fun at all.

The dog training classes start up again next weekend so I should have more fun agility posts to write. I'm exited to see how this second session will turn out. I built a table so have a new piece of equipment for the returning participants. And I'm going to paint and prepare a plank that we can use to start teaching contact behavior. Of course, we have no contact equipment, nor do we have any place to put such things even if we had them. But that doesn't matter--it's all part of the challenge of doing agility in Saudi Arabia.

Meet Kinky Friedman

2012-01-04T15:26:00.001+03:00

In mid-December, a very skinny orange and white tabby kitten started hanging out in my area of the Mango cluster-housing ghetto. He was loud and persistent and hungry. Because I am both stupid and soft-hearted, I fed him one night. And you can guess where that led. He showed up every night and started darting onto my porch every time I opened the gate. Not the best idea, I told him as I gently shooed him back out.

He wasn't feral--you can't approach or touch feral kittens. He hadn't been outside long because he wasn't torn up or scarred and wasn't really that dirty, mostly dusty around the edges. He looked to be about 10-12 weeks old, later confirmed by the vet. My guess is that he was abandoned.

I kept hoping that he would find another part of Mango to beg in but he kept showing up, surviving the gauntlet of feral cats, foxes, and dogs. On top of this, we were having a cold snap. So a few days before Christmas I decided to bring him into my house so I could figure out what to do next.

Tsingy took one quick sniff at this stranger in the crate and ran upstairs to hide. The dogs were simply besides themselves with curiosity. I introduced the kitten to them that very night. There was a very hysterical moment, about 30 seconds long, in which the kitten was poised utterly motionless, back arched, every hair erect, tail puffed, making not a sound, staring at both dogs who were also utterly motionless (except for Mimi's tail) just a few feet away. In the end, nothing happened. Nothing at all. Quite the anticlimax. Kitten didn't run, dogs didn't chase. And that was it.

I have to give some credit to my dogs because I have no doubt they would happily kill any cat that they found outside. But once that cat is inside, well, their concept of pack is rather fluid. None of my dogs has ever known life without cats as part of the household.

I put the kitten in a very large dog crate with food, water, a cozy bed, and a small litter pan. And the next morning, I made an appointment at the vet. I wanted to make sure he was free of nasty things before he had any opportunity to interact with Tsingy.

Kinky in his dog crate.

Because we are only allowed to have two animals registered to one Aramco badge number, I had to find a "sponsor" for the kitten so that the vet could see him. I called up a friend from my dog classes who only has one dog and who isn't a cat person and thus is unlikely to get a cat in the future. She was more than happy to lend me her badge number and sign the form. The vet clinic is completely aware of how we multiple-pet owners manage to get around the system: Tsingy is on her original owner's badge while their new second cat is on the badge number of one of their friends. That's how the animal-owning community here in Dhahran makes it all work.

In the 24 hours between my call and the vet visit, the kitten fell horribly ill. Vomiting constantly, he became lethargic and wouldn't eat or drink. The vet didn't waste any time--he thought it might be kitty parvo, which is horribly contagious and often lethal. Kitten did not have a good prognosis. They whisked him off to kitty ICU and put him on fluids and antibiotics right away. There he stayed for five days. The vets called me with daily updates, even over the weekend. I told them, he deserves a chance. And if it was necessary to euthanize him, then he deserved to die with dignity and in as much comfort as we could provide. This is the least we can do for the least among us.

I spent the rest of that weekend cleaning my downstairs floor and everything kitten had touched with bleach. I was very worried about infecting Tsingy.

In the end, the vets decided that kitten did not have parvo (he tested negative for that and for feline leukemia) but instead had gotten an extremely nasty bacterial infection in his gut. He was a very sick kitten for several days.

In the end, he pulled through. The following week, I brought him back home, weak and much thinner. He spent a couple of days in the large dog crate until I could make sure he was able to properly use a litter box. He needed the extra rest, too. I would let him out when I was home in the evenings, much to Mimi's pleasure--she was fascinated by him. As the days passed, he became more active and curious about his surroundings and he got to spend more and more time out of the crate. His personality started to express itself. So he had to have a name. I chose to name him Kinky Friedman. Either by accident or birth he has a 90-degree bend at the tip of his tail (the kink). And it seemed to me that he had some sort of spiritual kinship with the famous Jewish cowboy/politician/musician, a feisty attitude and a love of life.

Mimi and Kinky.

During the past two weeks, Kinky's personality has really begun to shine. It's been a while since I had a young animal in the house and his energy is astonishing--and remember that I live with Mimi, the perpetual motion machine. Kinky, like Mimi, quickly figured out how to surf across the tile floor. The other morning, he gave one of his toys a big whack, took off and dropped into a slide, only to ram headfirst into the five-liter communal water bowl. Bong! It rang like a bell and a wave of water sloshed over the edge onto him. I laughed so hard I thought I was going to pee myself. Harry, being no slouch in the "I can get attention too" department, got up and brought me another cat toy. Logical, of course. If I was that amused by the stupid kitten playing with a cat toy, Harry wanted in on the action. I could only laugh harder.

Kinky has collapsed into a stupor from kibble gluttony but he can't drag himself away from the kitchen.

Tsingy has been the X factor in all of this--I decided that I would not keep Kinky unless I could get Tsingy to go along with it. Upon Kinky's return from the vet, Tsingy disappeared upstairs. She didn't eat, drink, or use the litter box for three days. I figured it wasn't very healthy for her to keep that up. So I changed the arrangements a bit. I set up Tsingy's food and water and litter box in her room and shut her up in there alone. And I set up a new litter box next to Kinky's dog crate. So there Tsingy sulked for a couple more days, deigning to eat three or four pieces of kibble (although she gobbled up the canned cat food I bought especially to tempt her). But at last she started to eat and use the litter box.

Group nap. Mimi usually takes the purple pillow but she was being polite for a change and didn't push the kitten off.

It has been a very slow process of integration, more difficult than my other experiences with introducing a new cat to an existing household. Tsingy is very stubborn and not at all happy about sharing space. But thanks to the blissful ignorance of kittens, Kinky blunders his way around ignoring her snits and snarls. Both litter boxes are in the office now, and Kinky has full run of the house. Tsingy is starting to resume her normal schedule. Kinky has claimed sleeping spots all his own and has his own routines. While these two cats may never curl up together in a patch of sun for a nap, I think that a general detente is being shaped.

I know this particular photo looks pretty tense but for the most part, the cats are ignoring each other.

So welcome to Kinky Friedman, the newest member of CircusK9!

Kinky lounging on one of the dog beds. He's got quite a tail (a kinkajou tail, to be exact; "kinkajou" is his new nickname) and you can see the kink a couple of inches from the tip.

Agility in KSA: The Back Story

2011-12-31T18:20:00.001+03:00

This is a post that is long overdue. I want to give you North American readers some idea of the issues and obstacles that make doing agility in KSA difficult.

Like my Basic Obedience classes, the agility classes are part of Community Education. There is a remarkable array of classes available nearly year-round through Community Ed: hair cutting, digital photography, cooking, intro to carpets, and of course language classes such as the French classes that I've been taking for two years. The classes target adults although in special circumstances and with permission of the parents, older children can sometimes register for them. All of the instructors are people like me, a member of the Aramco community who has a special skill or interest and who is willing to share that with others. We sign up for Community Ed classes online and payment is taken directly from our paychecks (in the case of non-working wives, the payments come from their husbands' paychecks!). And instructors who are direct employees are paid through an addition to our paychecks at the end of each trimester.

Offering the dog training classes through Community Education provides many direct benefits to me. First, they handle the registration and the money. That's a huge administrative hassle that I don't need to worry about. And for the basic obedience class, Community Ed arranges for us to use a very large air-conditioned room at the middle school, so the classes can be held any time of day and any time of the year.

But much more importantly, Community Education provides me an Aramco-approved cover for playing with dogs in public venues. With their blessing, we can pass through the school security gates. With their blessing, we can use school property on the weekends when it is not used by other groups. Community Ed's wasta gives us cover.

The venue of the middle school itself is also extremely valuable. First, there is a 10-foot high concrete wall around the entire school. Second, we can control which gate dog class participants use, and thus can keep a close watch on poop patrol. And third, for the agility class, the soccer field itself is fenced again (although with a dozen openings).

Why is it so important that we keep such a low profile? I can already hear you say, why not trot out into the desert or use a sports field that is only used in the evenings?

We expats that wish to have dogs are allowed to do so only by the thinnest level of tolerance. For example, for about a year, no dogs have been allowed into KSA unless their paperwork describes them as labs or retrievers.

A majority of Muslims believe dogs are unclean. The religious reasons are far too complicated for me to deal with here. But I will tell you that these opinions are based on interpretations of hadiths, which are "sayings" of Mohammed written down as late as a couple of centuries after his death. You can google "hadith islam dog" and do the research yourself. Saudis' fear of dogs is palpable. They will cross the street if they see you approaching with dogs. Women will move to the other side of their husbands. Children turn and run. And to be truthful, many Asians, both Christian and Muslim, are no better.

The country in which I reside is openly hostile to dogs, particularly the idea of dogs as companion animals. The official rules are designed to make it as difficult as possible to bring dogs into the country. The behavior of the locals is intended to make it as uncomfortable as possible to move dogs openly about in the community.

If a single Saudi were to complain about the dog classes, even if they complained for no other reason than they didn't like dogs, then that single complaint would be enough to end the classes, even with the wasta that Community Education possesses.

We walk a very fine line with our agility classes to be sure. You can't do agility with the dog on lead and yet it is a direct violation of Aramco rules to have dogs off leash. Now I hope you can see the value of tucking ourselves away behind the middle school fences and holding the classes at sunrise on the weekends. We can't offend if we can't be observed.

Having a dedicated dog park somewhere else on camp is something that Aramco doesn't want to touch with a 10-foot pole. The security and safety risks are overwhelming. Given the barely tolerated presence of dogs in the community, I hope that you can see that Aramco does not want to be involved in such as issues as:

who is responsible if your dog gets out and gets hit by a car?
who is responsible if your dog bites another dog in the dog park?
who is responsible if your dog escapes from the dog park and bites a person?
who is responsible for keeping the dog park clean?
who is responsible for making and enforcing poop pick-up rules?
who is responsible for deciding what constitutes an aggressive dog and for making and enforcing a rule of "no aggressive dogs"?

The short answer for most of those is that you are responsible and your dog will be put down if something happens. KSA is not a democracy. It does not have a codified legal system. There is no recourse to such decisions.

There is a vocal dog park contingent at community meetings who simply do not understand these safety issues. They are always the people who are known for not picking up their dogs' poop, or for never walking their own dogs (houseboys rarely pick up dog poop). There are certain streets in Dhahran which are literally lined on both sides with piles of dog shit (I never walk my dogs along those streets). A dog park would quickly become a sea of dog shit in this community.

The "dog parkists" don't understand how important it is to stay under the Aramco and the Saudi radar. They don't understand that it takes work and commitment to openly maintain the presence of dogs in such a culture and community. They would risk the privilege of owning a dog for the ease of not having to walk their dogs any further than the "dog park" in order for Fluffy to shit where he wants to, and where they don't have to pick it up.

The constant threat of the "dog parkists" has caused me to abandon all attempts to form a recreational dog training group. We can play our dog games and I can help a few dogs each year become good canine citizens by keeping our heads down and by staying under the protection of Community Education, who gives us a semi-official stamp of approval.

I am very thankful that Community Ed supports us and gives us a safe place for us to train. I am not a patient person and am still surprised that I managed to wait for two years before pushing the agility classes. I built up wasta of my own by holding so many basic obedience classes without incident and to such positive feedback from the community. It's all come together for now, but I am aware that our agility game could end at any moment. That's why each week, each class that we manage to hold, is a little miracle all by itself!

Agility in KSA Week 10

2011-12-22T16:38:00.002+03:00

Today was our last class for this session. I'm very happy to report that Community Education is going to let us run the dog agility class again starting in late January for another 10 sessions! Even better, I've arranged to move it to Fridays so that I can reclaim my Thursday morning shopping time in Khobar. At last report, I have 7 handlers signed up for the agility class. I'll teach the basic obedience class again on Thursday afternoons; registration for that class filled in about a week.

MH and I planned a very special set up for this final class: a complete novice level course comprised of 11 obstacles with one side change. The course had 7 jumps, 2 tunnels (one straight, one curved), 1 chute, and for a special surprise, two sets of 2 weave poles, canted at 2 o'clock and 8 o'clock, 10 feet apart, put in the course as a "weave" obstacle. You can see the layout in the videos I've posted below: a sweeping U-shaped affair with the chute as the final obstacle off to the left. We numbered the entire course and set out cones for the start and finish lines.

After we had it all set up, MH and I ran it with our dogs to ensure it was runnable, and to figure out where the change of side needed to occur. I originally thought it would be a cross before jump 10, but the speed that our dogs had on the second straightaway meant we could never be there with them when they were at jump 10. So the side change had to be done between tunnel 6 and jump 7. An FC or a RC would work, although we have only taught them front crosses in class, so I hoped they would choose that.

Just imagine what we were asking of our dogs and handlers: eleven obstacles! That's a lot to tackle after only 10 weeks of class, considering that none of these ladies and their dogs attended all 10 weeks. But MH and I wanted to set the bar high for them.

After they walked it and we had a short discussion about walking courses in general and this course in particular, we had them backchain it. This means we had them work the last 4 obstacles, then the last 8, then finally doing the entire thing, with plenty of rewarding along the way. One thing I didn't do often enough with my own agility pups in training was stop and reward during a sequence. I wanted to make sure that our novice handlers and their dogs didn't make the same mistake. Then, after all of that practice, we asked them to run the full course and reward at the end.

Our little novice group exceeded expectations and more! All three dogs were focused and driving forward, diving into tunnels and over jumps, happy to receive their rewards along the way but also quite happy to do the obstacles, and by the end of class, all three dogs were able to complete the full course with only one huge reward at the end. That's a huge leap forward in dog and handler understanding of what agility is! MH and I were getting goosebumps watching them! Of course they weren't perfect but I have seen far worse handling in real trials. I told MH that we managed to create some real agility handlers and dogs in just 10 weeks!

Judge for yourself in the videos below.

All of the handlers looked at the "weave" obstacle and said, my dog doesn't know what the poles mean. They only do it for the toy reward at the end. MH and I said, try it anyway. We've been sending them home for several weeks with either fixed steel 2x2 bases or stick-in-the-ground poles (depending on whether they have a backyard with grass or not) so they can practice. Turns out that practice does pay off because all of the dogs drove forward from jump 7 directly into the first set of 2 poles and forward to the second set. To their handler's surprise, they absolutely understood what the required performance was supposed to be.

And yes, I already know what you purists are saying, that we are totally perverting Garrett's 2x2 method. So what? We are in Saudi Arabia and making all of this up as we go. We put those 2x2s in a sequence and the dogs did them in the sequence. We may not have dogs doing inline weaves yet...but we will. And we are going to have plenty of fun getting to that point.

There were other challenges in our little novice course besides the side change. Jumps 3, 4, and 5 formed part of the curve from the first leg of the U to the second. The handlers worried about these curved jumps because they'd only done jumps in a straight line, but for the most part, the dogs did just fine.

And I sneaked in the curved tunnel, obstacle 6. We've been putting out straight tunnels for weeks but we've been heavily rewarding for the tunnel commitment. So the curved tunnel presented no problem at all for the dogs (handlers, it was another story as they had to drive forward to get in position for the FC!).

On a final note, all of the handlers who signed up for the class (all of them, not just these three) apparently were sneaking around behind our backs because they presented MH and I each with an extremely generous gift certificate for the spas and restaurants at the Ritz Carlton in Bahrain! I suspect MH was as moved by this as I was. And I'm not kidding about the generous part!

This class has been a labor of love on all levels for me and MH. Yes, we get up hideously early on a weekend morning. Yes, we haul every scrap of equipment up and down a steep hill each week. Yes, we set up the class in the dark. But...we have learned so much about teaching agility. We get to remember way back when we were novice handlers too. We get to try out different teaching and learning methods. And we have been able to provide our own dogs an opportunity to do agility that both of us have waited two years for. In the process, a very happy coincidence indeed, we have provided that same opportunity for some handlers and their dogs who are now infected with the agility bug! I am so very thankful that MH is my partner in this venture and that we have found some dog folks who find this crazy game just as exciting as we do.

I am quite blessed to end my second year in Saudi Arabia doing agility with friends.

Recuperating

2011-12-22T14:35:00.000+03:00

Other than the somewhat garish wound and stitches, you'd hardly know that Harry had surgery yesterday morning. He's a bit more tired today than usual and still a bit wobbly on that leg, but he jumps up on the couch and did his squeaky bounce to greet a friend last night. Gotta admire those tough little terriers.

Most of the swelling is gone. He has two additional layers of stitches inside the wound to close the skin layers. The lump was completely outside his muscle tissue and the vet said he didn't have to cut any muscle at all to remove it. He said it went very smoothly. That's Mimi's tail sticking into the middle of the picture.

Mimi in fact is presenting me with more of a worry. Upul came by yesterday after the work day specifically to talk to me about her.

Harry and I left around a quarter to 7 that morning and Upul came over around 10am. He said he could hear Mimi howling from the parking lot!

