Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Waaaay Too Much Information

What would the holidays be without family...relaxing?...enjoyable?...stress free?  Oh, did I say that out loud?  I meant boring, sad and stressful

I love my family.  Really.  But based on last week and Christmas of last year, I am thinking of joining the witness relocation program.  I hear Antarctica is lovely this time of year.

You see, the problem is that my parents have thankfully enjoyed good health, my father in particular.  He prides himself on the fact that he has not needed a doctor since he was in the navy, so last Christmas, when tragedy struck, it was, well, tragic.

The day after Christmas, my dad was literally blown off his feet by an unexpected gust of wind and thrown to the ground.  Fortunately, he just ended up with a boo boo on his bottom and a pulled muscle, according to the ER doctor.  And our doctor five days later.  And the x-rays.  And Web MD.  And Marcus Welby.  And the entire cast of Gray'sAnatomy,  and The Practice.

But no matter what everyone told him, he was convinced  he might never walk again...and have to live with us instead of flying back to Florida with my mom.

For an entire week, we had to hear, in great and excruciating detail, about his boo boo.  We were treated to vivid descriptions of the size, location and severity of the bruise.  We lived through his brave attempts to walk five feet without the walker, cane, forklift, or tow-line.  We grinned and bore hearing about the indignity of sitting on a glorified whoopee cushion for meals.

We tried to distract him with the Food Network, Angry Birds and his granddaughter, but nothing captured his attention or imagination the way his boo boo did.  He just knew the doctors were all wrong and he had broken something.  He was sure that he had at least torn a ligament or severed a tendon.  It was the beginning of the end.  He would end up bedridden for the rest of his days, eating gruel and making macrame potholders.

So, to ease the pain (ours), we gave him drugs.  The doctor had prescribed pain pills and muscle relaxants, but the man who was never sick or injured a day in his life didn't want to take them.  We told him it was him or us, but those drugs were going to put someone out of their pain. 

This, of course, opened up a whole new set of issues.

While I am totally consumed with my dog's poops--size, frequency, form and texture--I really, really, really do not need to even know about my father's.

"Do you know that it says here this medication can cause constipation?" he demanded, waving the sheaf of papers at me that now come with every prescription.

"It also says it can cause you to cluck like a chicken or spontaneously break into the dance of the sugar plum fairy, but hey, let's look on the bright side, and maybe it will just make you feel better and your biggest worry will be finding a six-fingered glove for the new thumb that will sprout."

Every day, we got a potty update, along  with dire predictions of being unable to board the plane for home when the holiday ended.

"I'm fine flying back alone," my mother chirped, seeing a light at the end of her tunnel.

I believe our response was something along the lines of, "Look, we love dad to death, but he is getting on that plane if we have to buy an extra ticket and strap him to our back like a piece of carry-on luggage."

Fortunately for everyone involved, he got on the plane.

Last week, it was my mother's turn.  She had a doctor's appointment here, so she flew in the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

Monday morning, I drove her to the doctor, and waited for her.  After about a half hour, she came out, looked surreptitiously around the empty waiting room, and said, "I'll tell you what the doctor said later."

Thinking she meant in the privacy or the car or back at the house, I nodded in agreement.  No such luck.

As we entered the elevator, the crowded elevator, she launched into a blow-by-blow account of her visit...which would have been fine had we been at the eye doctor, but we had unfortunately been to a doctor for women's issues.

I am still waking up at night in a cold sweat.

At first, I tried to pretend I was just some poor, random stranger this woman had targeted to share intimate details with.  "Uh huh," I murmured half-heartedly as she used the V word for, like, the forty-seventh time in three minutes.  I wondered what the penalty was for pulling the fire alarm.  I even briefly contemplated actually setting myself on fire.  My mother, oblivious to the lack of response, chattered on.

"So you thought the doctor was nice?" I desperately tried to nudge the subject onto a path strewn with less personal information when I could no longer pretend I didn't know her.

"Oh, yes.  She said..."  And she was off and running again with things that had people bailing out of that elevator like it was a 70's disaster movie, and the director had just called "Action!".

And the best part of it was, it never ended.  Not in the lobby, not in the elevator down to the garage, not in the car, not at Toys R Us where we did some Christmas shopping.  I kept hearing about parts of my mother that I don't even want to know exist.  And there was no escape.

