On Sunday, Chico and I attended a handling seminar given by California trainer Mia Grant and organized by the Agility Club of New Hampshire. Mia was fun to work with, she has a great laugh and a new perspective on my handling. The seminar was run as a series of mini-private lessons. She’d set a small course, we each had floor time and individual attention while we all worked through it in our own time, and then she’d set another course. There must have been seven or eight of them between 7:30 AM and 3:30 PM. Since I had woken before my 4 AM alarm, I was pretty tired by the end. And so was Chico. He gave me several good sets of weave poles that day, but maybe he really wasn’t up for that much work in one day. Around 2PM, at the start of one of our runs, he went into a tunnel and laid down, right in the curve where he was hard to see from either end. I got him out and got him excited to run, but it was a statement of “This is hard and it’s making me tired.”

On another note:

Since the spring I have been fooling around with lawyers, a right of first refusal, builders, architects, and my own conscience about buying and rehabbing a building here in my town, and at the end of September, I closed on the property.

There it is, at the end of the field, by the river.

The building is an old granary, post and beam frame, built around 1900. In my town there were once 170 water powered mills, fewer than a dozen remain. This place was on the way to falling down in the mid-1970s when some young actors associated with the Barnstormers Theatre moved in for summers, and stayed. The roof and floors and fiberglass insulation they put in, and forty or so years of constant occupancy (the owners had children, got other jobs, took opportunities elsewhere but always kept the house as a rental) saved the structure.

Chico and my camping bed, in what someone called “the great room.” And I think that “pink” (Argh. Unnecessary quotation marks) rose is not live anymore.

It wants some attention – rather a lot of it actually – related to roof, flooring, plumbing, electrical, heating, insulation. In truth, I think I am pretty much going to be building a new house, but the hard way. When ever I’ve bought a used car, I have learned, I was buying a new car – one piece at a time. I did it with a 1962 Studebaker Lark and a 1957 VW bug (or was it even older? It had semaphores for turn signals), now it seems I am doing it with a house. I guess some of us learn slowly.

So don’t be surprised if you read about Chico and me taking field trips to places like Habitat for Humanity’s Re-Store, and tile and flooring show rooms in the next six months.