He opened the gate and came up to the window and looked in to see her sitting with her back to the window, head thrown up, howling. She didn't even hear him until he rattled his keys. It is quite clear that she was most unhappy being left alone (the cat, snoozing upstairs, hardly counts).

She didn't greet him like she usually does. She ran to the door and stood there. He thought she needed to go out so he put her on the leash and took her out. Ignoring all of her usual "I've gotta go" quick peeing spots, she pulled him straight to the parking lot...Upul said, "ma'am, were you parked to the left of the Range Rover this morning?" Um, yes, that's exactly where the car was when I left with Harry. She dragged Upul to the very spot where I had been parked, sniffed around, then wanted to go back in the house. He said the entire time he was in my place cleaning up, she stood at the door staring out instead of following him around like usual. I'll just mention that she can't see the parking lot from the house.

Upul asked me what I was going to do when Harry "was gone." I said, well, I guess I'm going to have to get Mimi a dog!

Mimi recovering from a full morning of agility and Harry just recovering. I had been on the other end of the couch with Harry's head in my lap. They didn't move when I got up to take this picture.

She greeted Harry's return at noon on Wednesday with extravagant sniffing and nudging.

Getting Old

2011-12-19T19:07:00.000+03:00

Harry nodding off with a toy in his mouth after a happy game of fetch.

I was grooming Harry this weekend, something I usually only need to do every couple of months at most, and when I was clippering his fuzzy butt, I discovered a large mushy lump on his right buttock. It didn't feel connected to anything, sort of like it was floating below the skin. It certainly hadn't been there when I last groomed him. I slept very poorly for a couple of nights until I was able to get him into the vet.

The vet clinic here is not quite bare bones but it is starkly utilitarian. The two vets take care of an array of small animals as well as the horses at the Hobby Farms in both Dhahran and Ras Tanura. They are stretched pretty thin even on good days.

The one that was on duty when I took Harry in was the Kiwi. He's stereotypically blunt and abrupt but I quite like him. He gave a quick look at Harry's lump, grabbed a giant syringe with a tiny needle stuck on the end, and jabbed it in the lump a few times. He then rubbed the needle tip on a glass slide and held it up to the light on the ceiling. "No sign of cells here, probably not cancer" he said. Just like that. No fixing agents, no stains, no cover slide, no looking at things under a microscope. Veterinary medicine by triage.

Diagnosis: lipoma. The lump is about the size of a ping pong ball (pretty big when you are the size of a fox terrier). Lots of dogs get lumps as they age and lipomas are for the most part benign and can be left alone, although they can get quite large.

The vet and I debated the various sides of the matter: would it get bigger, would I want to do surgery on a 15 yr old dog (in two years), would it interfere in any way with function, what would the surgery entail, what about recovery, etc.

I have decided to have it removed. This is his only lump but the rapidity with which it developed concerns me a bit. Harry is still quite vigorous and healthy, even if he is getting a bit hard of hearing (upon returning from class, Mimi and I can sometimes get entirely in the house before he hears us and wakes up), and his cataracts are getting progressively worse. Even so, he is up for walks whenever they are offered, he plays with his toys with as much joy, if perhaps a little less energy, as he has always had, and he eats everything he is offered. He may not be able to get much air when he jumps to greet me (his hind legs don't leave the ground very often these days), and he's rather stiff in the mornings. But he's 13 years old and all of these things are to be expected.

I hope I'm not subjecting him to a procedure that isn't needed, but the sight of that lump bothers me. His surgery is scheduled for Wednesday morning. (If you are interested in this sort of thing, a series of photos of a lipoma removal can be found here; they aren't kidding, not for the squeamish.)


Harry and Mimi (the lump under the greenish blanket; she likes to be completely covered) on a cold evening a couple of weeks ago. They'd had play time, dinner, a walk, more play time, and it was at last time to settle down for the evening.

Agility in KSA Week 9

2011-12-16T18:03:00.001+03:00

It's the end of the year and all of those "over" holidays are around the corner (overeating, overspending on crap nobody needs, over-religious-ing on an originally pagan holiday co-opted by the Christian church, over-decorating, over-emotional...). We aren't immune to any of that stuff here although it does take a little more effort to make it all happen in an overdone fashion.

And in the holiday spirit, this week I got emails from one handler after another saying they couldn't make it to class, until the list dwindled to one. And she emailed me at 1:30 a.m. Thursday morning saying she was sick.

I emailed MH earlier in the week to let her know of the trend. Her reply? "Well, I'll be there." That's my girl!

So she and I spent two hours having our own private agility seminar! We worked our way through two different exercises from the CleanRun Exercise Source Books (I have numbers 1 and 2). As always, what looks fairly easy on the page can turn into quite a challenge when you put actual dogs and handlers on the field.

We had a great time! It was another clear and cold morning here in Dhahran and by the time we were ready to run, the sun was up and the field was entirely ours! MH and I use radically different handling styles and it was quite fun to watch each other sort out the various challenges in each exercise.

I asked MH to take some pictures of me and Mimi since I realized that I've been posting about agility in KSA for TWO months and haven't posted one pic of my little fox terrier actually doing it.

Mimi. She KNOWS that the agility class is really all about her.

MH and Austin, one of her PWDs.

A great picture of Mimi turning out of the tunnel. She is one happy fox terrier.

This is my favorite picture of all. I just love the sign for the school in the background! Mimi exiting the weaves. Thanks to MH for taking this great photo!

MH and her older PWD Dallas in the weaves.

Not the best picture of Mimi (amazing extension on her hind legs though) but it shows me and the school sign. Just in case any of you were doubting that I was really doing agility in Saudi Arabia. That's the bunny fur tug-n-treat clutched in my left hand.

Adventures in the Kitchen

2011-12-10T19:54:00.001+03:00

I've mentioned that the five English-language radio stations we get here in the Eastern Province include the Armed Forces Radio Network. Instead of commercials, they run short spots lasting 1 to 3 minutes that are pulled from public networks all over the U.S. One of these is a short radio blog done by Mike Colameco called "Food in a Flash". Because cooking is one of my hobbies, I usually try to pay pretty close attention to his bits. This weekend, he talked about baking winter squash with maple syrup, bacon fat, and lime juice. Bacon? Limes? Squash? It sounded pretty interesting!

I like all of those flavors on their own so the idea of combining them sounded like something I definitely needed to try. When I ran to the commissary on Friday, I picked up some imported limes and two nice Saudi-grown butternut squashes. We can get locally grown limes but they are small and bitter and not all that juicy. I prefer to pay more and use limes that have a more familiar performance.

Unfortunately, I was folding laundry at the time of Colameco's bit and didn't get all the details, such as oven temp, and whether you peel the squash or not. To find an answer to these questions, I turned to the venerable Joy of Cooking. But even this hoary reference didn't help me much. I could have sworn Colameco said to peel the squash, but JofC said not to. Recipes for baked squash in JofC called for oven temps ranging from 325F to 400F--that wasn't narrowing things down much. But in the end, I realized that all of the JofC recipes involved steaming the squash in the oven then adding some seasoning. That clearly wasn't what Colameco had in mind when he was extolling the virtues of squash baked in bacon fat.

So like any good cook, I improvised.

I did follow JofC's tip to peel and dice the raw squash on a folded towel using a serrated blade. Those tough winter squash can be kind of tricky to cut up when raw. But it all came off smooth as buttah.

I put the coarsely diced squash in my trusty pyrex baking pan, drizzled some maple syrup over it, then I followed that with some more maple syrup (maple syrup, yum!). I gave the squash a liberal dousing of freshly ground pepper. Next I laced seven fat slices of smoked bacon around the squash cubes (yeah, seven slices for one squash; don't be so quick to judge--it's a damned miracle that I even have bacon and thus not surprising that I am liberal in its application). Finally, I squeezed 2/3s of a fresh lime over everything.

It took about 55 minutes at 375F for the squash to cook tender. I covered the dish with foil for the last 20 minutes.

The end result was fabulous! Since I didn't add any extra oil, the dish wasn't sloppy or greasy. And the pepper and lime really brightened up the dish, making it feel Caribbean or Asian in influence. Easy to prepare, easy to cook, and as long as you overlook the saturated animal fats, ever so healthy for you!

Let's review the ingredients:

maple syrup: organic, comes from a tree, has to be better for you than processed white sugar, and it is so smooth and delicious
freshly ground black pepper: if you can flavor chocolate with black pepper, well, you can put this stuff on just about anything (maybe not oatmeal, but even that might be worth an experiment: black pepper and maple syrup oatmeal...yum!)
freshly squeezed lime juice: a secret ingredient of many tasty South Asian sauces
smoked bacon: the mellow fatty counterpoint to the acidic lime and the sharp pepper and the sweet syrup, bacon can also be used to flavor anything; I knew this bacon was very salty so I added no additional salt to the squash
butternut squash: fiber, vitamin A, seasonal, locally grown, side or main dish as you choose--how could you not appreciate the versatile butternut?

Agility in KSA Week 8

2011-12-09T15:34:00.001+03:00

This week I had to run the class myself since MH was OOK on a short trip. Since I could observe last week that lots of the dogs had commitment issues with jumps in particular, I had already decided to have them backchain a jump chute this week. That meant that I could pare the equipment list down to something I could manage on my own (although it still took me three trips from car to field). Amazing how quickly I got used to having MH haul half the gear down each week!

I had each team begin with one jump and had the handlers start in different locations--with the dog, at the jump, on the landing side of the jump. And I added a twist--everyone had to throw a toy forward to encourage the dog to drive ahead. We've been working with toys in a haphazard fashion but I figured it was time to increase the training pressure and require every handler to use them.

The handlers were quite interested in my bunny fur tug-n-treat, so a few weeks ago I ordered some of those along with some other fun tugs and toys from Clean Run to sell to them. Imagine the excitement of the dogs, who are just starting to figure out this agility game, when confronted with one of those very high value toys! They were all mad for their new toys! Even Webster, who will drop a toy for food, wouldn't drop his new tug-n-treat bear, no how, no way.

For the dogs who have issues returning toys to their handlers (I am all in favor of a good victory lap but if it happens every single time you throw the toy, all learning is lost), I brought some nylon rope to make tethers for the toys. So now the novice handlers had to manage the dog while not running into the jumps and wrestling with six feet of rope tied to a toy that they have to throw at precisely the moment the dog commits to the jump (too soon and it's a lure, too late and you really aren't rewarding what you want to reward).

After having them work one jump, I set up two, then quickly progressed to three in a row with the handlers working the jumps first off their left, then again off their right. The dogs were sailing! It was fabulous to see how excited everyone was!

Our experiment in training weaves using the 2x2 method took a big leap forward too. We haven't been progressing terribly quickly but this week we did at last make it to the step where you have two sets of 2 poles rotated at 2 and 8 o'clock, set about 10-15 feet apart. I was frustrated at our lack of progress in the weave training and figured that if we could get the handlers used to throwing toys and the dogs used to driving forward that we might be able to get out of our rut. And it worked exactly as I hoped it would! After some warm up on one set of 2 poles, the dogs rapidly progressed to driving forward through two sets of 2 poles with the handlers working both left and right sides.

Running this class has been exhilarating and frustrating at the same time. I see so much talent and promise but with only one class a week and no access to equipment or a space to practice in (like me, some of the participants don't even have yards), our progress is slow. I've had to dial back some of my larger expectations but every week I am amazed at the new skills that the dogs and handlers display.

Agility in KSA Week 7

2011-12-01T16:42:00.001+03:00

This week I decided to raise the bar fairly high on our little group of handlers. I set up a sequence using three jumps and a tunnel such that they would be forced to use a lead out and a front cross in order to be successful. MH and I set out cones 1-4 and told them to "walk the course" and figure out what they needed to do.

My goodness, there was much discussion amongst them about what to do, but in the end, to my great pleasure, they did figure out that they needed to do a front cross after the second jump. I gave them some tips and let them walk it again.

I know that many of you in North America look at these photos and think, well, that's kind of a yawn: I've put in this post some pictures of handlers walking a course. How dynamic can that possibly be? But please, do not ever forget that you are seeing pictures of very dedicated dog owners who are giving up their precious weekend mornings to come and do agility...in Saudi Arabia! I get goosebumps watching them each week. If I'm talking about it after I have a couple of glasses of whine, I might even get a tear or two in my eye. This is a huge achievement, an amazing thing we are doing here.

I've said before, I will do anything for my dogs. Turns out MH will too! She's bringing in half the equipment each week and she works her behind off in support of the class. We meet at 5:15 in the morning in the cold dark and manhandle a couple of hundred pounds of equipment and three dogs down a steep path to the soccer field within the school grounds (in the process, we pass through a security gate manned by a guard wearing a very large sidearm). We unload our carts, then put up 12 mesh panels to block off the fence openings (I custom-made the panels to fit the openings; MH figured out this morning how to put them up with only two clips each, saving one of us a trip to town to buy more; you say, pssh, why not just drive to town and get more? well, we can't drive to town, and the expedition to go buy more clips might take 2-3 hours with the various buses and taxis and store closures during prayer times; are you willing to give up one of your evenings after work to do that?). We set up the student part of the course then lay out the remaining equipment around that so that we can goof around with our dogs for a good 45 minutes before class begins.

So without further ado, here are the photos from today's class.

MH goofing with one of her dogs.

More goofing. She probably has some good pictures of me and Mimi. MH and I highly value this time in which we get to work our own dogs, practicing half-remembered handling moves.

Brr!! It was 48F this morning with a stiff northerly wind. For KSA in early December, that's cold!

Walking and discussing. The sequence was jump 1-jump 2-tunnel 3-jump 4. The arrangement forced them to start with the dog on their left, then FC after jump 2 and handle the rest off their right.

More walking and discussing. MH and I didn't intervene for quite a while, just walked around and took pictures! A side story to this photo is that I required everyone taking the class to show up with a crate. There was a fair bit of resistance at first as few people here use crates. But I held firm, holding in the back of my mind this vision of handlers walking a course. That is only possible if your dog is safely stashed in a crate.

More walking. Think this is a dumb picture? This photo was taken at 0650 hours on December 1, 2011, in SAUDI ARABIA!

JH and her elderly terrier mix Aris. Look at that fabulous fluffy tail! He gets quite a bit of air over those bars and can easily jump 4" despite having a bum hip, but we don't want to tire him out. So it's bars on the ground for Aris!

Okay, this week I put in THREE pictures of C and her miniature dachshund Webster, but that is because I managed to get some amazing shots of them and because he's so damned cute! His legs are not even 2" long so he jumps bars on the ground. C has already rewarded him for coming to the correct side of the FC and now she is running the full sequence. Having completed the FC, she is sending him into the tunnel. Look at that inside hand indicating the next obstacle!! Look at her body position!! Seriously, readers, tears in my eyes as I post this!

Sometimes our green dogs need a bit of help at the start line. Rather than train that in class, MH and I just hold them. I took this over Webster's head as his mom C was leading out to the second jump.

It's amazing that I managed to capture this shot. Now we have the handlers running the sequence in reverse--jump-tunnel-jump-jump--but a FC is still required! Diabolical! C is throwing the toy forward over the next jump as Webster is driving forward. Readers: this occurred this morning in SAUDI ARABIA!

PM and her lab Nellie heading for the start line.

Reward time! Get that tug! MH in the foreground bundled up because it was cold here this morning!

Agility in KSA Week 6

2011-11-26T12:17:00.001+03:00

On Thursday, the Dhahran agility class met for the sixth time. It was probably our best class yet.

After dragging all of the equipment from our cars to the field (with careful stacking and use of bungees, we have improved our transport efficiency to one dolly trip each and one dog trip each), MH and I started talking about what we wanted to do that week. I said, I want them to do another short sequence using the two tunnels, perhaps jump-tunnel-jump-tunnel-jump. Michelle suggested instead that we put the two tunnels adjacent to each other and start with them. Our goal would be to get the dogs and handlers motivated and running fast. I thought that sounded like a great idea.

So we set one tunnel up in a J-shape, often easier for a novice dog to negotiate than a C-shape, and the other as a straight tunnel with about 16 feet between them. We had the handlers line up and ran them through very quickly. Most of the dogs were driving for the first tunnel and heading right for the second to the surprise of their handlers who were often hard pressed to get to the end at the same time as their dogs. We encouraged people to throw toys and treat containers to help the dogs go on.

Then we added a jump at each end, before the first tunnel and after the second one. We have dogs of all sizes and we have to change jump heights a lot. The beauty of this setup was that MH could be at one end and I could be at the other assisting as needed.

I had to hold the dogs at the start line for the first couple of times through because we had some handler chatter and arm-flailing that needed some correction, but the handlers and dogs quickly got into the groove. They progressed so quickly and successfully that we added a second jump at the beginning and the end--now we had six obstacles for them to do. The whole sequence formed a smooth arc across the field.

I got goosebumps watching handler after handler approach the first jump, remove the lead, set their dog up at the start, lead out past both jumps to the tunnel (with their back to the dog), stop and look over their shoulder, hold out the hand closest to the dog, and calmly release their dog to the tunnel as they took off down the arc...it was as close to the real thing as I could ever hope for and quite an achievement in just six weeks. They looked so confident and their dogs were so enthusiastic about "doing it again"--exactly what I was hoping to achieve with this class.

I've already arranged with Community Education to teach the class again in the next session (late January-March), and I've invited two of my current basic obedience participants who have shown exceptional promise to join us. A particularly unique challenge of teaching agility in Dhahran is the difficulty in creating continuity and improving skill levels from week to week when people are out on leave so much. In ten weeks, most people might attend only five or six times and rarely in succession. Still, MH and I think that all of the time and effort are more than worth it!