By the time she flew back to Florida, I was waxing nostalgic over my father's boo boo and ensuing poop issues.

Can't wait for Christmas this year.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Who's Training Who?

I have decided that I am not cut out to be a dog trainer.  And the dog knows it.

The problem is, I grew up with cats.  You call a cat and they walk away.  You tell them to sit, and they walk away.  You offer food, and they walk away.  To be fair, there are some exceptions to those rules, such as: 1. the cat doesn't feel like walking away.  In that case,they will curl up with their back to you and yawn. 2.  They have a use for you.  They may need an itch scratched or a warm, comfy place to sit, and 3. you offer something really good to eat like shrimp, fresh Maine lobster or ahi tuna, lightly seared.  They actually may deign to sample it, if the presentation is up to their standards.

I loved my cats, but I accepted early on that I merely existed to serve their every whim and never tried to train them.  Period.

But a dog?  They are supposed to be trained.  They want to be trained.  They beg to be trained.  And it's a piece of cake, right?  Yeah.

Based on these totally erroneous assumptions fostered by doggie propaganda films like Benji, Lassie, and Rin Tin Tin, I decided to give it a shot. 

The first thing I did was buy every book I saw.  I got Dog Training for Idiots, Dog Training for Dummies, Dog Training for People Who Are Too Stupid to be Idiots or Dummies.  I watched all those training shows on the dog TV channel:  AKC Training, How to Train Your Puppy, How to Train Your Dragon, The Dog Whisperer, The Horse Whisperer, and The Ghost Whisperer.  Anything that I thought might help.  And what a colossal waste of time and money that was.

You see, the problem was, all those things are for training perfect dogs who live in fantasy land.

Make the dog walk on your left, at your heel.  Don't let them pull ahead, they tell you.  Uh huh.  That is supposing your dog will walk AT ALL!

Unlike every dog these people worked with, our dog would go approximately five feet, then throw  herself down on the street as though she had just trekked across the Sahara, pulling a covered wagon loaded with bricks.

Firmly tugging on the leash and using a firm, commanding voice elicited a look of utter contempt from the dog and sympathy from passerby who were surreptitiously googling "animal abuse hotline" on their smart phones.

Training her to use her crate as a "safe place" went equally well.  Throw in some treats, they all said.  Get her comfortable with the door open, then close it and she'll be in "home sweet home" and happy as a clam.  Snort (I don't know how to write this sound, but it is the only one I can think of to adequately describe my reaction to this faulty bit of reasoning).

I threw in her favorite treats.  Chloe, who will eat leaves, the carpet pad and rabbit poo as though they were the latest offerings of a five-star master chef, looked at me like: I hope you don't think I'm going in after that because I know it is a trap.  Not only am I cuter than you, I am also waay smarter.

Alternatively, she would approach the crate as though it held a rabid rattler, brace her back feet against the open door and stretch her neck as though she was that slinky dog to grab the treat and then run like crazy with her prize as far as she could go.

As far as using treats to train her to follow simple commands?  Yeah.  That went great...as long as we were in the privacy of our own home where no one could observe her caving in and actually doing something I said.  Oh, and as long as I had a fist full of treats.

First we worked on sit.  Sit.  Treat.  Sit.  Treat.  By day two, she would see the treat bag and automatically sit before I could say anything.  I guess I was too slow with the treats, so she figured she'd just cut to the chase.

By week five, she knew sit, down, stay, heel, off, out and leave it.  If she even suspected I might possibly have a treat, she would run through the list like an olympic athlete sprinting for the finish line.  She would flip, flop, hop, skip, jump and then throw herself down before I could even clear my throat.  She seemed to think that since she had done it all, I should just dump the whole pile of treats all at once and stop wasting both our time.

Take her outside and give her the same commands? Not only did I have to show her the treat, I had to offer it up for approval before she would consider entertaining my request.  Sit?  For a carrot?  Whaddya have rocks in your head mom?  I will sit, but I want a hot dog or at least some chicken.  I also don't feel like staying, unless you want me to walk, in which case, I will be happy to jump up and down in a complete frenzy before throwing myself in the middle of the road and then rolling over on my back and going limp when you try to pick me up.

And so we got a trainer.

Sit, said the trainer, and she sat.

Heel, said the trainer, and she heeled.

