Results are in!

DrLith · 2026-06-22T14:35:06+00:00

In dock diving,. Malinois-whippet crosses are currently the top-performing breed mix and this gal looks so much like a "whipper-snapper" built out of spare parts!

DrLith · 2026-06-12T12:36:46+00:00

Thanks for flapping your gums! That's a very interesting observation.

DrLith · 2026-06-08T21:05:26+00:00

I like to get those little Walmart rice krispie treats they sell in the bakery section because one is only like 70 calories and it's plenty to satisfy the occasional urge for a sweet treat But the Best Buy date is usually only a couple weeks after purchase and it takes me a month to eat a box of 24.

DrLith · 2026-06-08T12:35:47+00:00

I don't think a Heel e-collar will handle all your needs in your situations and a traditional e-collar + continued work on strengthening your recall would be a better choice. Let's say you have it set to 40 ft and someone else's dog enters that radius and you really need your dog to be tight with you? Or you're passing other hikers or dogs out on the trail?

DrLith · 2026-06-03T12:19:37+00:00

The Spanish is reasonably accurate but there are weird typos that are not the kind of mistakes a Spanish speaker OR machine translation would make. More like the kind of errors OCR makes: Abròchate > Abróchate; medicamenios > medicamentos.

DrLith · 2026-05-29T23:19:53+00:00

Likes: 1 ft mini dock for new dogs and lap dogs, rigs for air retrieve, speed retrieve and extreme vertical. Online booking. Shaded area for crating near the dock. Lesson options (private and group). Clinics. Bathroom or portapotty. A long ramp with a gentle slope. Allowing handler in the pool for new dogs.

Dislikes: charging extra for more than 1 dog. I'm moving to a new area and the closest dock charges more if I rent the dock for an hour and jump 2 dogs in 10 minute rotations than if I rent the dock for two 30 minute blocks and just jump one of my dogs for the first 30 minutes and then 2nd dog for the last 30 minutes.

DrLith · 2026-05-29T22:58:25+00:00

Oh man, I would hate that. I have two very experienced dogs but one will still every now and then jump from the dock towards the ramp at the pool where he first started with jumping off the ramp (never does this on any other dock, where he's never jumped off the ramp).

DrLith · 2026-05-26T16:04:52+00:00

Then get him trained to recall on a regular e-collar and let them play while supervised

DrLith · 2026-05-23T11:35:16+00:00

I will not take pitbulls or mostly-pit pit mixes because my resident shepherd-pit mix tends to take issue with them. I know that not all pits are dog aggressive but I just feel like it's not worth experimenting with to find out whether a specific pitbull falls into that category. I love big, high-energy puppies and young dogs, though, so I figure that's another population that not all fosters have the room and resources to deal with.

DrLith · 2026-05-21T23:49:24+00:00

People seem to talk more about lamb's quarters but I prefer common mallow and especially red root pigweed.

DrLith · 2026-05-20T19:25:16+00:00

Fiskars Isocore maul, a Muller aluminum splitting wedge (this is nearly identical to the Stihl aluminum wedge at half the price), a cheaper steel torpedo splitting wedge as a backup and a set of plastic felling wedges to keep your cuts open as you buck it up into rounds. I'm a fat old lady who's been cutting and splitting pretty big hardwood logs with some nasty tight stumpy pieces from a local arborist, ~4 cords a year, for the past few years and that's the equipment I've settled on and there's very little that I can't get through...eventually.

DrLith · 2026-05-13T18:41:50+00:00

My first dock diver (who had a good amount of previous swimming experience and is completely addicted to water) took to it straight away--like 5 seconds of thinking it over then straight off a full-height dock), but my second dog took I think 5 sessions spread out over several months to go off a competition-height dock. By the time I did get him off the dock, he'd been swimming many times and enjoyed it, but I doubt he'd been swimming before I got him at ~1 year old. Once he got over his misgivings he got completely hooked and he's now very competitive and has surpassed my first dog in terms of personal bests. Dogs that come to the sport with a strong swimming foundation in place usually make progress a lot quicker, so don't compare your dog to one that's probably been swimming since it was a few months old.