Raining Early in the Eastern Province

2011-11-26T11:42:00.001+03:00

It's not often that my desktop weather gidget (gadget + widget) looks like this:

That's right! It's raining! Water droplets falling from clouds (they are pretty dusty droplets but let's not quibble over details)!

Last Monday as I went out with the dogs for their 4am walk, I looked to the west and saw huge streaks of vertical lightening. The rumble of the thunder was just at the limit of my hearing (but Mimi sure could hear it and was not happy about it). The system was many tens of kilometers away and I thought no more about it.

The weather patterns here are interesting in part because there are no permanent lakes or rivers that can provide moisture to storm systems and generally speaking, the Arabian Plate doesn't have a lot of topography which exerts a strong influence on the formation and movement of storm systems. Storm systems thus tend to be localized over relatively small areas. Rainfall can be violent but is usually brief. Even the presence of clouds is a bit unusual because it is normally too dry for clouds to stay around for long. So I saw the clouds to the west and thought, it might rain out there today but we probably won't see anything here.

It turns out that the weather system was larger than I realized. It passed through Dhahran later that afternoon as a dust front and was followed by three days of the most gloriously clear and cold weather. Sweatshirts! Long pants! Throw open the windows and let the hovel air out! It gets that cool for only a few weeks out of the year, usually in January, which is also the time it typically rains, so this weather was a welcome surprise.

I could tell last night that it was warming up again--back to shorts and Tshirts when walking the dogs (in contrast to some Brits and most of the Saudis and Asians who bundle up like they have to face Arctic conditions whenever the temps are below 70F). So I was pleasantly surprised to see more clouds this morning right overhead.

The rain started as I was driving to work--and five hours later it is still raining! You could almost convince yourself that winter is just around the corner.

Agility in KSA Week 5

2011-11-18T18:05:00.001+03:00

This week I thought it might be fun to give you some idea of what is required to make this agility class a reality.

First, I want to give a gigantic thanks and thumbs-up and bow of respect to my co-instructor MH. She has thrown herself completely into this agility teaching gig . Frankly, I couldn't have made it work without her.

We have now reached the stage where we have enough gear that it takes three trips from car park to soccer field, each of us manhandling a dolly precariously stacked with awkwardly shaped loads. It is all made harder by the fact that the security gate we use to enter school grounds is about 20 feet higher in elevation than the soccer field.

It is still dark here at 5:30 in the morning. Class equipment dumped in the soccer field. Jumps are made entirely of PVC with J&J Dog metal jump cup strips attached. I put as much stuff as I can into duffels for easier transport.

But it isn't simply a matter of driving up somewhere and we are done. All of the class equipment has to be loaded into our cars the night before and unloaded each class meeting. The soccer field is about 100 yards from the car park. We are now meeting at 5:15 am to do the gear-dragging so that we have about 20 minutes for transport, 20 minutes to set up the field, leaving about 25 minutes to work our own dogs before the first participants show up at 6:30 am when class begins. And to make all of that happen, I have to get up at 3:00 am on my weekend morning. Pretty brutal.

To complicate matters, the soccer field is enclosed with a fence but it has 12 permanent openings. I made mesh panels that can be clipped over each opening to give us a practice space that is sort of secure. It takes between 3 and 4 clips per opening to attach the panels. The field is 390 feet long and 150 feet wide and the openings are distributed around the perimeter so clipping up the panels before class and taking them down afterwards is a significant time commitment.

Moving to the grassy field was the impetus for us to introduce weaves this week. We are using Susan Garrett's 2x2 method (and MH's three sets of 2x2s). Even in the first lesson, and considering that we are not training handlers or dogs who will ever see competition agility, we saw some great success.

View of the field this week. You can see MH and her PWDs and the silver mesh shade we put over our three dog crates in the background. Looks kind of like real agility, doesn't it? In fact, this photo seems pretty tame until you remember that it was taken in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia!

When I Travel

2011-11-18T17:23:00.001+03:00

Lots of people both in the US and in KSA ask me what I do with the dogs when travel. The short answer is that I have my houseboy stay at my place with them.

I've never tested the pH of dog spit but I strongly doubt that it is a median 7.0 pH. Caustic or acidic, dog spit dissolves dog toys. Before every trip out, I sweep the house and make a grand event of washing all stiff, stinky, or otherwise treasured toys. Then they get tossed into the dryer. This is a photo of the finished product: clean, dry, fluffy, almost-like-new dog toys. I've found that they last much longer with a regular wash.

I was extremely reluctant to adopt that apparently pejorative term when I first arrived in KSA, but pejorative is in the eye of the beholder. Like feminists who want to reclaim ownership of the very old word cunt or gay men who want to invest fag with a meaning that they define and control, the word "houseboy" can make some KSA newbies uncomfortable. "Domestic help" sounds so much more sanitary, right? But such semantic gymnastics don't change the reality--lots of people who live in KSA, Saudis and expats like, use other non-Saudi expats in a variety of functions: gardener, house cleaner, maid, cook, baby sitter, etc.

My houseboy is named Upul. He is from Sri Lanka. Upul is a Christian (probably Catholic but I never probed that far). He is one of the few houseboys who is willing and able to handle dogs.

I am fortunate beyond measure to have found Upul because as far as my dogs and cat are concerned, Upul walks on water. Upul hung the moon. Fun and joy begin when Upul shows up. I get to witness this firsthand every Friday when Upul comes by to get the key and cleaning supplies for my car, which he washes and polishes to a dealership gleam each week. The dogs engage in the usual greeting frenzy but then quickly start bringing him toys.

My dogs are not at all inclined to engage in behaviors for which they don't receive any sort of reinforcement, so the fact that they bring him toys as soon as he appears is fairly telling. Upul immediately engages in tug with Harry, accompanied with plenty of growling, and fetch with Mimi.

Upul told me a very interesting story when I got back from my last trip. He told me that after he packed up his things on Friday morning in expectation of my return Friday evening, every time he and the dogs came back in the house, Mimi ran around the place looking for...me.

This is a remarkable stor y on many levels. First, it is pretty clear evidence that the dogs don't miss me too much when I'm gone. But second, Mimi is smart enough to know that when Upul leaves (as indicated by him packing his things), I am returning soon. And third, Upul is observant enough to notice her behavior!

Mimi, Harry, and Upul.

I am extraordinarily lucky to have someone like Upul who cares for my crazy terriers and my silly Saudi cat as much as I do.

Flyball! (appendix)

2011-11-18T16:46:00.001+03:00

Here are some photos that I wasn't able to muster at the time of the original post.

Kim and Stella with Lauren's back and Duwain's headless body. These photos are out of focus and very dull because we can't use a flash during racing.

Lauren and Ryp and Duwain, generous owner of flyball whore Eris.

Karl Ruetz's back (he is so dedicated to flyball that he went through all of the training to become a judge!), Danielle and Makena, Valeria and Steve (box loader extraordinaire), and Alyssa and Mika.

My coach's notes for the A and B teams, respectively. The circled numbers are the race numbers. The columned numbers are the passes in feet (W is wide, AJ is around jump) and the numbers below the total line are the total race time in seconds with W (win) or L (loss) indicated. The notes are crumpled up from being alternately crammed in my pockets and yanked out to record results.

DR! races for the two-day tournament. This little scrap of paper looks a bit beat on because I carried it in my pocket all weekend, pulling it out frequently to check on what team was coming up.

Flyball!

2011-11-16T12:39:00.001+03:00

The heady mixture of dog hair, dog pee, fritos, doughnut sprinkles, half-drunk sodas, dregs of wine from the night before and dregs of coffee from this morning...the cacophany of dogs on the edge of meltdown and people taking a game we play with dogs far too seriously (and themselves too often on the edge of meltdown), the shriek of the judge's whistle, the snap of the box ejecting a tennis ball...it must be flyball!

It was a real stroke of luck that my November leave, timed to take place during the Muslim eid holiday when Aramco is closed, coincided with the flyball tournament hosted by my old club Dogz Rule!, about whom I have written many posts. The lovely Bell County Expo Center in Belton, Texas, located about 60 miles north of Austin, is a perfect venue for running flyball.

This is a good point to clearly state for the record that I flew halfway around the world just to go to a flyball tournament (literally halfway around the world, because I traveled about 12,900 km and the diameter of the earth is 12,750 km!).

When I told DR! that I could come help with the tournament, I expected the club to ask me to help with scoring. That's not a high profile job but a properly run score table is critical to running a flyball tournament; a typical tournament has multiple divisions containing four or five teams each, up to six dogs on each team, and multiple judges, all of which is organized and managed from the score table. I would have been happy to sit at the score table and in between recording scores and printing race results, watch the racing all weekend.

But to my complete amazement, when I showed up I was listed as coach or pass caller for all three DR! teams! I immediately demurred on pass calling. That's a skill that takes regular practice to do well and I've not practiced it for two years. So I ended up as coach. For three teams!

I have to confess that I harbored a secret hope that DR! would ask me to coach their C team. I coached that team for most of the time I was with DR! The C team is a team for green dogs who are testing their tournament readiness, older dogs who may be slowing down a bit, dogs who may not be able to run an entire weekend. Unlike the A or B teams which have relatively fixed line ups, the C team always went in with a second goal (besides winning, of course): to give all six dogs as much mat time as possible (only four run in any given race so there is lots of lineup juggling). The dogs assigned to the C team changed from tournament to tournament making it quite a challenge to coach! But I'm proud to brag that we usually finished first or second in our division. Sure, sure, the dogs and handlers were doing all the work, but I like to think I had a little tiny bit to do with it! The C team may not have set world time records but getting good passes and clean runs were often far more exciting for all involved.

So I was utterly thrilled that I not only had an opportunity to coach them again, but I was also going to be working with the A and B teams as well. I couldn't believe that DR! had that much faith in me.

But wait, there's more! DR! whipped out some club Tshirts--can't do flyball unless one is properly attired in club colors and logo. One of them was even an old shirt that I donated to the club when I left!

Finally, in an act of incredible generosity, Duwain offered to let me run his beautiful red BC Eris (as in goddess of discord). Eris was on the amazing team (the "well oiled machine") that took Harry all the way to his ONYX title at his last flyball tournament in August of 2009. She is lean, barky, and utterly obsessed by flyball, so consumed by the game that she will run for anybody, a charming behavior flaw. I didn't get to run Eris in just one or two races, I ran her all weekend long. I didn't do much coaching for the C team after all!

Rrrreeeeaaaaaadddyyyyy! Loud, barky dogs like Eris (and Harry in his day) are often useful in getting other dogs revved up. We are just inches away from the start dog.

I know for sure that I would probably have ended up in a corner at least once that weekend with tears in my eyes because I was missing my fabulous boy Harry, who lived for flyball. But because I was able to regularly put my hands on a dog, a bucking, leaping, excited, barking dog and work the passes and run up and down the lane with my team, the weekend felt exactly like it was supposed to.

I've written before about the strange sport of flyball, how it draws groups of disparate people together with a common love of dogs and a bit of a competitive streak (and in the case of DR!, a propensity for foul language and starting on the wine a couple of hours after lunch, excepting the Ruetz family, who have stuck with DR! through thick and thin even though they don't engage in ANY of these questionable behaviors), and how the social aspect of the sport has as much appeal for the humans as the tennis ball part of it does for the dogs. That really struck me again as DR! members, both new and old, welcomed me back, well, like I was part of the family. And several other people from other clubs came up to me that weekend and said, hey, I noticed you've been gone. When I explained that I had been gone, that I was just in for a visit, to my surprise they all said, well, it's really good to see you here. Many dog sport communities are like this, and NAFA Region 5 flyball clubs are no exception.

After it was all over, Kim casually mentioned that it was as if I hadn't ever left. It meant a lot to me that she felt that way. It meant a lot that Duwain trusted me with his beautiful but crazy dog. It meant a lot that the club had enough patience to let me stalk up and down the lane yelling at everybody all weekend.

Get it! (No, I have no fingers on my right hand, apparently.)

Dog friends have been my truest friends over the years, and DR! folks are some of the best friends anyone could hope to find.

Intertubes Wildlife

2011-11-16T11:40:00.001+03:00

There is some really crazy stuff out there on the intertubes. To wit.

Hiatus

2011-11-03T09:15:00.000+03:00

I'm taking a short trip out of the Kingdom. In the name of opsec, I'll wait until I return to post details.

What is opsec? Well, I listen to the radio a lot, and one of the four English-language radio stations we get here in the Eastern Province is AFNR, Armed Forces Network Radio. They run military-themed PSAs all the time, including some about opsec, or operations security. No reason that we non-military expats shouldn't apply some of the same common sense as we move about in this unsettled part of the world. No, no, nothing is near a tipping point yet, at least in KSA. But sadly, the people who live in this particular region of the world are prone to regularly making their own tipping points. Ignorance, fanaticism, money, water, oil...an awkward algebra for power.

But back to the hiatus...those of you whom I plan to see shortly, you know who you are!

Companionship

2011-10-28T17:06:00.000+03:00

I changed the blog photo (see right). Among the dogs' favorite weekend activities are the many opportunities to soak up rays on the patio. Harry in particular likes to warm his old bones in the sun.

I always put out two dog beds, plenty of room. And it never fails that when I look out the window to check on them, the dogs are crammed together on just one bed.

They are always touching, always in contact. It is so amazing to me that two toy-obsessed, territorial, guardy smooth fox terriers can be so relaxed in each other's company.

Agility in KSA Week 4

2011-10-28T16:54:00.001+03:00

This was by far our most exciting class yet. I realized after last week that the dogs weren't ready to commit to obstacles and that I probably rushed them into that first sequence (yeah, I'm feeling my way through this; cut me some slack). Yet in some ways that stumbling success we had with the jump-tunnel-jump sequence gave them a tiny taste of what agility could be like. So they came back for more this week and I was better prepared.

MH and I meet early--she helps me unload my car and set up the equipment and then we work our dogs in our own small private class for a good 45 minutes before the first handler shows up for class. MH uses a handling style suitable for the NADAC venues that she trialed in--she prefers to stay almost entirely outside the course and handle from a distance with "switch" and "out" commands. I show her the Derrett handling system but I'm not sure I've convinced her yet that it is a more reliable system for getting your dog around the course faster! I never competed in NADAC so it's interesting to see how the different course styles shape handling styles. I prefer to run with my dog because I feel more connected to her and of course the Derrett method emphasizes and even requires that connection between dog and handler. Even so, NADAC-style handling works for some handlers and dogs--the beauty of agility is that it accommodates us all. But back to class!

This week, I decided to have the handlers do some progressive send drills with a single straight tunnel and then a single jump. I had them start at the tunnel exit and call the dog through. Then I had them move 3 feet back and give the dog the tunnel command and run forward to meet the dog beyond the exit. Then I had them start at the tunnel midpoint. Finally, I had them start back with the dog, first running to meet the dog beyond the exit, then stopping halfway and calling the dog as they were exiting so the dog came around to meet them. They had to do all of this on both left and right sides. And for the final drill (calling the dog as it exited the tunnel), I made it harder by forcing the handlers to start working their start-line stays so that MH and I can be gradually removed from the picture. These were fast, physically active drills that wildly exceeded our expectations! MH and I are proud and amazed and excited by this small agility revolution happening before our very eyes!

I am waiting for some video--and I will post plenty this time because these drills were so wonderfully successful. In the meantime, here are the usual still shots I manage to sneak in with my camera. When I look at these pictures, I see one very important thing: the big smiles on everyone's faces.

PM and Nellie--you can just see the tip of Nellie's tail as she runs into the tunnel.

Our tiny star Webster and his mom C. He may be small but he's a real dynamo!

Kris and Kanga. He gives all of her commands in Polish but I think she has no problem understanding what she needs to do! MH grinning in the background.

JH and her "old" dog Aris. You can see how he drops that right hip just a bit but it doesn't affect his enthusiasm at all. I love her expression in this photo--no wonder he's so happy!

Chris and Beau. What a change from last week! There's no other way to describe it: Beau is diving into the tunnel!

And speaking of progress, Mr. B played his "I'm a sensitive, anxious dog, don't make me touch that scary tunnel" with me just once too much. MW was holding a veritable plate of hot dogs out to him...and he just wouldn't go in the tunnel. So I picked him up with an arm around his chest and sort of pushed/set him in the tunnel, which was smushed up to all of 4 feet long at this point, hardly a major trek. I was gentle of course, but to our utter amazement, he walked right on through to mom and the hot dogs. So we lengthened the tunnel and I pushed him in a few more times. By the second set of drills, I was able to hold his lead and at most sort of guide his head into the tunnel...and through he went! No trauma, no drama, MW was ecstatic, and I'm pleased that it all went off so smoothly at last. Sorry, I don't have any photos of this tiny miracle but I'll bet that some video will be coming soon!

No, I don't think I want to go in there, thanks. Mr. B and MW before the intervention.

I Said That I Wouldn't...

2011-10-26T15:48:00.000+03:00

post anymore on local politics and culture. I suppose I should amend that to say, I won't comment on local subjects anymore. But this op-ed piece by Mai Yamani in Al Jazeera is a fascinating read. We expats are all talking about this.

Brrr!