Walk, said the trainer, and she walked.

Then we went home.

Sit, I said.  She rolled her eyes.

Heel, I said.  She sat.

Walk, I said. 

Look, she said, you are not the trainer, so get it out of your head that I'm going to listen to you.  Unless you have something really, really tasty for me.  Now, where did you put those hot dogs?



Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Happy Birthday (Or How I Got Out of Cooking Breakfast Ever Again)

Long ago and not so far away, I decided to surprise Tim for his birthday by bringing him breakfast in bed...and I have been banned from making breakfast ever since. (hehehe)

It was his first birthday after we had gotten married, and I wanted it to be special, so I racked my brain for ideas. A rose petal strewn coverlet? Chilled champagne and strawberries? A candlelit dinner with softly playing violins in the background? A little something secret from Victoria's? Scrambled eggs in a toast cup? Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner!

I mean, really, what says I love you more than "the incredible, edible egg" floating in a toasted cup made of Wonder Bread? It just screams romance and celebration.

So I got up early, snuck out into the kitchen and transformed into a cross between Martha Stewart and the Barefoot Contessa. I mixed and cut and buttered and stirred, until I had produced a feast fit for a king, served up in such a way that the Iron Chefs would have been gnashing their teeth out of jealousy.

Setting my creation on the tray complete with artfully folded napkin ( I had mastered the difficult triangle shape in preparation for the big day), I breezed into the bedroom and set the meal before my victim, er, love of my life with a flourish.

"Um, what is this?" I remember Tim peering down at the tray, poking the food gingerly with his fork as though it might poke back.

"Breakfast," I informed him, pleased with my creative use of breakfast food and a muffin tin. Had the Food Network been around then, I felt sure they would have come knocking at my door. Maybe not.

"I know it's supposed to be breakfast," Tim jabbed at it again, a little harder this time, and watched closely for any signs of aggression. "But what is it actually made from? Anything I might recognize?"

"It's a scrambled egg in a nest.". This was not going quite as I had envisioned it.

In my scenario, Tim was supposed to be scarfing down the sumptuous repast I had lovingly slaved over while gazing at me adoringly. Instead, he was shrinking back away from the plate as though it contained some sort of mutant creature that might suddenly lunge for his throat at any moment, while eyeing me suspiciously as though he suspected I may have taken out a really large life insurance policy on him.

"No, really. What did you do to the, um, okay, we'll call it an egg?" Tim apparently decided I had sufficiently wounded it to the point where he could safely gather some of it up on his fork. Although he did hold it at arms length just to be on the safe side. "Is it cooked?"

"No. I served you a raw egg." Birthday or not, there was only so much I could take. Hmm, maybe Vickey's would have been a safer choice. I mean, would he actually have said, "Black? Lace? Really? What were you thinking?"

"Well, it just looks a little...undercooked. And what is this cup made of?". He banged the side of my cute little toast cup with the knife like he was kicking the tire of a used car he suspected might break down after he drove it five feet.

Note to self: next year, go with the rose petals, because apparently he would find them more appetizing than my current offering. At least he wouldn't be looking at them as though they might do him some bodily harm.

"For your information, the eggs are cooked perfectly. They are not supposed to resemble a rubber product from the Acme gag gift catalogue, which is how you apparently like them. And I'll thank you to stop chipping away at the toast as though you were trying to tunnel your way out of Sing-Sing."

"Okay. Okay. I was just saying..." Tim took a deep breath and gamely shoveled a forkful into his mouth...and then gagged. "Nope. Can't do it, " he gasped, reaching for the juice and downing it as though it was the last vial of anti-venom on the planet.

"Fine." I grabbed the tray. "That's the last time I'm making you breakfast."

"Can I have that in writing?" he called after me as he scrambled out of bed and rushed into the bathroom for his toothbrush, paste, Listerine, Scope and Clorox. "Seriously. I'm not saying that just to be nice."

And so, this morning, for his birthday, I gave him the gift he wanted more than anything...no breakfast.

And we all lived happily ever after.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Missing!

I always tell Tim that if I die first, he will have to sell the house 'as is' because he knows where NOTHING is.

"Do we have band-aids? a heating pad? extra guest towels?  tape? scissors?  toilet paper?  the check book?  my cell phone?  milk?"

