To continue my week: Janet, an enthusiastic and successful agility competitor, had loaned me some motivational sports-training books, the kind which told you to make lists of goals, to reframe your anxieties into positive statements, and to never use the word “try”. I particularly cottoned to the idea of imagining myself doing something perfectly, over and over. That was probably because I like imagining things. Reading those books made obvious how much I wasn't making any plans, and how formless that kept my progress. I tried to rectify this by dusting off a little binder, installing fresh paper in it, and writing GOALS on the first page. Under this I wrote:

1. not so pushy!
2. goats
3. not so flat on the top

The trouble with getting some goats, which I thought would be such an improvement in my life, was that in order to keep goats I would have to feed them something, and that something (hay) would have to be kept dry somewhere, which meant building some structure, which, on my hilly acres meant leveling a spot and putting in a retaining wall and pouring a concrete floor and constructing a ramp to it. And it would not stop raining. My goat barn floor-to-be was a mud pit.

And so were my goals, by and large. Shouldn't I be aiming for the stars? Shouldn't I plot out just how and by when Bonnie and I were going to get our Working Trial Championship and end up triumphant at the National Cattle Finals? But all I wanted, really, was goats, and pasture for sheep, and not quite so pushy. Although, I had to admit there were plenty of times where pushy was just fine, like when the sheep didn't want to go through the gate, or the calves preferred to keep their heads in the feeder. And what were goals, anyway? I wanted a lonely hill of grass and wind, not ribbons and titles and my dog's name in the Aussie Times. I didn't want those stars. I wanted to go home. But all I seemed to do was drive.

On Wednesday I went back to the Central Valley for my weekly lesson. Sherry put Bonnie on her light ewes, and she was too pushy no matter what I did. Just like practice, only with my teacher yelling at me added. Sherry said, "I wanted to start you parallel driving, but you've totally screwed up your go bye flank. It's all your fault, your dog is good but you've got her underflanking or overflanking every time, trying to do what you tell her."

There were a lot of details about how I had managed to do this. In my crude attempts to push her out on her go bye corner, to make her give the sheep more room, I habitually was either flipping her back the other way before she got to head (making her short), or driving her past the heads (overflanking), whereupon she would ring around behind me to head them on the other side. With Sherry describing it to me as it happened, I could see exactly what I was doing. But poor Bonnie was so patterned, now it took an absolutely perfect cue to prevent her from doing wrong what she ought to be doing right without any cue at all. In fact she had no problems with this on cattle, because I couldn't see her to cue her wrong.

She, too, was frustrated, and toward the end of the lesson, when she could not get manage to get far enough out from the sheep to pin them at the center pen, and ringed the pen over and over, chasing her sheep while I yelled at her to kick out, she faded toward the gate as if it was just more than she could take. These sheep needed about sixty feet of room for that maneuver, much farther out than she'd worked before. But she did keep working to the bitter end, and succeeded, much to everyone's relief.

On Thursday I collapsed. All I did was go to the DMV to register my new-to-me pickup (for the livestock I didn't have yet), walked the dogs four miles, bought $150 worth of groceries, cleaned the house, answered email, made dinner, paid the electric bill, and ferried my daughter to school and back. You know: nothing.

On Friday I went to Gwen's to practice. It was beyond muddy there, just after yet another rain, and the horse pasture was seeping water everywhere. Walking through it took intense concentration not to fall or get your boots sucked off. (and then fall). Bonnie gathered the flock, took them through three tricky gates, sorted off four, drove them through the panels clockwise and then counterclockwise, penned them, sorted off four easy ones for my friend who carpools with me who has a just-out-of-the-round-pen dog, and then went off to work lighter sheep in the corral. This was where I could see Bonnie shorting out on the go bye.

We worked on that one cue over and over until I was having more successes than failures, which I decided to call progress. At least I was seeing what I was doing. Then we put them away, and fetched the whole rest of the flock back across the meadow from the sorting pens to their home corral. At all times during this "chore work" Bonnie was completely calm, walked her sheep everywhere, was obedient and careful. I felt she was working exactly right. We went home tired, happy, very, very dirty, and looking forward to Monday.