2011-10-23T12:18:00.000+03:00

A cold front rolled into the Eastern Province on the heels of the sand and dust this weekend. When I took the dogs out for their walk this morning, it was 66 F! I actually put on a sweatshirt.

Now I would be the first to tell you that 66 F is hardly sweatshirt weather, and I am aware that 66 F hardly represents a "cold front" for most of you. But no matter where you live, that first cold spell at the end of the year always feels colder than it really is. Your body isn't prepared for it--it was 100 F here on Friday afternoon, we are all still in summer mode (hats, sunscreen, water bottles, etc.).

What is missing from this lovely weather are the many smells that a westerner would associate with autumn: wood smoke; the dry, dusty smell of fallen leaves; holiday baking and roasting; the cedar chest scent that clings to the first wool sweater you haul out to wear.

When I was thinking about autumn smells, it occurred to me that there are oddly few environmental odors here, and even fewer that we can associate with the seasons. The folks who live in Ras Tanura can smell the damp salt smell of the Arabian Gulf every day but back in Dhahran there isn't much to smell. Sure, it can get kind of stinky in Khobar and the back side of the commissary isn't very nice, but those smells are there year-round.

All our lizard brains have to go on to tell us that the seasons, they are a'changin, are the temperature and the length of day. And my lizard brain is telling me to put a blanket on the bed.

Agility in KSA Week 3

2011-10-21T19:59:00.002+03:00

I've got 90 minutes of video from yesterday's class to wade through! Definitely some great footage of the dogs and handlers. But I've been feeling kind of crummy for several days--the weather changed and we've had strong winds from the northwest blowing sand and dust around so my sinuses are now officially on strike. On top of that I've been fighting an intestinal bug that's been going around. I have steamed snow peas and rice waiting for me; after I eat some, I'll probably head off to bed early. So you will have to be content with still photos again.

MH and I introduced the handlers to their first sequence, the classic jump-tunnel-jump. I even put up cones although they are hardly necessary for only three obstacles! Somehow the cones make it look a bit more like the real thing. I was really surprised at how hard it was to get the handlers to cross the plane of the second jump, that is, to continue forward and reward their dogs on the other side. The handlers kept stopping right before the second jump--and of course the dogs did too. But this is a First Ever for all of us, me for instructing and them for doing, so we are all learning new things. I'll explain the exercise differently next time.

After we had them do the basic sequence on both sides a few times each, we had them do it again with a front cross before the second jump. They are definitely getting smoother and faster with their footwork and timing.

It's been quite a while since I had to train the basics and I'll admit that I need to back up a bit next week and work them on drills for sending to jumps and tunnels. But despite the steep learning curve we are all on, everyone seems to be having a great time. And I always have to keep that primary goal in mind!

I just want to thank all of you blog readers for sharing the news of our agility adventure with your friends. The page views of the first post are setting records for my blog (not that this is a high traffic site to begin with; it's all relative). But thanks for forwarding the link!

Kris and Kanga. They were absent last week so we had her work on a straight tunnel instead of a curved one. Notice that the bar is set low. The surface is rubberized but still a bit too stiff so all of the dogs jump very low bars.

PM and her crazy lab Nellie. Later in the class, Nellie got the zoomies, dived under the mesh we have clipped up on the openings of the area we are in (admittedly, the mesh really isn't intended to stop a determined dog, and it didn't), and continued her zoomies in the larger school grounds. There's always one in every class! Nellie was collected in good order however.

MW and her shepherd mix Boodle. MH is patiently holding his leash. Mr. B (as I have nicknamed him) is an anxious dog who is very cautious around new things...like scary plastic tunnels. He just doesn't want to put his feet in there. But this picture represents a huge success over the first week: Boodle actually put his head and shoulders in the tunnel. I've loaned MW my second tunnel so she can continue Mr. B's desensitization at home during the week.

This is Chris and his gorgeous standard poodle Beau. You can tell that they are both into this exercise!

J and her terrier mix Aris, who is 10 years old and has a bit of a bum hip. She was completely unprepared for his speed out of the tunnel, but adjusted quickly! J was a bit worried about her little old guy when I invited her to sign up for the class. She didn't think he would run. Well, he hops over the bars like a pup, reads her turns like a seasoned champ, and walks around during class like he owns the place.

Another picture of Chris and Beau. MH grinning in the background. I have to constantly remind my basic obedience folks to praise their dogs but the handlers in the agility class are much more proactive. Chris poked around on the internet, found a recipe, and made some fabulous little cheesy treat bites--brought baggies of them for everyone in the class! You can tell that Beau found them well worth working for.

I wanted MW to be able to practice the front cross footwork for this exercise and since Mr. B is not doing the tunnel yet, I loaned her Mimi. Here, MW isn't crossing the plane of the jump so Mimi correctly interpreted her body language to mean that she should wrap the jump. What a beautiful tight turn my little terrier can make!

Relaxing in the Kitchen

2011-10-20T17:05:00.000+03:00

In addition to the agility class, I'm teaching two sessions of the basic obedience class, one here in Dhahran on Thursday afternoons and one in Ras Tanura on Fridays. We had our third agility class meeting this morning and we have a ton of video and photos as a result of having a dedicated videographer (MH's husband, who gave up his usual Thursday morning to do this for us). But I am feeling a bit saturated tonight with dogs and dog training (the basic obedience class today was particularly engaging and tiring) so I'm going to post instead about relaxing in the kitchen.

I am quite capable of zoning out on the couch while watching a movie (I rarely watch sitcoms and never watch reality shows---big yawn). I much prefer relaxing on the couch with a good book (more and more these days it is an ebook although I still ready plenty of the old-fashioned tree-killing variety). But above all, I find that I unwind and relax most often in the kitchen.

It's sad that I'm stuck with the dollhouse kitchen in my hovel but I've learned to make do with everything else and the kitchen is no exception.

The monthly (or so) making of the dog food is one of my most elaborate kitchen events involving all sorts of equipment and knives and pots and vegetables. Making my whine is important but only sporadically time consuming--dumping yeast, sugar, and grape juice into the 20 L round Gott cooler (customized with a hole in the top and tubing duct-taped in to create a one-way valve) is messy but not that complicated. The big time sink for whine making is the bottling stage. I have to wash and sterilize the bottles a couple of days ahead of time to let them thoroughly dry inside before transferring the precious whine into them. But it doesn't really matter because I look forward to even the most quotidian kitchen tasks.

I have a bit of a weakness for prawns and last weekend bought 2 kilos of fresh ones from the wonderfully expanded, awesomely newly renovated Tamimi store in Khobar. Two kilos--that's a lot of damned prawns. It took me nearly an hour to clean and devein them all (divided into bags, I promptly froze most of them). It was certainly an hour of hard, messy work--but I found it extremely satisfying. How could you not? Just imagine that giant bowl of fresh, clean prawns ready to go!

My usual kitchen rituals involve making dinner. I love to cook and I love to eat what I cook. If I can't cook, rather than settle for some gross prepared frozen meal, I will eat a bowl of muesli and yogurt instead. And of course I must have a glass of whine or two while making dinner. It is only the cook's due, in my opinion.

In this post, I am sharing my recipe for Mango Chutney. I make this fresh then cook fresh prawns in it or use it as a sauce over grilled hammour (which is what I am going to have for dinner tonight). It also works well as a dressing on top of greens or rice served with grilled lamb (look, I live in Saudi Arabia; everything goes well with lamb). For you purists out there, I am perfectly aware this isn't the same sort of gummy spicey stuff you get in jars at the store; this is more of a "field" version of chutney).

Mango Chutney

Wash, peel, and coarsely dice a large onion. Put in saucepan with olive oil.

Peel and dice several large cloves of garlic. Set aside.

Wash, peel, dice one or two large mangos. Ripe ones are sweeter but even unripe sour ones are okay to use here. Set aside.

Wash, peel, and dice about a thumb's worth of fresh ginger. Set aside.

Gently saute onion over low to medium heat. Stir frequently. When the onion begins to turn clear, add the garlic, mango, and ginger. Add to taste salt, black pepper, and curry powder. You can add a bay leaf too but this is not critical. If you are feeling frisky, toss in some dried red chili pepper flakes (I always do).

If you don't have real curry powder, you can use a mixture of turmeric (3/4) and cinnamon (1/4). If you use a commercial curry powder, make sure it doesn't already have salt in it. If it does, don't buy that kind again and don't add extra salt. You can also use powdered ginger instead of fresh (add about 50% more volume if you go with powdered ginger).

You will probably need to add 1/4 to 1/2 cup water if this mixture looks dry or sticky (which it will if you add a lot of powdered spices). Add the water in small volumes until the mixture looks smooth but not runny.

If you used sour not-quite-ripe mangoes, add 2 tablespoons of honey.

Optional: wash, peel, and separate a tangelo or tangerine (remove seeds and white stringy bits from each piece). Add the pieces with the mango.

Optional: instead of honey, dice some dates (remove pit) and add with the mango. You can add dates even if you use ripe mangos. Yum!

Optional: squeeze a lime into the pan. Lime and mango were made to go together.

Stir well.

Reduce heat and simmer gently, stirring frequently, until the mango pieces just begin to fall apart. Add water if needed.

If you want to use this with prawns, add them a couple of minutes after the spices. If you want to use the chutney as a dressing for grilled fish or meat, cook it completely, remove from heat, and cover until ready to serve with the main dish (the flavors improve with the sitting anyway). You can easily "perk" it up with a tablespoon or two of water added over very low heat and a bit of stirring.

Agility in KSA Week 2

2011-10-16T20:21:00.000+03:00

The main focus this week was on the front cross. I remember struggling mightily to learn how to do this move way, way back in the day (remember that I am blessed with the grace and coordination of a potato). So I decided to use some role-play to let the handlers practice over and over without their dogs. MH was a very patient dog!! I had to remind the handlers to "set your dog up at the jump" and they would all go back to MH and tell her to sit and stay! Very amusing. We didn't make her jump any bars, though.

Unfortunately, we have no digital record of any of that. MH and I are far too busy watching handlers and dogs to keep a camera going. (Yeah, yeah, tripod blah blah blah. We'll set them up next week.)

But fortunately, Jeanette decided to film my introduction of the FC. So I present a short clip of that here. I know you really want to see the people in the class and their fabulous dogs. I hope to have a helper next week to man the cameras so we can share more of that.

I want to make two points with this short clip: (1) Mimi has to be the most patient smooth fox terrier in the history of smooth fox terriers. She holds that damned sit stay for nearly a minute while I'm walking around and waving the precious fur tug-n-treat about! Amazing. And (2) I really need to increase her rate of reinforcement!

Ignore my blather in the clip. It was my intro to the cross. We spent most of the next 20 minutes doing the role play then another 20 minutes with handlers doing the crosses with their dogs (the dogs are all on board; the handlers need more practice!).

And apologies for being such a sweaty pig. We had a wave of humidity come in and it was just brutal last weekend. I'll wear a more photogenic outfit next time. MH wants to make some "promo" videos!

Inspiration

2011-10-16T19:28:00.000+03:00

I know you are all checking the blog for an agility update (I can tell because the page count is up) but I am going to first put up a short post about teaching people and their dogs.

I think a lot about how to do that since it has become my major hobby here in KSA. This session I tweaked the lesson plan for my basic obedience course after nearly two years of success because I thought that the handlers would do a better job of the "final exam" (teaching their dogs a trick/behavior that I don't teach in class) if I introduced the concept of shaping sooner. I spend every obedience class circulating around to each dog and handler multiple times, giving them my undivided attention for at least a couple of minutes each visit. I check the gear in my little plastic crate every Wednesday evening to make sure I have all of the handouts, clean up supplies, toys, and other items I might need for the coming weekend. I buy and process turkey hot dogs and chicken breast and string cheese to make sure that the instructor always has the best treats. Before every new session, I distribute a questionnaire to each handler and I read them before every class for a couple of weeks until I know every dog's name and the particular issues or questions each owner has. I send an email update almost every week to review what they should be working on at home.

In short, I invest a lot of time and energy in preparing and delivering the basic obedience classes.

And now the ante has been upped considerably with the agility class. I pack all the gear in my car the night before. I have to get up at 3:30 a.m. to ensure that I get to the class site by 5:30 a.m. so that MH and I can unload my car, dolly all of the stuff to the site, set up equipment, and work our dogs before class starts. I bought DVDs and reread training books over the summer so that I had a variety of methods ready to hand to explain the same concepts in different ways. I design exercises to take into account the limitations (challenges?) that the dogs and handlers bring with them. I am barely a step ahead of these classes in terms of planning but knowing that I can be creative and flexible with my tiny set of gear helps.

And every time I step in front of a class of hopeful handlers with their excited dogs, I call to my mind the agility instructors who inspired me, who taught dog handling with humor and insight and kindness, who seemed to display infinite patience even when I, as a participant, wanted to throttle one of my fellow handlers. I think about how they organized their lessons, their gear, their own dogs. I think about how they encouraged me and others. I think about all of these things in those few seconds at the start of each class because I want to be that kind of trainer for my classes.

In particular, I want to single out Debbie Spence, owner of PAWS in north Texas. I spent a couple of years training with her when I was in Dallas (many of the posts in the first two years of this blog are about my training and trialing experiences as one of her students). Of all of my agility trainers, she has become my role model. Debbie, I want you to give yourself a pat on the back for being such an inspiration that I could even conceive of the crazy idea of bringing agility to Saudi Arabia.

Agility...in Saudi Arabia!

2011-10-07T20:59:00.000+03:00

I have been bursting with this news for months but have waited to post on the blog until I had photographic proof...of the first ever performance of dog agility in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia!

I've been working two years for this! Two years of teaching basic obedience through Aramco Community Education (I've taught well over 60 dogs and owners now), two years of earning gold stars (mine are among the most popular Community Ed courses), one year of making do with Rally Obedience, two years of dog classes without incident (neither poop nor aggression), two years of being patient (not really), two years of planning and scheming and false starts.

And here we are at last. The photos in this post are truly historic. Oh, I know they look pretty tame to you North Americans who can attend an agility trial or visit your trainer just about any weekend you feel like it, or simply step out into your backyard. Oh my, we are certainly starting small.

But it is a start.

I had goosebumps when I started class this Thursday.

I won't burden this post with a lot of text. That can all come later as the course progresses. But I'll give you a short outline here: we are meeting from 6:30-8:30am on Thursdays (our weekend). We will move to a huge, grassed, fenced soccer field at the end of October. The course will meet every Thursday well into December. I continue to base my dog training within the securely fenced confines of the Dhahran middle school. Aramco Community Education has made this possible and I can't speak highly enough of their willingness to help me make it all work.

I am basing my handling system on Greg Derrett's system since it is the most logical one (to me; let's not get into an argument about that here, my agility readers). In addition, I've incorporated all sorts of training bits from Leslie McDevitt (Control Unleashed), Sandy Rogers (One Jump Two Jump), and Jane Killion (When Pigs Fly).

For this inaugural class, the entire equipment set will fit in the back of my Honda CRV (along with Mimi's crate): two tunnels, a chute, tunnel bags for them, stick-in-the-ground weaves, seven jumps, and a table with two heights, 4" and 12". I made the jumps and the table here (there are many adventures associated with those activities; the tales are best told in person over a glass of wine or two). I bought everything else and either had the items shipped in (i.e., jump strips and tunnel bags from J&J and tunnels from NTI Global) or hand-carried them to avoid Customs TFW (i.e., the special PVC connections for the jumps).

Purists, beware. I am cutting and pasting as I go. I don't have to follow any rules except those that work in KSA. Our goal isn't competition but the doing of the thing itself--and hopefully some more refined training of our dogs in the process. Oh, and having fun!

Enough of my blathering. Please enjoy these pictures of our first class.

I do have to make one final comment: Mimi was indeed present and she and I did a demo of serpentines, threadles, and other crazy stuff. I think some of the other folks might have pics of us.

It's important that I mention this because in the end, this is all about Mimi. It's all about what I will do for my dogs.

MH, my co-instructor, and her PWD Austin showing some of their moves.

MH and our first morning's demo setup: 5 jumps in a circle and a tunnel. Baby steps, baby steps.

The brave handlers who signed up for DOG-301! Big dogs, little dogs, young dogs, old dogs, and handlers who have no idea what agility is.

Skipper is an old, arthritic lab but Marion really wanted to find something that allowed her to have one-on-one time with him (she has a much younger black lab who is as wild as they come). Here, Marion is introducing Skipper to the jump (bar on the ground, of course)--rewarding him for hopping over the bar without touching it. I don't have the luxury of only teaching people with Ferrari dogs. I have to figure out how to ensure that dogs like Skipper and handlers like Marion are successful, and most importantly, have a good time.

Here's Cheri and her boston terrier mix Xena being introduced to the jump. I used Sandy Roger's method as described in her DVD "One Jump Two Jump." All of the dogs were successfully clearing a low bar for a click and a treat after about 6-10 reps.

Introduction to the tunnel. Where's Mom??? Jeanette is doing her best to get Aris' attention by crawling into the tunnel while MH is doing her best to simply hold Aris and let him figure it out. I keep telling the handlers, stop worrying about looking stupid. Nobody is looking at you--they are all looking at your dog. Might as well instill this in them as early as possible.

Oh, there she is! Aris figures out the tunnel and runs towards his mom.