Seriously, if it can't jump up and down, waving a flag and screaming "Here I am! Here I am!" while a big neon arrow hangs above it, he can't find it.

I have seen the man literally stand in front of an open fridge telling me we don't have any butter when there are four pounds of it staring back at him.

"Oh.  Well.  How was I supposed to see it behind the yogurt?"

 Yeah.  I can see where that would be a problem what with the clear glass shelves, and also because the butter has only been kept there since, hmm. let me think, FOREVER!

At least when can't find something, there is a very good reason for it...it's because I have put it someplace  so safe that no one, including me, would think to look for it there.

Most recent case in point:  a phone number on a post-it.

I was given the number late on a Friday afternoon about two weeks ago and I stuffed it into my purse among the eighty-six thousand old dry cleaning tickets, thirty-nine dozen empty Halloween candy wrappers, one hundred pens (only two of which actually work), fifty stubs of old eye/lip pencils, assorted flip-flops (for pedicures), twenty-six pounds of change all in pennies and nickels, and twelve million dollars worth of twenty percent off coupons for Bed Bath and Beyond from 2006 that I habitually carry.

At some point on Saturday, I got the oh so brilliant idea to put the post-it someplace safe, so that I could actually find it to call first thing Monday morning.  And that is the last time I saw that post-it.

I spent days looking for the crummy little thing.  I looked in all the usual places like the office, my bedside table, jewelry box, and bathroom counter.  I looked in less likely places, hoping to shift the blame for losing it, like Tim's bedside table, Tim's dresser, Tim's "basket o' crap" (which is the male equivalent to my purse) in the TV room.  No post-it.  It had vanished into thin air.

I played a few rounds of the "If I were a post-it,where would I be?" game and the "If I were going to put something in a really safe place, where would it be?" game, but I was so bad at both of them I didn't even get the consolation prize of a years supply of Rice-a- Roni, let alone my post-it.

Finally, after opening the same drawers/cupboards/doors for the thousandth time in the mad, hope that the stupid post-it would have magically appeared, I had to give up, call the person who gave me the number, admit that I was losing my mind and/or stupid, and ask for the number again.  Ugh.

And the thing is, I just know, based on past experience that that lousy post-it will show up when and where I least expect it.  One day, I will open the freezer, or decide to organize the garage and there it will be, mocking me, like the cup of coffee I lost awhile back.

One minute, I had the cup in my hands, the next, I had no idea where I left it.  We were getting ready to go out, so I couldn't mount a full scale search and rescue mission, but I did try to retrace my steps and even made slurping noises, calling, "Here coffee, coffee," but to no avail.  My coffee was nowhere to be found.

About a week later, Tim opened the hall closet to get something out and emerged with a coffee cup and a funny look on his face. 

"Remember that coffee you lost?" he asked, holding it at arms length as though it were a poisonous snake or ticking time bomb.  "I think I just found it...or what used to be it.  Now, it's more like a science experiment gone bad."

Eww.  Well, that's one way to kick the coffee habit.

But my all-time best (worst?) was years and years ago (which I unfortunately couldn't blame on age, like I do now), and involved a ring.

This was the first really "nice" piece of jewelry Tim had given me, and I was sooo careful with it.  Right up to the moment I lost it.

I had packed it in our bags to go to Pennsylvania for Easter, and when we got there, the ring was gone.

I blamed the airline employees, sure that it had been stolen, but  Tim pointed out that since we had driven ourselves, that was unlikely.

All through Easter, I checked and rechecked our bags.  I fretted, fumed and worried, anxious to get home.  Finally, the holiday came to an end, we drove home, and I barely waited for Tim to slow down before I was out of the car, making a beeline for our apartment.

No ring.  I looked high and low and everywhere in between.  No ring.  I ripped apart every drawer in the place.  I searched old suitcases, purses and toiletry kits.  No ring.

"Pray to Saint Anthony," my mother advised, nodding sagely.  "It always works for me.

I prayed.  No ring.  I prayed harder, but he must have been helping my mother find all the things she lost (a full-time job even for a saint), because I still couldn't find that darn ring.

"Put it out of your mind,"  Tim told me.  "If you don't think about it, you'll remember what you did with it."

Good plan, general.  Except for one tiny little flaw.  Not thinking was clearly how I got into this mess in the first place!!!  Got a plan B you'd like to share?