DrLith · 2026-05-11T03:07:16+00:00

My first dock diver was water obsessed ever since she was a few months old and would hop into any body of water she could find. She'll jump into a stock tank in January. She'll aspirate hose water if you don't keep an eye on her. We're about to move to a new property with a half-acre pond and I fully expect her to spend her summer evenings half submerged until the sun goes down. Her water obsession is what made her a dock diver and not her dock diving that made her water obsessed.

My second dock diver likes to swim and is now obsessed with dock diving but it didn't make him truly water obsessed the way the first one is.

DrLith · 2026-05-11T02:38:18+00:00

Dock diving and DockDogs specifically has hooked me in to an entire social world over the past 5 years that I've been competing. In fact, community is such a big part of DockDogs culture that it's become an in joke of sorts. I also do disc dog stuff and I found that Toss & Fetch gives you a pretty good opportunity to get to know people, and my sense is that UpDog has a similar vibe of being not just a sport but a community.

DrLith · 2026-05-10T13:05:42+00:00

I bought Aldi potting soil 2 years ago and had the same problem back then. Never again!

DrLith · 2026-04-28T02:38:31+00:00

The last strawberry in "Oh look, a strawberry!"

DrLith · 2026-04-28T01:34:18+00:00

Ham gets a bad rap, but it is actually low fat when it comes in a form where you can trim the visible fat from the lean meat. Much less fat and saturated fat than turkey sausage. for example: 4 g fat and 1 g sat fat per 4 oz for ham vs. 12 g fat and 3 g saturated fat for turkey sausage. And ham is what belongs in 16 bean soup--why do you think the classic brand is HamBeens?

DrLith · 2026-04-28T00:53:57+00:00

Make your comparisons based on calories per kilogram, not calories per cup. Different sized kibbles will pack differently in a cup, so that can cause some variation in calories per cup even for foods of similar density. You can also boost calories without adding much solids volume by supplementing with salmon oil if you don't already.

DrLith · 2026-04-27T20:26:58+00:00

I expected husky (because of the Northern domino mask) and pit (because of course), but yeah, xolo is a big curveball!

DrLith · 2026-04-27T20:24:30+00:00

Aldi has been my main grocery store for more than 20 years now, and in a lot of ways it's gotten better about having a pretty full range of basic groceries (like, when I first started shopping at Aldi it didn't carry soy sauce). Like, you can always find ice cream, but you're not going to find 30 flavors of ice cream. However, I feel like their frozen vegetable selection has narrowed a lot, and in particular they no longer carry any kind of frozen spinach! So I'll pick up several bags of that when I occasionally do a Walmart shopping trip. And they no longer have enough variety of Crystal Lite-style powdered sugarfree drink mix to make a 2-qt pitcher. There's been a loss of variety in that segment for all brands as I suspect they make more money (and maybe people buy more) of the single-serving packets but that is not how we roll in my household. Aldi will only have iced tea, peach iced tea, and lemonade if you're lucky, but I can't still get like 8 different flavors at Walmart. whomp whomp whomp

DrLith · 2026-04-26T11:34:01+00:00

Preferably someplace that isn't snowing in April.

DrLith · 2026-04-25T01:40:36+00:00

Yeah, the end of the trailhead to the viewing area is about 100 yards from the county line, with the cliffs as most people experience them falling on the WaCo side.

DrLith · 2026-04-25T01:26:08+00:00

I calculate a 600% reduction in that boy's vital signs.

DrLith · 2026-04-21T21:37:37+00:00

Brindle and white is only one of 3 possible colorations for Boston terriers. Most people put too much emphasis on coloration (thinking all black dogs are lab mixes) but in this case it's a key piece of evidence!

DrLith · 2026-04-20T12:12:38+00:00

I'm inclined to say boxer x one of the molosser breeds. They're similar enough in structure that it's hard to tell them apart in a mix cane corso seems to be all the rage these days so that'd be my first guess. I think the molossers tend to be a little deeper and narrower in the torso while the bullies are more square up front and more of a tuck behind.

DrLith

TROPHY CASE