The tunnel provided the class lots of laughs. Here's Webster, one of my Rally Obedience stars (he has a heel to die for) being handed off to MH by his mom Crystal. We did four reps for the tunnel introduction; most dogs got it by the third rep although half had to have a shortened tunnel to start out with. Webster is a mini dachshund with truckloads of confidence--he had no problems with the full 12 feet of the tunnel!

Kris and his lab Kanga (the angle of the photo is not too flattering but she is unfortunately overweight when viewed at any angle). She has just shot out of the tunnel to her handler.

So raise a toast to our intrepid little group and wish us well!

Quotidian

2011-10-07T19:02:00.000+03:00

The lemon bars came out fabulous. Just as gooey and tart as they should be. The powdered sugar is cosmetic, added right before serving; I decided not to mess with that part of it. G, I like the idea of using a coffee grinder to make powdered sugar and may try to make some for the heck of it. Sorry, no photos of the yummy lemon bars. My camera isn't quite up to taking sexy food shots.

Instead, I will offer you a picture of the dogs that I took this morning while sitting on my porch enjoying my one cup of coffee that I allow myself per day. (Caffeine in all of its forms causes me to have extremely intense migraines. I see flashing lights, get nauseated, become light sensitive, feel like someone is shoving spikes into my frontal lobe--all of the classic symptoms fucking my brain up at one time for up to 24 hours at a time. Good times there. If I am super strict about my caffeine consumption, I can pretty much eliminate migraines; for example, I no longer eat dark chocolate. It has made a huge difference in my quality of life.) Anyway, back to this beautiful morning! It was 69F when I got up to take the dogs out to pee at 4:00 am and only 71F a few hours later when I snapped this picture of the dogs soaking up the earliest morning rays peeking over my patio wall. Fall is officially here in Dhahran!

I took this picture because the sky is almost never blue here. It is usually tannish and hazy or so overexposed from the sun you can't even really see the sky. During dust storms, it can become rusty orange. The clear blue today was a real treat!

View of the blue sky this morning from my porch.

I thought I would close this quotidian post with the recipe for one of my favorite dishes. It has many variants and names depending on the culture making it and the spices they like to use (raita, tzatziki, etc). I make it regularly for myself and frequently take it to potluck events since it is a guaranteed crowd pleaser. Here is my recipe for cucumber yogurt dip/sauce/salad. It's low fat, sodium-free, and super easy to make.

Wash some cucumbers. The final volume of the dish will be twice the volume of the cucumbers you use. You can peel them if you want. I don't since the Saudi cucumbers aren't waxed and I think the dark green skins look pretty in the final dish. Dice the cucumbers and place in a large bowl. Dice is a subjective instruction. You can thinly slice, mince, dice, even grate--whatever strikes your fancy.

Peel and mince some large cloves of garlic. You should know how much garlic you can handle--but this dish just cries out for you to let yourself run wild with garlicky abandon. Add garlic to cucumbers.

Drizzle some olive oil into the bowl.

Stir well.

Let the cucumbers and garlic marinate at room temperature for about an hour. Stir them two or three times.

Just before serving, add a volume of plain, unsweetened yogurt equal to the volume of cucumbers to the bowl. Stir well.

For exotic presentations, you can add mint (fresh or dried) or orange zest or grated carrot or sprinkle the top with sweet paprika.

You can serve this dish as a stand-alone dip with crackers or use it as a side dish to grilled meats (it is excellent with lamb).

This dish improves with age; keeping it overnight in the fridge and serving the next day enhances the garlic blast several times over.

Enjoy!

Walking the Dog

2011-10-03T14:59:00.001+03:00

I came across the concept of the“companionable walk” while reading “Inside A Dog” by Alexandra Horowitz (Ihighly recommend thisbook; even though it has footnotes and references to scientific literature,it is a fun and funny read; note that Amazon reviewers who gave it only one ortwo stars mentioned that it had “too many big words”; just another example ofwhy America is doomed): taking a walk with your dog is one of the more relaxingactivities available to us dog owners (I would add to that list taking a napwith your dog, but I suppose napping isn’t technically an activity). The walkis made even more companionable when we are with a dog who knows the route, theroutine, when we are in no particular hurry, perfectly happy to stop at everyshrub and pole for a quick sniffing update. We move along together, eachcontent with his own thoughts yet sensitive to the observations of the other.

The idea of the “companionablewalk” resonated with me. I spend a lot of time walking my dogs and thus spend alot of time thinking about these very things. I find it amusing that Harryknows that if I turn around after depositing the trash in the depot, it meanswe are going on our “Safaniya” walk, his particular favorite. He whips aroundand begins pulling me across the parking lot to the sidewalk that begins thisroute. With the smooth accuracy of a flock of birds, the dogs simultaneouslyturn to the left after we exit the hedges at the start of our morning walksalong the circum-golf course path. I no longer say a word or indicate the turnwith the leashes; the dogs know that we always turn left at that place.

The dogs and I often stop toexamine the same interesting things, although for very different reasons: isthat a flower up ahead on the ground or a discarded food wrapper? When we founda hedgehog balled up next to the soccer field one night, I joined in with thepoking (never fear, we left it unmolested although Mimi drooled on it in herexcitement at the discovery of something so new and exotic).

Even though one isn’t supposedto, I stick to a routine that doesn’t vary by more than 15 minutes for anyparticular outing. On our early morning walks, usually started by 4:45 a.m., weregularly see perhaps no more than 4 or 5 people, and then not even every day.It is much more common for us to encounter one or two people every morning fora week…then they decide it is too hot/early/dark to engage in that much activitythat early in the morning and they disappear. Lightweights, I say to myself, myvirtuous satisfaction only slightly dimmed by the fact that I am out therebecause I have to be and given the choice, I’d rather sleep in too!

I’ve had agility runs where mydog and I were completely in sync. The feeling is exhilarating. The “companionablewalk” is similar but not quite as jacked up with adrenaline. While walking, weget a chance to observe our corner of the world and spend time contemplatingthe small changes in it.

So I encourage you to set asidethe rush of your day, the stress of work, the demands of your phone, and takeyour dog for a walk.

Postscript: When I read thetitle of Ms. Horowitz's book, my first thought was of the classic Groucho Marxjoke: Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it'stoo dark to read. I was delighted to discover that she selected the title basedon that very joke!

Minor Kitchen Crisis Averted

2011-09-30T18:09:00.000+03:00

I was in the commissary today picking up a few items and as I passed the lemons, I thought, mmm, I want to do something with those lemons. They were so beautiful and yellow. I could taste them just by looking at them. What to make with them? The obvious choice is of course lemon bars.

When I got home, I started thumbing through my cookbooks. When exploring a new recipe, I always turn first to Joy of Cooking. Nearly every recipe in there works, even with substitutions, and most of them are fairly simple. But to my horror, there was nary a mention of lemon bars in this old standard!

I didn't even bother looking in Laurel's Kitchen or The Enchanted Broccoli Forest; lemon bars are far too decadent for these two cooks. My paperback copies of these cookbooks are stained, dogeared, and festooned with paperclips; the binding on my copy of Laurel's Kitchen long ago gave up so I hold it together with a big rubber band. (I heartily recommend both if you want to explore flavorful vegetarian cooking beyond beans and rice. The banana bread recipe in Laurel's Kitchen is the only one I have used for years.)

My French cookbooks (from Thierry Marx and Julia Child) of course have recipes for lemon tarts...but lemon tarts simply aren't lemon bars (besides, the French lemon tarts have their feet firmly planted in soufflé territory, which is definitely not what I want). I want lemon bars. You know what I'm talking about: tangy and sweet, sticky, just the right bit of crunch in the crust, lovely yellow color, all in one bite-size package. Nothing else would do for those beautiful lemons.

Of course this minor kitchen crisis was averted by a quick search on the internet. Lemon bars only involve half a dozen ingredients and about the same number of steps--no rocket science or graduate-level chemistry required. Still, I have only made them once before and I do like to work from a printed recipe.

Of course no cooking adventure undertaken in the Magic Kingdom is without crisis. While I may have found a recipe, I couldn't find any powdered sugar. I'm sure that I'll manage without it, just like I manage without the dozens of other food items that are impossible to get here. (Speaking of that, I do have to tell you that a Saudi importer has picked up a soy milk line from Europe so I can now get decently priced soy milk whenever I want, and one of the Saudi dairy vendors has come out with a line of firm, unsweetened, bioactive yogurt. Mmm. I eat some nearly every day.)

I figure all the challenges will make me a more flexible and creative cook.

Morals-Free Harridan

2011-09-21T18:10:00.002+03:00

Oh, how I wish I could claim the brilliant title of this post as my own words. Unfortunately, I am far too consumed with the TFW of the Magic Kingdom and keeping my toy monsters happy to be able to muster and maintain such a razor-sharp eye on US politics. This opinion piece, written by Paul Slansky and posted on Huffington Post on 16 September, pretty much sums it up.

The Imminent Overness of Sarah Palin
The wild orgy of 9/11 porn that we've just endured -- with, to my awareness, nary a peep of "lamestream media" outrage about Congress's obscene indifference to the medical bills of the first responders (really, does eventhis get left to Jon Stewart?) -- marks the end of our having or wanting to hear about that horrific day again for a long, long time. Similarly,the extended wallow we're just diving into around the release of Joe McGinniss's brutal takedown,The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, should at last burn people out on this morals-free harridan.

Just as Dan Quayle's introduction to the nation was immediately marred by the focus on his avoidance of Vietnam, Palin's was accompanied by widespread speculation about whether she was actually the mother of the child she claimed to have recently birthed, or whether the whole thing was a stunt designed to hide the fact that her daughter Bristol was an unwed 18-year-old mom. The point of that whole bizarre kerfuffle was that this woman whom most people had never heard of days earlier instantly gave off such a viscerally negative vibe that a large portion of the population was willing to believe her capable of such a grotesquely brazen deception. How laughable it is from this vantage point to imagine this "Snowbilly Grifter" -- as Wonkette so sublimely dubbed her -- being embarrassed enough by such a trivial transgression to go to the trouble of hiding it. (And, of course, the delightful proof that the child was, in fact, Sarah's was that Bristol was already expecting her own Tripp before Trig was born. Sothere, Andrew Sullivan.)

Always more a trashy reality star than a serious politician, her entire platform was Nixonian umbrage, but the Sarah Palin Show had something for everyone. The dismayingly expanding lunatic "fringe" identified with her braying rage, while the rest of us were simultaneously fascinated and repelled by her relentlessly deceitful jabbering. Even in politics, it was rare to find someone with such a compulsive contempt for the truth. But the act is stale. We're sick of it. And now we have new shows, starring new loons.

It's Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry who are being photographed fellating Iowa corn dogs now. Not only is Bachmann at least Palin's equal when it comes to proud ignorance, but she replaces those unappealing qualities of personal avarice and political indolence with the mesmerizing spectacle of outright batshit insanity. And that effeminate husband out there "curing" the hated gays promises much better entertainment than yet another teenage pregnancy and more rumors about drugs.

Meanwhile, Perry has anger plus a serious resume. While Palin quit being governor of a large but minor state after less than three years, he's run a large and major one for more than ten. Perry gives us Reagan and Bush combined, but with their efforts to hide behind avuncularity and goofiness abandoned. Really, why bother to pretend you're a nice guy when the audience is out therecheering for death? His viciousness is amped to naked bloodthirstiness. This man's not shooting animals from the air for some asinine notion of sport. Rick Perryenjoys executing humans, and he not only doesn't mind if you know it, hewants you to know it. If you're anything like him, he's definitely your guy. Giddily overseeing the killings of hundreds of humans -- guilty or not, who cares? -- he's even shameless enough to haveclaimed, in connection with his controversial efforts to mandate cervical cancer vaccinations, that "at the end of the day I am always going to err on the side of life."

So we don't need Sarah Palin anymore. After three years of overexposure to her tawdry toxicity, we know her too well, and our remaining schadenfreudal needs will more than be met by the cornucopia of damning nuggets Joe McGinniss has unearthed. He'll be gleefully sharing them all over the place over the next couple of weeks -- with Piers Morgan, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and lots more -- just as the question of whether or not she's going to run for president is finally going to have to be answered. The only surprise she could still have in her would be to say yes.

Not that she's about to disappear. For the next year she'll be blithering away about the campaign with all the other Fox fools. She'll be there "analyzing" Election Night results along with O'Reilly, Van Susteren, Hannity, and, one hopes, that consummate doofus Doocy. But that will kind of be that. We're bored with stupid and lazy now, and we're moving on to stupid and crazy.

Yes, we are indeed.

The U.S. Consulate in Khobar assists us expats in voting in national elections (I think we are on our own if we want to stay involved in state and local matters). Part of my daily news-gathering includes keeping up with the current circus going on in the U.S. because I do plan to vote next year. I am sure about one thing only: stupid and crazy feeds the news cycles but it is a horrific way to run one of the most important countries in the world.

Travels: Adventures in Iceland (OMG!!PONIES!!)

2011-09-14T20:45:00.001+03:00

Rather than clog up my blog with tons of pictures, I put the best ones in a flickr stream (you can log in to flickr with a Yahoo or Google id). This post is the text that goes along with the photos.

On my second day in Iceland, a perfectly beautiful late summer day, I rented a bike from the hotel and toured around western Reykjavik. Marvelously maintained asphalt and gravel paths about 4 to 6 feet wide that are completely separate from the roadways crisscross the city. You can go just about anywhere on a bicycle. During my ride, I found a very large cemetery (Fossvogskirkjugarður) next to an even larger park and spent some hours exploring both.

That afternoon, an Eldhestar van took me to their farm located south of the tiny village of Hveragerdi, about 50 km southeast of Reykjavik. Eldhestar is one of the larger Icelandic pony touring outfits in Iceland offering guided trips of varying length and difficulty. The word Eldhestar means "volcano" (eld) and "horses" (hestar)--"fire horses" if you want a more colloquial translation. I had arranged to take three day-trips with them, returning each evening to the guesthouse at the farm (some of their other trips involved sleeping in camping huts in sleeping bags; not my thing anymore). The package included all meals, guided riding each day, and a room with a private bath. They were full days of riding too, with more than 6 hours in the saddle each day plus breaks and an hour for lunch. Believe me, that is plenty of riding each day. The cost was extremely reasonable given the high level of fun and adventure. The evening meals in particular are worth noting. The Eldhestar cooks turned out fabulous three-course gourmet meals made from very high quality ingredients. And every day after we returned to the guest house from riding, they had fresh coffee and cake still warm from the oven waiting for us.

The three days that I spent at Eldhestar rank amongst the best vacations I have ever had.

I set that sentence out by itself to make sure you got the point. I had the most wonderful time. Sure, I was stiff and sore in places I didn't even know existed, but that's what ibuprofen and yoga are for. I quickly forgot any little aches and pains once we got out on the trail each morning.

On the first day, we rode up into a geothermally active valley. On the second day, we rode down to the huge, flat delta of the Selfoss river. The weather the first two days was pretty nice, a bit damp and cloudy in the morning and breezy in the afternoon. On the third day, we rode up into the mountains over a huge waterfall to a natural hot pot. It was pouring rain all day, progressing from drizzle to deluge. In the mountains, the mixture of steam from the geothermal vents, mist from the waterfall, and rain and fog made the landscape alternately appear spooky and dreamy. The trail on the third day was so steep--at times the ponies were picking their way across very steep rubble slopes along a tiny little trail; sheer face to one side, sheer drop to the other, and all of it slick with rain--that I wasn't able to take as many photos on this last day as on the other two days. Still, I put up quite a few photos from each day so take your time browsing through them.

And each day we learned more about the natural wonder that is the Icelandic pony.

The horses live in open pastures year round. Each morning, the Eldhestar guides, 98% of which are young, fresh-faced German, Danish, and Icelandic women, drive a number of the ponies into the main corrals. There, they saddle up the ponies that will be needed for that day's rides. The saddles are worth a quick mention. If you are used to western riding, you would find the Icelandic saddles quite small. Icelandic ponies themselves are small--I rarely looked one in the eyes while standing next to it. They have extremely long, thick manes and tails. Here's an unusual fact: the coloration of the Icelandic pony has more variation than any other known horse population. They come in all color patterns--dark horse with a light mane, light horse with a dark mane, tan, black, pinto, chestnut, brown, white, grey, spotted.... And quite a few of the experienced riders noted how unusually close the Icelandic ponies get to each other, flank to flank, one's head over another's neck, even noses side by side. On the rides, it was not at all unusual for your pony to want to keep his nose inches from the butt of the pony in front of you. They just like to be near each other.

Eldhestar does a lot of business this time of year. On the three days I was there, there were on average 8 rides departing each morning, some only going for a half day, some not to return for a week, with group sizes ranging from half a dozen to more than 20 people. I got incredibly lucky and all three days my groups never had more than 6 people plus the guide.

Some ponies are frisky and need to go with experienced riders, of which there were plenty as Icelandic pony tours are one of the big tourist attractions, and some ponies are, well, kind of pokey. In fact, I renamed my first pony Mr. Pokey--he was given to me because I said I was inexperienced. I learn quickly so I got a slightly better one on the second day, but the real magic occurred for me on the third day. I renamed that pony Mistah Buttah. To explain that name, I need to give you a bit more Icelandic pony background.