Days turned to weeks, weeks to months and then one day, I took down a box from the tippy-top closet shelf where I kept mementos, opened it to put something in and...there was the ring!

To this day, I still have no idea how it came to be in that box.  I suspect elves.  Or maybe fairies.  Hmmm. Possibly a poltergeist.  Because I know I couldn't possibly have put it there.  I would have put it someplace "safe".

Friday, November 4, 2011

Gremlins

Years ago, I had a car that had gremlins running around inside it.  We'd be driving along, listening to the radio, when all of a sudden, the station would change, usually to something that made you want to drive over the edge of a cliff, like talk radio where the topic was "Foot Fungus:  Friend or Foe" or the Lawrence Welk channel with special guest Hans the goat boy and his magic accordion.

No matter what buttons or pushed, or how hard you pushed them, the station would not change until those gremlins were good and ready to change it.  Oh, and bonus!  You couldn't turn the radio off either, so there was pretty much nothing you could do but slap both hands over your ears, drive with your elbows and knees and chant, "lalalalala, I can't hear you," until the station was switched back to something resembling modern music.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the doors would randomly lock and unlock.  Running errands?  Lock.  Lost in a dicey section of town?  Unlock.  Driving down the highway?  Lock, unlock, lock, unlock.  Getting gas?  Lock.  On Tim.  While he was pumping gas.  With the keys inside.

And that was the end of that car.

Now, we apparently have some of those same gremlins running around our house.

Last week, I was watching TV as the dog snoozed behind the couch when, all of a sudden, one of the smoke detectors upstairs gave one long, loud beeeep, and one of the lights above the stairwell started flashing on and off, on and off.

Jumping up, I ran over to the stairs, only to find...nothing.  No smoke, no fire.  No reason why the lights should be flickering like in one of those horror movies where you're shouting, "Run, dummy, run!" to the ditsy girl who simply has to check it out when she knows full well that there is a revenge-seeking, mask-wearing, axe murderer on the loose and so far, nine out of her ten friends have been gruesomely killed in that same stairwell.

I turned the light off, then back on.  Still flickering, but the other light on the switch was completely dead.  I quickly checked the date.  Nope.  Not Friday the 13th.  Whew.  I pressed the switch again.  Same result.  I double checked our address.  Okay, we did not live on Elm street.  I went to the alarm panel.  No alarm had registered.  Hmmm.  Curiouser and curiouser.

Suddenly, the dog went on high alert.  Oh no, was it Freddy, Mike Meyers, Chucky or Dracula???  Nope.  It was only Tim, no axe in sight, coming home from a dinner, and Chloe happily tripped over to welcome him.

I related the bizarre incident to Tim, and he also pushed the button (both lights were now dead), checked the alarm, looked under the bed, in the closet, behind the door, and shrugged, concluding that maybe we'd had a power surge or something.  Meanwhile, I slept with one eye open that night, just in case.

Two days later, the gremlins struck again.

We had a friend over with her dog, and the three of us were laughing as we sat in the basement watching the dogs tumble around the floor.  Suddenly, the alarm went off again.  This time, it really went off, beeeeeeeppp!!!  Tim ran upstairs to disarm it while I assured our friend that it was just our friendly little gremlin and it was not really a fire...probably.  Maybe.  Hopefully.

A few minutes later, the front doorbell rang.  Assuming Tim would get it, I didn't bother to go upstairs, and kept chatting.  About five or so minutes later, Tim appeared downstairs again. 

"You really should answer the doorbell when it rings," he warned me.

"Didn't you get it?" I asked, raising a brow, because surely, he hadn't expected me to run up the stairs when he was, what, twenty feet from the door?  Who was he, Archie Bunker?

"I was at the store," he informed me.  "I went to get batteries for the smoke detector, since I thought changing the batteries might solve the problem."

Confused, I followed him up the stairs.  "Then how do you know the bell rang?  Was it you?  Did you forget your key?  Why wouldn't you call?  And anyway, you're in, so what's the big deal?"  The final words died on my lips as I saw the armed police officers standing in the kitchen.

Crap.  Had the house actually been on fire or broken into?  Did they have Chucky cuffed in the back of the cruiser?  Was Freddy's blood splattered all over my living room walls?  What had I missed???