All horses trot and gallop. But Icelandic ponies have an additional gait called the tölt. Most riders must be taught how to ride the trot; it is a hard and bouncing gait. But the tölt, my goodness, I've been in cars that didn't have that smooth of a ride. To put the pony into the tölt, you move your hands forward on the reins, sit back heavily in the saddle, and enjoy! In the tölt, the pony's topside barely moves. Your ass never leaves the saddle. Your feet don't get bounced from the stirrups. You sit up nice and tall and watch the scenery flow by. The tölt is a gait that can eat up the miles without much effort from horse or rider. Mistah Buttah's tölt was as smooth as....buttah!

In the tölt, both legs on the left side move, then both on the right, compared to the 1L-2R-3L-4R movement in the trot. A pony moving in the tölt reminds me of a windup soldier toy. The Icelandic ponies have particularly straight fronts because their shoulder blades point up more than back and they are also "cobby"--about as long as they are tall (think more square than rectangular).

You certainly didn't need to know anything at all about riding, but in my opinion it adds a lot to the experience--you are able to take longer rides, ride more lively ponies, and just get more enjoyment out of the riding itself. My own riding experience is not that extensive, but I do know how to follow instructions, and I think that I understand the basic concepts of handling animals. Everyone was given a short lesson in a fenced corral before setting off each morning: how to mount up, how to signal directions to the ponies. I'm not an expert by any means but I sure am hooked!

The guides were quietly competent (we had a pony injury the first day and a human injury the second day and each guide dealt with the fuckwittery calmly and efficiently). Most of the guides were college age, working at Eldhestar in the summer, not to earn money necessarily because they were paid a pittance, but because they loved the ponies and it was a great opportunity to be around them for weeks and weeks at a time. They were crammed into a giant dormitory with bunk beds and shared bathrooms--definitely as much an adventure for them as a summer job.

The different scenery on the three rides, the ponies, the fresh air, the great food, even the rain, all combined into one fabulous experience. I definitely recommend Eldhestar and I plan to return for even more adventurous rides!

The last few photos in the flickr set are from the few days I spent exploring the old city center of Reykjavik. I was quite impressed with the Hallgrimskirkja. The exterior of the church looks quite fabulous with sweeping concrete columns flanking the tower. I bought a ticket and went to the top of the tower but it was rainy that day and the photos are a bit disappointing. The interior of the church is amazingly austere but because it is lined with giant windows it had a light, airy feel even on that cloudy day.

Reykjavik has a few museums but, unusually for me, I didn't visit a single one. After my pony adventures, I was content to wander around window-shopping and people-watching and sampling the bland food. The puffin was the most exciting thing I ate after I left Eldhestar.

I can recommend the guesthouse I stayed in (Guesthouse Snorri). It is on the edge of all of the action, which is really only a 20-minute walk away. But that meant that at night, it was blissfully quiet. It is expensive, as is everything in Iceland, but it was well run, clean, and actually quite pretty.

I could have gone to see a glacier, geyser, or volcano... if I was willing to climb on a bus with 50 other tourists. After my disappointing experience in Burgundy with the winery tour, I am a bit hesitant to do the bus thing again. But I did talk to folks and read some brochures and my next visit to Iceland, and there will be a next trip, will include all of these things--on my own schedule. Iceland maintains more than 13,000 km of roads (one goes all the way around the island) and I was told by a German couple that spent several days on them before arriving at Eldhestar that they are in excellent condition. Renting a car is easy and encouraged for the more adventurous tourist. I plan to go during puffin nesting season and visit the nesting sites along the north coast, taking in a volcano and a glacier or two along the way!

And of course I'll visit Eldhestar and do more tölting on Icelandic ponies!

Toy Monster Update

2011-09-08T15:27:00.003+03:00

I posted earlier in August about Mimi's toy training that went a bit awry. Not really wrong, exactly, just that as usual she takes things to absurd limits. In the process of training her to bring toys back to me coupled with better recall behavior, she became a Toy Monster. All she wants to do now is chase down toys and bring them back to me.

Upul, my houseboy, reports that Mimi is just as relentless about toys with him as she is with me. He said that she never stopped trying to get him to play with her. And she also tries to work him over with The Stare--he thought the staring/picking up the toy/dropping the toy/staring behavior to be particularly funny. He told me again the night I got home that he enjoys staying here with the dogs when I go out on leave because "it's always interesting"!

Back Home at CircusK9

2011-09-08T15:09:00.003+03:00

No matter how long or short my travels, I'm always mobbed when I return home: Mimi sproinging repeatedly, Harry squeaking, Tsingy swirling in and out screeching (being partly deaf, she has a horrendously loud, offkey meow).

The greeting frenzy usually wears off in a few minutes and after a day or so, they all return to their normal routines.

Harry's had his dinner, his evening walk, and I'm home. All is right with his world.

Tsingy tucked into her cave bed--all is right with her world, too.

One of the most important events that happens after I return home is the making of the dog food. The dogs are still eating homemade dog meatloaf for their evening meals. They are thriving on the stuff: sleek, fit, happy. (Contact me if you want the updated recipe.) It takes about three hours from start to finish (washing veggies to storing the cooked meatloaf in containers for freezing), and I have to do it about every 3 weeks. But the commercial food options here in KSA are so dismal that I really don't have a choice.

The best part is licking the pan at the end.

Speaking of eating, I want to make a product plug. I don't do it that often, so just bear with me. You North Americans can pop into any number of big box stores or boutique shops to purchase a myriad of products for your pets: collars, leashes, toys, food, treats. I can't do that. And having items shipped to KSA is really expensive--if the company you are shopping with will even ship here; many don't. Then there are always concerns about what will make it through Saudi customs. That's why I was very pleased to come across Trendy Pet. They make light, strong, nicely designed frames to elevate feeding bowls. And they ship to KSA!

Harry's getting noticeably stiff these days and was having trouble bending down to his food bowl. Earlier this year I purchased two of their 10" tall, single-bowl stands. Harry loves his!

If you are in the market for this sort of thing, CircusK9 gives a big thumbs-up recommendation to Trendy Pet!

Travels: Iceland

2011-09-08T13:17:00.000+03:00

I'm back from Iceland! I already know what you are saying..."Why Iceland?" For a number of perfectly good reasons. It's not Saudi Arabia. In fact, in terms of climate and culture, it's about as far away as one can get from the Magic Kingdom. It is green, wet, and cool, and populated by people who don't bathe in cologne, who think backpacks are the best way to carry one's stuff around, and who can't wait to get outdoors and do something. But Iceland is also geologically unique, a volcanic island that sits astride a tectonic plate boundary (the midocean spreading ridge in the North Atlantic). It is chock full of volcanoes, geysers, waterfalls, and glaciers. The ever practical Icelanders make full use of their natural, although certainly at times hostile, resources. From Wikipedia:

Five major geothermal power plants exist in Iceland, which produce approximately 26.2% (2010) of the nation's energy. In addition, geothermal heating meets the heating and hot water requirements of approximately 87% of all buildings in Iceland. Apart from geothermal energy, 75.4% of the nation’s electricity was generated by hydro power, and 0.1% from fossil fuels.

How about that math? More than 99% of Iceland's electricity comes from renewable sources.

Iceland has an interesting human history as well starting with the first settlements back in 874. It's a hard place to make a living. Even now after more than 11 centuries (!), there are fewer than 320,000 people in the whole country; about 180,000 of them live in Reykjavik and its suburbs. Iceland doesn't have really harsh winters because of the warm Gulf Stream waters but it is a harsh landscape nonetheless. Volcanoes, earthquakes, and geysers make for awkward neighbors. There are some trees in Iceland but they are few and far between (i.e., no forests). There aren't any big animals except for cows, sheep, and horses, introduced by man, of course.

I had some difficult arranging a hotel for my first two nights--every hotel in Reykjavik was booked solid. Who the heck were all these people visiting Iceland in late August? After watching people for a few days, I concluded that most of the tourists come from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and then perhaps North Americans come in a distant fifth. A few Japanese were scattered about as well. I asked a Swedish woman why her countrymen and women would choose to have their holidays in a country so similar to their own. She said, well, culturally it's similar but the landscape is very different. A lot of them come to bathe and swim in the hot springs (I dubbed this the "sauna culture").

The country has no major industries or exports (can't export steam) except for tourism. The tourists come for the gorgeous scenery but also for inventively and playfully designed textiles, clothing, housewares, furniture, jewelry, and art. Iceland has a vibrant music scene as well. With all of the tourism focused on outdoor activities, there are several outdoor gear companies that make extraordinarily beautiful and functional outdoor clothing. And of course there are the woolen goods: sweaters, hats, dresses, vests, mitts, socks, scarves, blankets, and more. You can easily spot the items made with undyed wool in black, grey, white, and brown. After a while, I could see common decorative patterns and themes.

The food was nothing to write home about. In my opinion, it was typically bland Northern European variations on a fish and potatoes theme. I did try some puffin. And no, it did not taste like chicken. It had an odd texture like very firm seafood, kind of like a scallop but not as smooth. It wasn't gamey like pheasant nor meaty like herbivores. Grocery stores have a few extremely hard or sadly limp vegetables in limited supply; green vegetables and fruit don't comprise a large part of the Icelandic diet. They do grow and eat a lot of berries, though, which are probably the source of key vitamins. My favorite food discovery is skyr, a type of thick, creamy cow's milk yogurt.

One thing that did surprise me was how expensive Iceland is. On a scale of 1 to 10, this place is a 10. And I wasn't even paying for five-star activities and accommodations. I saw tourists spending money like mad on all sorts of luxury goods (i.e., things they didn't need to survive). Despite their recent national financial crisis, the Icelanders seem to have a pretty good attitude about it all. This was also the height of tourist season when they make most of their income for the year so the locals were at their charming, helpful best.

Like most Europeans, Icelanders put Americans to shame when it comes to language. All of them--ALL of them--speak excellent English as well as Icelandic and at least one of German or Swedish or Norwegian, sometimes all three. Swedes and Norwegians told me that they can sort of understand Icelandic but they can't speak it. I purchased a very funny tourist Tshirt which says in Icelandic, "I can't speak Icelandic": "ég tala ekki íslensku". Yeah, exactly.

So by now I'm sure you are saying, alright with the damned social studies lesson already, where are the pictures? For that, you'll have to check back soon! But I'll leave you with a few teasers.

Reykjavik. View looking northeast.

Bubbling hot pot; the hole is about 12 inches in diameter. The water comes out of the hole at boiling temperatures. The white bits are bacteria and mineral deposits. You can also see feathery green algae and farther away where it's a bit cooler, clumps of grass.

Icelandic pony.

Spring Cleaning

2011-08-21T10:04:00.000+03:00

It's not really spring. And I didn't really clean anything. But I decided I needed to freshen up the blog a bit.

I added some new "lurk links" to the right. Check out Crossroads Arabia. This guy is extremely careful not to express his opinion about things but he manages to post about all sorts of rather controversial subjects from Saudi and other Arabic and English news sources. Interesting reading.

Toy Monster

2011-08-20T18:07:00.000+03:00

Mimi never does anything by halves. Why walk when you can run? Why wait quietly when you can sproing repeatedly in the air? Everybody knows that makes dinner come faster. And now she has taken the matter of playing with toys to a whole new level.

It really is my fault, of course, for we "get the dog we deserve." Mimi wouldn't do anything more than once unless there was some tiny bit of reinforcement for doing so. When I was working hard to train her to bring a toy back to me, any interaction that she had with a toy, even the slightest glance at it, would result in my starting a toy game with her. And as long as she was interested in playing, I would be too! Over time, I quite successfully shaped her to bring toys to me on command. Of course, I would always stop each game before she got tired of playing, the tried and true "leave them wanting more" method. But I would still begin playing with her whenever she showed interest. The result was inevitable. Predictable.

I created an insatiable toy monster.

At least once, usually twice a day, most often when I am focused on something else like reading, getting ready for work in the morning, or making my own dinner (i.e., not focused on her), Mimi begins raiding her toy box. She pulls out one toy after another until she finds just the right one (she does have favorites but by and large they are all now her favorites so the process of selection is a bit random) then she runs around the room tossing it in the air as close to me and what I am doing as she can get. If it still squeaks or honks or crunches, all the better! Squeak, honk, crunch over and over and over. If that doesn't get my attention, she starts piling toys up around me. I have turned around more than once when making dinner in the kitchen to find three or four toys on the rug by the sink. If I'm on the couch, she actually places the toys on my feet.

Harry is keeping an eye on his favorite bear. Mimi is on her toes, ready for action as soon as I got up to get the camera for this shot.

Mimi is a fine and true terrier, relentless in all things. Her final coup de grace is The Stare, a mixture of pathos and excitement. She will pick up a toy, stare at me, put the toy down, stare at me, pick the toy up, stare, put the toy down a few inches closer to me, stare. She never makes a sound during the entire performance.

Sadly, I give in just about every time. I turn the stove off, put the book down, stop whatever I'm doing, and go have a game of fetch with them. Harry always comes along for the ride but he wisely lets Mimi do all the prep work. Hey, it's hard being an old dog! He just turned 13 at the beginning of August.

I'm quite aware that letting Mimi set the play agenda violates all kinds of dog training rules. But frankly, I don't really care. I'm happy that she now thinks that playing with toys with me is about as much fun as a terrier can have.

Travels: Medieval Church in Aulnay, France

2011-08-15T17:51:00.000+03:00

I didn't do much touring outside of La Rochelle (because I spent most of my time in France in bed sick). However, I roused myself one morning to drive to Aulnay to see its 12th century church. One of my travel guides said the fantastical sculptures were not to be missed.

The back side of the church. Medieval churches were shaped like crosses. This view is looking down along the "head" of the cross where the main altar is located.

The church was built between 1120 and 1140, so its claim to medieval fame is well established. I'm always amazed first and foremost when I visit such old structures--think of all of the wars, even modern ones with bombs and such, that they have withstood. The sharp-eyed amongst you may notice quite a few places in the interior where damp and decay have been repaired. Most of the gravestones in the yards around the church date from the 16th through 18th centuries--certainly not the first burial cycles that place has seen. The grounds were mowed and tended and the inside of the church was spotless, obviously still in use for at least special ceremonies.

I presume this is an array of saints, angels, and related figures. The layered arches with dozens and dozens of detailed figures reminds me of a buddhist wat,

Surprisingly, all of the doors were unlocked. Sure, Aulnay is a fair ways off the main roads, but several decent sized villages are located all around it. Such a wonderful treasure, unlocked, free, available to be seen and enjoyed whenever you took the fancy (the mairie's parking lot was even directly across the street)--that just wouldn't, couldn't, happen in the U.S.

Yep, that's what I think it is too: a cow rain spout.

The Oriental influence on the carvings is striking. Elephants? How did unlettered masons of the early 12th century know what elephants looked like?

These elephants capped one of the columns inside.

All of the columns were topped with the most fantastic carvings: plants, faces, shells, animals.

The church is dedicated to St. Peter. According to my guidebook, this is a carving of two Roman soldiers hammering nails into a crucified St. Peter. Note more of the Oriental motifs and layered arches.

A view of the front of the church with the suitably atmospheric, lichen-covered grave markers and monuments.

Readin' and Writin'

2011-08-14T08:27:00.001+03:00

To my surprise, I have discovered through continuing this blog that I have become interested in the nature of narrative. What makes a story funny or memorable? How does the language that we choose, even at the level of individual words, shape the stories we tell? Indeed, what is the purpose of telling a story? Education? Bragging? A metaphorical "this didn't work so well, don't try it at home"? I find myself examining events taking place around me differently than I used to, pre-blog.

I sift and reject many stories that may be worthwhile and interesting but that aren't sufficiently blog-worthy (tip o'the fedora to Elaine on Seinfeld who gave us that meme; heck, thanks to Richard Dawkins for giving us meme in the first place). When I finally choose what I will write about, I spend a few days constructing the story in my head. It may then take me a couple of hours to actually turn it into a blog post with pictures and links.

Sure, it's a labor of love, done for my own sanity. Your reading (and enjoyment) of the posts is a happy coincidence. Still, I slave over a hot keyboard to find just the right words to tell each story. Which ones seem to resonate with you readers? The ones about dove-icide or the Step Dominatrix don't seem to make a ripple, even though those types of posts are the ones I spend the most time crafting. But slap up a rant and it is like poking an anthill with a stick.

Of course I follow political events in the US from afar. I have to. The US extracts taxes from my earnings. I pay into Social Security and Medicare. I park my savings in US institutions. I am a US citizen and will eventually return to the US. I would like to buy property there eventually. The ongoing political slap-stick (really, Larry, Moe, and Curly are more sophisticated than the talking heads in Congress, so I guess that I am insulting slap-stick) is an embarrassment, a debacle, a freeway wreck that one must look at, even if only out of the corner of your eye as you pass. Expats, even homeless ones like me, can and do vote. And since this is my soapbox, I do occasionally burst out with a rant.

But I hope that you find the stories about mango madness in Lulu or jaunts in the jebels with the dogs more satisfying to read. They are certainly far more satisfying for me to write.

Sheesh!

2011-08-13T10:25:00.000+03:00

For the most part, I keep my political opinions to myself. I don't talk about them in social settings and I don't say much about them on this blog. I figure that if you, my readers, are motivated to learn the facts about economics, climate change, health care, religion, et al., you are going to do so regardless of whatever blather I put up here. And if you aren't motivated to learn the facts (preferring instead shrill talking points), then whatever blather I put here doesn't matter anyway.

But I do have political opinions. And two rather different comments posted recently to Charles Blow's op-ed piece "Genuflecting to the Tea Party" in the NY Times have pushed me to say something.

Here is the first one, from Marie Burns of Ft Myers, Florida:

Republicans think representing 90 percent of the wealth is as good as representing 90 percent of the people.

I want that printed on Tshirts, mouse pads, coffee mugs, bill boards, toilet paper. I want to buy advertising time on local TV and radio stations and have this repeated daily. I want it added to the warning labels on cigarette packages. It is perhaps the most succinct summation of the deep hole we (the American people) are in, cavalierly pushed there by the Republican party and their fellow travelers.

Sheesh.

Then there is this tidbit from JoJo of Boston, who I'm sure felt that she was drawing a really significant distinction between crazy and crazier:

...I'll have no respect for any of them, except Ron Paul -- he's extreme on some things, but he's the only one who's not a lying pseudo-religious hypocrite.

I'm sorry to rain on Jojo's parade, but Ron Paul is one of the biggest hypocrites out there. The supposed godfather of Libertarians, he constantly espouses the primacy of individual rights to property, life, speech, action. Yet Mr. Paul, excuse me, Dr. Paul, as he is a medical doctor, is also virulently against a woman's right to have an abortion should she so choose. I've got news for you, Dr. Paul. There is no property right more fundamental than my right to control my OWN BODY!

Sheesh.

So in a nutshell, here's my blather. Fact-check everything. Don't rely on a single source for all of your information about the world. Everyone in power has an agenda, primarily one of staying in power, but their motives and results may be much darker than that. Voting is a responsibility, a burden, that we must not take lightly. Participating as a citizen in a democracy is also quite a burden. The burden is education. And that takes time and effort. Please find the time and make the effort.

Lamb With a Cherry on Top

2011-08-10T12:18:00.000+03:00

Time for another recipe. This one fell together last night because I was too exhausted from kick boxing class to come up with anything more complicated. It was quite tasty.

A note on the meat (you non-meat-eaters might want to skip this paragraph; well, really, you non-meat-eaters might want to just skip the entire post). I used a cut of lamb available in all of the stores here that is simply labeled "boneless lamb." I am not even sure what part of the lamb is involved. (I did a google search on "boneless lamb" and I can assure you that what we get here looks NOTHING like any of the pictures I could find.) Shanks, shoulders, and necks are pretty tough cuts and require hours of simmering to become edible. I use the word "cut" loosely. The small brown guys that work in the meat departments of the grocery stores don't so much cut up the meat as they hack it apart. All I know is that the "boneless" cut doesn't have a bone in it and it isn't full of tough connective tissue. You can put it in a curry without fussing for hours in the kitchen. This recipe will also work for lamb chops.

I often marinate meat before grilling it and I've been experimenting with fruit marinades for years. One of my memorable efforts was a homemade, fresh plum-garlic chutney marinade for shark (any firm fish would work). Mmm. The dish I'm posting about uses non-sweetened dark cherry preserves, a half-bottle of which I just happened to have in my fridge.

Wash, and if needed, trim, the lamb ("boneless" or chops). Pat the meat dry. You want to leave some fat on it because that is what gives meat flavor.
Wash your hands! You've been handling raw meat.
Drizzle some olive oil in a shallow bowl and drag both sides of the lamb around in that.
Liberally sprinkle salt and garlic powder on both sides.
Spread 3-4 oz of natural (unsweetened) cherry preserves on the meat, covering it evenly.
Take the dogs for a walk (30 minutes). When you get back, turn the meat over and spread the preserves that smooshed out from under it all over the other side.
Heat the grill.
Make a foil pan and put the lamb in it. Scrape all of the preserves out of the bowl and onto the meat. Put the pan on the grill.
Grill on low flame to medium rare (smaller cuts of lamb can get dry and tough if you overcook). I'm not going to be more specific here because you should know your own grill, but no matter what cut you are using, the meat should be on the grill no more than 5-6 minutes.
Serve with a vegetable of your choice. I chose to gently saute shiitake mushrooms in a bit of butter and olive oil. I would have added parsley if I had some. A green salad with a simple balsamic dressing would be good as well.

It's All Relative

2011-08-09T10:01:00.002+03:00

We expats have been marveling at the great weather we've had for the last four days: afternoon highs of 105F, humidity around 30%, light breeze.

Starting in late July, around the time I returned from repat, afternoon temperatures shot up to 115F (and higher) and the summer humidity (80-95%) dropped over us like a heavy, hot, wet blanket. I stopped walking the dogs because they simply weren't able to cool themselves; the panting system doesn't work so well in those conditions. This is typical summer weather for the Eastern Province, and it can last for 6 or 8 weeks during August and September.

But to our surprise, we woke up this past Saturday morning to what is ironically referred to here as a cold snap. Yes, we are celebrating daily high temperatures of only 105F. Imagine, when I take the dogs out for their first pee at 4am, it is actually below 90F! (It was about 85F this morning.) But it's all relative, right?

Those of us who are here at work during Ramadan are here for a reason: we can get an astonishing amount of work done. Saudis only work half days. They go home at noon and sleep until sunset when they begin the Ramadan overindulgence of food and drink, feasts that last for hours. This half-day rule of course doesn't apply to the army of small brown guys, nearly all of them Muslim, who pick up the trash, take care of the landscaping, clean the buildings, and so on. I deliberately saved up four big projects to work on during this month. With all the Saudis gone and many expats transiting in and out on leave, we can hunker down in our offices and work all day with no interruptions. No meetings. Can't go anywhere for lunch--all the cafeterias and food kiosks and coffee bars are closed for the month (we can eat in our offices or the sin room but not anywhere in public). Productivity shoots through the roof with 60% of the work force gone. Just another fascinating side to life in the Magic Kingdom.

But despite our good intentions to get stuff done at work, this wonderful weather has made us expats feel a bit twitchy. I hear mutterings of plans to play hooky, to spend the morning at home doing some yard work. We're all hoping the weather holds until this weekend.

Doves 0, Harry and Mimi 10 and counting

2011-08-07T07:54:00.001+03:00

In this part of Saudi Arabia (the Eastern Province), wildlife diversity is quite low. It's not a surprise, of course, as people couldn't even live here without modern technology and petroleum products.

Birds are more diverse than other types of animals but that isn't saying a lot. Indian mynahs, white-cheeked bulbuls, sparrows, hoopoes, ring-necked doves, and rosy doves pretty much cover the list.

White cheeked bulbul.

The noisy, gregarious indian mynah.

Eurasian hoopoe. They hiss and throw their crest up when the dogs get too close (the crest feathers are normally tucked down). They are not woodpeckers. They eat bugs that they spear out of the ground with their long beaks.

Every couple of months I spot a hawk cruising camp for a snack--the giveaway is always the group of agitated mynahs dive bombing it. There are several indigenous species of hawks, eagles, and falcons in Saudi Arabia but most live in the mountains to the west so a sighting here in the east is special. A very large community of bright green parrots, numbering into the thousands, noisily moves around camp but like the hoopoes, they are migrants that decided to stay for the water and shelter. Out by "Lake Lanhart," the sewage reclamation pond south of camp, you can see dozens of different types of migratory water birds, particularly in the winter. They almost never even fly over camp so unless you make a special trip out there (battling the flies and the smell), the average resident doesn't see them.

The small birds are fully integrated into the housing areas. I often see the mynahs in particular dumpster-diving. And freshly mowed grassy areas with lots of disturbed insects are just heaven for hoopoes and bulbuls.

Although we do have two or three kinds of more or less normal trees with limbs and leaves, most of the small birds seem to prefer to nest in the palm trees, some of which are more than 20 feet tall. (Hoopoes are an exception; they prefer to nest in holes in rocky soil.) I'm always surprised by the carnage of eggs and nestlings after big wind storms, which are common throughout the year (except for July through September when we are desperate for any breath of moving air). Either because they are exceptionally fecund and there is just a lot of them or because they make crummy nests, the doves seem to be the most common windfall species.

And now we turn the conversational corner. Those young doves tossed from their nests? They don't stand a chance with the ever-vigilant Harry and Mimi. I'm of two minds about this, of course. Even though the terriers are hard-wired for this behavior, it seems a bit cruel. On the other hand, if Harry or Mimi don't get them, the feral cats will, so the outcome is fixed no matter who does the actual deed.

Mimi in particular has shown some skill in taking down even adult doves, who of course didn't fall from a nest but were just stupid and careless (she's always on a leash so it isn't like she stalks and chases them). And I do have to admire their efficiency. Thankfully, neither dog has any desire to actually eat these poor birds. Once the dogs kill them, the fun is over. Sure, there is plenty of sniffing, and I usually have to pull some feathers out of their mouths, but that's pretty much it. I leave the carcasses for the feral cats and the ants.

The Step Dominatrix Returns!

2011-07-30T11:33:00.000+03:00

Erika, whom I've christened the Step Dominatrix for her demanding style in leading her exercises classes, is back! Pregnant with her third kid, she had to gradually back off then completely hand over her classes to a substitute instructor this spring. Then she was out for a month after she actually had the baby. But this Thursday was her first day back! Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depends on the perspective), I chose that day to return to exercise class myself--the Thursday morning "boot camp", an hour and a half of cardio, weight training, balance work, a real grab bag of stuff. Next to step class, it is Erika's signature workout.

And she was in fine form, zipping around to every station, constantly correcting and praising as needed.

I really appreciate her methods. She combines motivation and encouragement with a no-mercy, no-slackers attitude. Of course teaching basic dog obedience is a far cry from delivering an hour-long step workout but a lot of the underlying concepts are the same. A good instructor knows how to combine the carrot and stick to keep students both challenged and successful. I've not managed to find a moment to tell her that, as an instructor myself, I have learned a lot from her, but I think that I need to do that. Everyone likes to be appreciated, even the Step Dominatrix.

Travels: Bordeaux and My Annual Shopping Trip in the US

2011-07-25T20:17:00.001+03:00

I'm back home after my annual repat trip. I spent a week in Bordeaux, France, and a week in Virginia. It was a rather frustrating trip because I was sick for the entire two weeks (something I picked up here because I was sick when I stepped off the plane in Paris). I probably should have gone to a doctor while I was in France. But by the time I decided that I needed to do that, I had to head back to Paris and get on a plane. Being stuck on a plane for 8 plus hours breathing dry, recycled air sent my entire system into a complete tailspin (to apply an appropriate metaphor). Couple that with jet lag and you shouldn't be surprised that I spent most of my repat sleeping. It's a very good thing I gave myself three days here in Dhahran before I return to work (tomorrow) because I'm only now starting to feel sort of like myself. So in short, the trip was not exactly the adventure I had hoped to have. But that's the way it goes sometimes.

I was in La Rochelle, located on the southwest Atlantic coast of France in the Bordeaux province. This very old port city with a deep harbor is favored by the French for their summer holidays. Not just the middle class French, either. The Ile de Ré just offshore of La Rochelle attracts French people of considerable wealth. While I was there, I observed only a handful of Brits and no Americans at all (who are unfortunately all too obvious by their manners and dress and speech).

La Rochelle is a very old city. The main streets that extend back from the original harbor are bordered by arch-covered walkways. Based on some literature I picked up there, many of the cobblestones in the streets are original. Can't you just imagine these walkways filled with vendors hawking all sorts of goods? This particular street was no longer part of the tourist commercial center but along other streets the arches were lined with shops and thronged with tourists.

The city was packed to the gills with happy French families enjoying the seashore and the (mostly) sunny weather. The autoroutes from Paris to La Rochelle were clogged with French people on holiday, their cars packed to the roof with bags and people, stacks of bikes on the rear racks, kayaks, tents, and other gear tied to the roof. The French seem to do just fine with their small cars and all that gear--not an SUV to be seen. I was also rather interested in the fact that all of the cars were new or only a couple of years old. With the obvious exception of the slums in the larger cities and some of the rather dismal rural areas, in general France is a relatively prosperous country. It is another interesting factoid that I've encountered in more than one guidebook and website that the French spend their holidays and their money in France.

Even though the tide was out the morning I took this photo, exposing a rather unlovely muddy shore, this La Rochelle beach was jammed with sun seekers.

I stayed at the Vue sur Cour B&B in La Rochelle. Located in the heart of the old city in a solid old building with a tranquil courtyard, it was perfect for short trips out and about in La Rochelle. Marika was a wonderful hostess, serving up homemade pastries and yogurt in the mornings and helpful tourist advice.

View from my sitting room window into the courtyard at Vue sur Cour.

The Bordeaux countryside is flat farmland. Fields of grass, grain, corn, and to my surprise, sunflowers, stretched as far as one could see.

The green patches are the sunflower fields--hundreds of flowers facing the same direction in each field.

The terrain is a bit more hilly around Bordeaux, which is why it is so perfect for the vineyards.

The famous vineyards of that province are all located around the city of Bordeaux, which is about 200 km south of La Rochelle. I was only able to visit the old medieval town of St. Emilion. Bordeaux itself is one of the larger cities in France with over half a million in population. It looks sleek and prosperous.

St. Emilion is a medieval walled city. Here you can see part of the walls and what was originally a moat.

St. Emilion is built on a bluff of cream colored limestone. The numerous monasteries and convents and churches and shrines on top of the bluff are sharply separated from the secular part of the village at the base. The usual claptrap about a hermit saint, a miracle spring, etc. accompany a large church carved into and under the base of the hillside.

This demon creature was in the corner of an otherwise standard religious painting/fresco inside one of the main churches in St. Emilion.

I stayed with my friend DSL and then my mother while in the US. What did we do? For the most part, shopped for things on my list. It has been almost a year since I was in the US and I needed a large variety of items that I can't get or find here or that I don't want or can't bring in via mail order: underwear, shoes, medicine and supplements. I won't go down the list because that would be pretty boring. But I will say that I traveled out with two suitcases with about half a suitcase of clothes spread between them and returned with, well, you can see for yourself in the photo below.

Harry and Mimi instantly suss out the suitcase containing the dog treats and toys!

Of course I don't go to the US just to go shopping. It was good to visit with friends and family, sharing meals and a good glass of wine or two. But I don't write about everything in the blog!

While at my mother's, I was able to spend time with Bhumi, my Siamese mix cat who almost instantly upon his arrival two years ago became BFF with her 17-year old male cat (I always suspected that Bhumi was gay) and with little Dyna, the sweetest SFT there ever was. She gave me a truly enthusiastic welcome, followed me around the house all week, and deigned to sleep with me at night. She's quite the spoiled princess, as of course she should be.

Bhumi and Freckles taking up residence in the guest room, usually forbidden to them.

Dyna, little sweet pea.

Upul managed to "endure" (as DSL so aptly put it) for the two weeks but it was clear that he was relieved to get a break from the terrier madness. Harry and Mimi were ecstatic when I finally got home. Tsingy has been a burr, never more than a few feet from me. I was sitting on the couch reading before I got up to take this photo. Can't you just feel the contentment? All is right with their world again.

Harry, Tsingy, and Mimi purring.

Training the SFT: The Joy of Toy

2011-07-02T16:37:00.001+03:00

I'm quite proud to announce that after 5 years and 9 months, I have at last taught Mimi a "bring it' command. What are the criteria for this command? It can be either verbal ("bring it!") or just a hand signal (one finger pointing straight down at my feet), but she has to bring the toy TO ME. Not within the same room as me. Not within 4 feet of me. To me. Inches from my feet, or preferably on top of my feet.

What a concept.

Harry, being the perfect dog, well, perfect except for his penchant for trashcan-diving, of course has a "put it in my hand" command (no need for the complicated verbal; he only needs to see a flat open palm and he rushes to jam the toy into it). I had to teach him this years ago so that he wouldn't do victory laps after every flyball race (not only did he often veer into the other team's lane, an offense that could have gotten us dismissed from more than one tournament, but the whole affair really slowed the show down).

Mimi has resisted this particular behavior mightily. She would whine, even bark. She'd shake the toy all that more vigorously. She'd start bouncing in front of the magic dresser hoping that an even better toy was stashed on top. She'd do everything she could except bring the damned toy to me. But when she started throwing the toy up in the air earlier this year, I realized I was at last making progress.

That throwing the toy up ever so gradually progressed into throwing the toy forward. I used only a verbal marker ("good girl!") and would go and pick up the toy to throw it again.

I suppose I should take a step back. Teaching Mimi the joy of toy was itself quite a struggle. For years, it was a one-throw affair. She just didn't see the value in bringing the toy back at all since she could entertain herself for hours without any need for my intervention. Last year I was at last able to turn her into a tugging monster, which meant that she needed to keep the toy in my general vicinity if that fun game was to continue.

So once she started throwing the toy forward, I knew that I had her hooked. She resisted mightily--she would toss it forward but it would still be feet from me. Once I was sure that the tossing behavior was very strong, I stopped going to get the toy.

My god, you would have thought that I was sticking her with hot pokers. The whines and moans that came out of her as she would pick up the toy, drop it, pick up the toy, drop it--all the while staring at me....but I held out. No toy brought to me, then no game. I'd keep playing with Harry, which of course just drove her mad.

And that first time she brought me the toy, all the way to my feet, I had a huge party with her. It took about eight more (long) weeks before she was willing to admit that bringing the toy to me was a far superior proposition than no more toy play at all. Fox terriers are extraordinarily stubborn, and we fox terrier trainers have to be even more resolute.

Play time is quite a bit more fun now. She's even started jamming the toy into my hand or leg if I'm not fast enough to pick it up and toss it again. I always reward that behavior with a good tug party.

Harry learned the "hand" command in a matter of weeks. Mimi, it has taken years. But I learned a lot in the process.

It's a bittersweet lesson for me as a dog trainer since I am no longer able to compete with my dogs. But I cherish the relationship I have with Harry and Mimi and am so thankful that I can continue to learn with them.

Odds and Ends, Mostly Odds

2011-07-02T15:13:00.001+03:00

Today is a holiday. It is not an official Saudi holiday but one engineered by and for Aramco. It has been a few months since there was a company-wide and/or national holiday--Aramco likes to intersperse those 3-day weekends throughout the year. School just ended here, it is close to July 4 (not that the Saudis care about that but the positioning of the holiday near an American one is an anachronism from the days when Aramco was an American company), the eid following Ramadan is still about 8 weeks away...all factors pointed to the need for a holiday sometime in early July.

It would have been a much more enjoyable holiday if we hadn't been hit with a major dust storm on Thursday morning. The worst of the storm lasted almost 48 hours. The Eastern Province has a nearly constant haze of dust and salt in the air but the furnace-blast wind and dust in this storm were particularly ferocious. We didn't see the sun on Thursday and the sky was a murky orange all day.

We haven't had a true shamal (sand storm) here in the two years I've been here but we frequently get the tail ends of them. The sand blows itself out somewhere between Riyadh and the coast, leaving us with the dust, so baby fine that it manages to work its way into every crack and crevice. My sinuses feel like they have been extracted, thoroughly pounded with a meat cleaver, sprinkled liberally with something suitably caustic such as Drano, then stuffed back into my head.

That this area is unsuitable for long-term human habitation is clearly demonstrated by the absence of ruins of towns. Oh, sure, remnants of the occasional Bronze Age seasonal fishing village are stumbled across, unless the Wahhabis get to the site first and destroy it (destruction and denial of pre-Islamic civilization on the Arabian peninsula is a refined cottage industry here). But even these tattered bits attest to the larger point: nobody lived in this god-forsaken landscape year-round. (There were towns along the western trade routes, but those were established by different peoples altogether.)

I'm preparing to leave this vile weather behind for a bit--my annual government-mandated repat leave is coming up soon. We are required to be OOK for 14 consecutive days each year. Add on the Aramco-mandated travel days and it turns into something like 21 days off from work. Doesn't matter where we go, but go we must. Aramco ensures our cooperation with it all by paying us extra to leave.

In other news, both dogs have a nasty case of dermatitis on their feet from the toxic combination of raw irrigation water, dust, salt, and sand fleas. Their front feet are most affected as both have lots of tiny bites between their toes. It doesn't help that we take most of our walks at dawn and dusk when the nasty little fleas are most active. I'm going to try spritzing their feet with an herbal insect repellent to see if that helps at all. Mimi licked her front feet so much that she gave herself a yeast infection (the vet, after taking a whiff of her feet, agreed that they did have "quite a pong"; he's a Brit, in case you didn't guess). He told me that nearly all dogs in camp develop this dermatitis after a year or so--it is just part of living here. We do have ticks and regular fleas so the dogs get FrontLine but it is not effective against the sand fleas, unfortunately.

Since cooking is one of my hobbies and I'm not exactly a shitty cook, I thought that I would start adding a semi-regular cooking or recipe note to the blog. So here's the first one (I'll start adding photos once I see how this goes):

Mango season is winding down at last. I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to mangoes--I like nearly all varieties--India, Africa, Pakistan, Mexico--bring'em on! I don't care much for melons or papayas or other tropical fruits but I really like mangoes. I stumbled across a great recipe that uses up as many mangoes as you need it to. Even better, this mango salsa is quite a crowd pleaser at parties. It's so simple to make! No fat! No salt! It's all good for you!

Mango Salsa

1 small red onion
3 large mangoes (if you use more than one kind, you get interesting variations in color and texture)
1 medium red bell pepper
1 hot pepper, about index-finger length (I buy the red Thai peppers but hot green ones work too)
1 lime
2 cloves of garlic (optional)

one bowl large enough to hold all ingredients

Wash all of your veggies well! Finely dice the onion. Deseed and finely dice about 1/3 of the hot pepper (add more if you are brave or your guests are hardy). Now wash your hands, the knife, and the cutting board. You just handled that hot pepper and you don't want those fiery juices getting places they shouldn't. Finely dice the garlic if you are using it. Mix these ingredients well with the juice of the lime. No hurry! Letting the onions and hot pepper sit in the lime juice allows their flavors to mix and mellow. Dice the red bell pepper. Peel and dice the mangoes. Mix all ingredients. Keep in the fridge until ready to serve with crackers (otherwise the mango bits can get kind of mushy). Also works wonderfully as a relish or salad for curries and grilled meats. Keeps for about 3 days in the fridge.

Bon appétit!

Another Busy Day at T3i

2011-06-27T17:18:00.003+03:00

THANKS, G!

T3i received a big shipment yesterday. This one was particularly smelly because of the bull pizzles and tracheas tucked in along with toys and beds. Perhaps that's why Saudi customs didn't open it...? Harry and Mimi are helping me unpack.

Harry gets down to business quickly. This is a cool toy--a plush cover for a plastic bottle. The SFTs can't resist any toy if there is plush involved. Plus it makes such an interesting crackly noise!

Thorough testing procedures are always observed at T3i. Mimi is now working on the plastic bottle while Harry is taking a turn at the gigantic squeaking, honking, furry raccoon. He is in his favorite position, draped across a dog bed with his hind legs out behind him.

Mimi played...um, I mean, tested, and tested and tested and took notes then tested some more--and she actually wore herself out. This is a very rare photo: Mimi nodding off due to exhaustion.

The production line of untested toys is full! T3i will be busy for months.

Tsingy has been put on the payroll at T3i as a specialized consultant. Here she is modeling a teal cave bed. Work it, girlie!

Proper product testing is hard work!

Whew!

2011-06-21T12:47:00.001+03:00

For most of May and June, the weather has been fairly nice. That's a relative evaluation of course. It's been extremely dry with dust storms every couple of days. Sometimes so much dust fell out of the sky when the wind died down at night that dust drifts collected in the corners of the windshield of my car. So the dust was a problem, but the temperatures were bearable: highs around 104F and lows around 81F. That's a pleasant temperature to start the day with. You might almost consider this spring weather here in the Eastern Province. Almost.

But two days ago, summer arrived with ferocity. Temperatures soared up to around 114F and for the past two nights the lows were only 94F. It doesn't drop below 100F until after 9pm, causing great difficulties for me and the dogs since, as a rule, I won't walk Harry until the temperature is below 100F. Forget playing ball or visiting the jebels. It's about all we can do to make it around our "short" route, about 20 minutes. Upul reports lunch time mutinies: neither dog wants to do more than pee then go back inside.

And the wind is still with us, blowing stronger than ever. You know the blast of heat you get when you open your oven to check on something baking inside? It feels like that here except it's like that everywhere, not just in front of your oven. It feels like we are living inside of a furnace. Insert as many hell metaphors here as you see fit.

About the only good thing you could say about the change in weather is that it is still extremely dry.

Expats live in Dhahran in housing provided by Aramco. There are pages and pages of rules restricting what kind of house you are allowed to live in or bid on based on your grade code, describing what you can and can't do to it, and so forth. For this privilege, we pay token rent. I pay around USD 120 per month for my hovel. We don't pay for water (such as it is) or electricity or local phone service.

We also get access to a 24-hour service center staffed with hundreds of small brown men from India, Pakistan, and the Philippines who will deal with any maintenance issue no matter how small or how critical. Can't reach that burned out bulb in the stairwell? Call the service center. Washing machine stopped working mid-cycle? Call the service center.

And most importantly, if your A/C goes out, you call the service center...and they have someone at your house in minutes. Aramco takes A/C very seriously. You probably don't even get that kind of response to house fires in the US. This in fact happened to me last weekend. Turns out the motor in my cooling unit burned out. I have no idea how the logistics works but these guys travel with spare parts for the dozen different A/C models around camp, tanks of coolant and compressed air, new filters, etc. They are like some sort of A/C SWAT team ready at a moment's notice to fix all A/C crises. They were at my hovel, had the motor replaced, and cool air again blowing all in about 30 minutes.

Et Voila!

2011-06-17T14:30:00.001+03:00

After a bit of flailing, I am pleased to show you the label design for my adult beverage products:

I have variations for Vin Rouge, Vin Blanc, Bière, and Pétillement (sparkler), the four types of beverages that I regularly make. And I do have to say that the quality of all four is constantly improving. Two French consultants drank almost 1.5 liters of my latest batch of beer last night--infused with ginger and hops with a lovely orange-red color, they decided to call that batch "Kilkenny Red"! And my cranberry preserve red? Totally awesome and dubbed by my French friends as being very similar to a decent "Beaujolais Nouveau." Both are definitely recipes to repeat. (I keep detailed notes on every batch.)

Apologies to DSL, but "Bonjour Gendarmerie!" turned out to be too subtle of a private joke and too difficult of a design project for my limited Photoshop skills to be turned into a label.

I wanted a distinctive label but one that couldn't be used to directly identify me, as I plan to start taking bottles to parties, book club meetings, etc. A dog theme offered lots of possibilities but my own dogs are too unique in appearance for me to use them as models. I found this image on CuteOverload--and I came up with "Le Point" as soon as I saw it.

I like the play on words. "Point" means period or point or dot or specific location in French, and ties into the visual image of the puppy's head peeking out, but "the point" in English has an additional meaning: purpose. After all, what is the purpose of going to all the trouble to make this stuff in the first place?

Santé!

Total Lunar Eclipse

2011-06-15T12:28:00.001+03:00

An event that isn't making many waves in the voracious US news cycle is the total lunar eclipse that will occur tonight. We will be able to see the entire event in Saudi Arabia. It won't be visible from any location in North America, however. I was surprised to learn that there will be another lunar eclipse and one solar eclipse in 2011.

Who will be able to see the lunar eclipse tonight?

A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon's path takes it across the Earth's shadow. It becomes a total eclipse when the lunar path crosses the center of the Earth's shadow. It is going to take the moon nearly two hours to cross out of the plane of the ecliptic. The local religious leaders are urging Muslims to spend that time praying. In contrast, western expats are heading to beaches to dabble our toes in the Arabian Gulf and drink whine with friends. Good thing I bottled a totally awesome batch of red last weekend--I added two jars of natural cranberry preserves during fermentation. The preserves were a bit of a pain to deal with during bottling as the cranberry pulp kept clogging up the tubing parts but my, did they ever contribute to a tasty result.

The path of the moon across the Earth's ecliptic. Times are UT; times of the event in Saudi Arabia are two hours later.

Addendum: The eclipse was fabulous. The moon looked fake, like it belonged in some 6th grader's science project on the Solar System, a styrofoam ball painted pink and purple. Our small group, about a dozen including a couple of kids, passed the binoculars around and around, oohing and aahing. One guy went swimming while the moon was totally blacked out--and as an unexpected surprise, we could see sparkling swirls of bioluminescence around his arms and feet (dinoflagellates, microscopic single-celled animals are the source). It looked like he was making snow angels in the water.

Just Say No

2011-06-14T10:02:00.000+03:00

I don't have Facebook or other social networking accounts and, despite regular pressure from friends, I don't plan on ever having them.

There are quite a few reasons for my position. I've posted in the past about my dislike of the solipsistic navel-gazing that these sites seem to foster. My random thoughts aren't very interesting and frankly yours aren't either.

Since those arguments don't seem to be persuasive enough, how about if we couch the entire mess in terms of security and privacy?

Aramco monitors our every keystroke at work. They track which applications people access from work, and the frequency of visits. Just a couple of weeks ago, certain people received an email from Aramco IT telling them to reduce their usage of Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking sites during working hours.

Aramco monitors our surfing, emails, and phone conversations from home too (they own the phone lines that we use). The mobile phone companies report usage stats and provide text content to the Saudi government--no judge's order is required. Like the US government, they have computer algorithms that scan emails, texts, and conversations for certain hot-button words. If you happen to get a little too frisky in your online presence, they sit up and take notice and begin monitoring every single thing you do online. Just last month an expat was terminated--he was given 48 hours to leave the country. He posted some items on Facebook in support of the demonstrations back in March in Bahrain and in KSA. Certainly a very stupid thing to do, but it turns out that isn't why he was fired as initial rumors had suggested. It was those postings, however, that caused Aramco to take a closer look at his online activity. It turns out that he was participating in some rather unsavory things that perhaps would have remained below the radar (apparently had for years) if he had not been so stupid as to use social networking sites in the first place.

As a result of that news, I removed three of my blog posts and will no longer comment about specific political issues in the Gulf region. Big Brother Aramco is always watching. Nothing is private or confidential in this company or this country.

Need more convincing? How about this snip from the warden message that I received from the American consulate this morning:

WARDEN MESSAGE
June 14, 2011

The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, the Consulate General in Dhahran and the Consulate General in Jeddah request that wardens pass the following message in its entirety to the U.S. citizen community:

The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, the Consulate General in Dhahran and the Consulate General in Jeddah would like to remind U.S. citizens of the security situation in Saudi Arabia and of recommended security precautions. The Department of State urges U.S. citizens to consider carefully the risks of traveling to Saudi Arabia. There is an ongoing security threat due to the continued presence of terrorist groups, some affiliated with al Qaida, who may target Western interests, housing compounds, hotels, shopping areas and other facilities where Westerners congregate. These terrorist groups may employ a wide variety of tactics. Most recently, al Qa’ida’s central leadership’s media wing, al-Sahab, released a 100-minute documentary calling for extremists to carry out individual “lone-wolf”-styled attacks in western countries, (specifically naming the United States, the UK, and France), and have distributed it widely on jihadist forums and mainstream video sites.

The United States Mission reminds U.S. citizens that publicly available information can be exploited by terrorist groups employing lone-wolf tactics. Unlike other means of acquiring information on a target, such as surveillance, this type of information gathering requires no training. The Internet can be used to ascertain biographical data, pictures, and addresses of U.S. citizens. In addition to company and other websites, social media can disclose damaging information. Biographical data is often easy to find. In addition, posting pictures can identify your frequent destinations and acquaintances through tagging. Many social media users also unknowingly post geotagged photos, revealing the exact locations where the pictures were taken. U.S. citizens should remain cautious and vigilant about personal information that is shared publicly, in the best interest of personal security.

How sophisticated of an internet user are you? Do you know if Facebook or Flickr are geotagging your photos? Using image recognition software to identify people and places in those photos? Do you ever post comments about trips you plan to take and where and when you are going? I've been encouraged by friends to set up a "fake" Facebook account. Do you know the actual identity of every person who can view your Facebook page? Every account is tracked back to a real email somewhere with a real name on it. It doesn't take a superhacker to find that information out, or a genius IQ to set up a sufficiently believable "fake" Facebook account that would allow that person to lurk everywhere. They don't ever need to post, do they? They only need to look at what is being posted.

If you were in my position, would you want to take those kinds of chances?

I thought not.

Just say no.

False Community

2011-06-13T20:58:00.000+03:00

There are things, small things in the scheme of things, that simply drive me mad.

When someone at Aramco retires with a really high grade code, Aramco springs for a group luncheon and a departing gift. But when someone retires and their grade code puts them down amongst the ranks of the worker bees, the home department is expected to spring for all of that, including the "masalamah" or departing gift. In the past couple of weeks, I've been nearly bludgeoned by one of our secretaries asking me to contribute to the masalamah gifts for two people who are leaving, two people with whom I never worked directly, two people whom I really don't even know.

I hate the sort of faux-community attitude that underlies those sorts of events. I hate the implied camaraderie. I detest the peer pressure, the assumption that I would go along with this just because I happen to be in the same department.

If that were not annoying enough, this week, I received two emails, sent only to the women in our department, asking me to contribute to the purchase of flowers for two women who were having birthdays.

What is wrong with that, you ask? Why send an email to only the women? Wouldn't some of the men who are friends with those two women want to contribute? That smacks of sexism, yes, sexism from the women, and to be honest, I've slaved for far too long in this industry to put up with that sort of behavior from anybody. Over the years, I've dealt with comments, improper touching, and other much more overt episodes of sexual harassment from male coworkers. I refuse to participate in the very same sort of thing just because it's being arranged by the women.

But here's what really chaps my ass about the flower emails. They didn't buy me flowers for my birthday, nor in fact did anyone, including secretaries who have access to personnel records that would list my birth date, offer me good wishes that day or even that week.

Ah, you say, perhaps if I weren't such a curmudgeon, I'd get flowers at work too? Perhaps, but I reject the very notion in the first place. I work to get a job done, not to run around like a puppy seeking approval and pets from everyone.

That's quite a cynical read on the situation, and you can rightly accuse me of tasting some sour grapes, but why should those two women get flowers and all of the other people in our department get nothing? Do those two women run the show? Are their jobs so mission-critical that tasks become bottle-necked waiting for action from them? Do we sit in meetings with bated breath for their next amazing pronouncements? The answer to all of these is no.

Then again, to receive flowers, is it necessary for someone to be that important? Again, the answer is no.

My larger point is that I am not willing to accept that it is okay to single out anyone to receive these sorts of things, particularly via the method of an email asking one to "donate to the fund."

It is all based on false community. Real pressure to participate in something artificial and awkward.

I'm not buying into any of it.