And shouldn't the dog have heard something and  barked?  Lassie had always barked to warn Timmy just before the dope fell into the well...again.  Couldn't Chloe have at least growled, sneezed or even burped to let me know my life was about to be snuffed out?

I glanced down at the adorable muppet at my feet who was doing her doggie best to smother the officers with kisses and hugs.

"Way to go Chloe," I congratulated her.  "Next time, maybe you can lead the axe-wielding psychopath to the silver before he kills us."

The police assured me though that we actually had not been in danger.  Apparently, the alarm had  come from the "panic" button on one of the key fobs, so they had raced over, assuming the worst.

Tim had arrived back home to find lights flashing and guns drawn, and assumed the worst.

Meanwhile, our gremlin was having the last laugh, since, at the time the alarm went off, we were all downstairs and our keys were on the hall table, upstairs.  Hmmm. I wonder if we can trade in our house like we did the car?

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

You Want Me To Do What ?

Graceful, I am not.  Not even close.  In fact, anything that requires more than a minimal amount of coordination is totally beyond my abilities, like, say, walking and chewing gum, or talking and working out.

After watching me try (and fail) for the umpteenth time to complete an exercise as she had demonstrated it, my trainer asked me if I would ever consider being on Dancing With The Stars . (If I were a celebrity, a quasi-celebrity, or someone who had more than five hits on You Tube.)

I started to answer, then realized what she had really meant was:  Would you do it, knowing that you would be voted off before the first episode even aired?

For three years, Jess has come twice a week to torture, er, I mean train me, and I still can't follow basic moves.

"Okay, you're going to take a weight in each hand, stand like this and move your arms like this," she will demonstrate, raising her arms up from the side above her head, rotating her wrists and bringing her arms down in front of her, as I mimic her in the mirror sans weights.

"Got it," I always claim, taking the weights from her, both of us knowing full well that it will take at least fifty or sixty reps before I can do anything even close to what she did.

"Okay," she'll stop me, "you're inventing a new exercise again that is working out your toenails, and we were going after shoulders and arms.  Watch."  And she will repeat the exercise.

"Wasn't I doing that?"  I'll ask, and sadly I am not faking it in order to get out of doing all fifty thousand reps she has decided is necessary to suck the joy out of my life.

"No, you were doing this," and she'll flail her arms around in a move that is a cross between the chicken dance and that bird pose the Karate Kid did.

"Oh.  There's a difference?"

Heaven forbid, she tries to give me a multi-step routine.

"First," she'll say, "you're going to do forward lunges, holding weights, then backward lunges, then jump squats with a push-up in between, and finally side lunges with a squat."

"Huh?  Wait. What came after you said first?"

And if something interesting comes on the TV or I decide to try and talk at the same time I'm doing a crunch while holding a medicine ball (well, okay, I am always talking)?  Pffft.  I might as well be trying to calculate the amount of thrust needed to lift Shamu into outer space using a hand-held fan and a go-cart engine.  I mean, c'mon.  I'm supposed to remember whether or not to raise bent knees or keep them straight as I simultaneously hoist the equivalent of a small child over my head and sit up while keeping up to date on Lindsay Lohan?  Never gonna happen.

None of this is new to Jess.  She knows that I will forget to bend my back knee in a lunge, lose count of the reps by the time I hit five and confuse a squat thrust with a push-up jump-out thingy.  After all, we've only done them five million times.

The dog trainer is learning all of this the hard way.  Come to think of it, so is the dog.  She had gotten pretty agile from dodging my two left feet.

"Get her in front of you, then step back with your left foot while bringing your left arm back, then forward, so Chloe follows the treat and 'heels'," the trainer showed me the routine...sixteen times.

"That was a good try," she encouraged me, while at the same time keeping the poor dog from being garroted by the leash.

"Watch again," and she performed the maneuver flawlessly.

Little did she realize that she could do it four thousand more times and I would still believe that I was matching her moves exactly instead of looking like I was reeling in a 200 pound fish who wasn't going down without a fight.

"You're actually pulling her around," she gently took the lead away from me after several more failed attempts, when the dog gave her a look that said,"Help me!"  "Maybe you should practice without the lead."

Maybe she should realize that moving my leg and arm at the same time while guiding the dog and offering a treat was beyond my capabilities.

"Let's go out in the other room, I'll bring in my dog and you can 1. let Chloe greet her, 2. call Chloe away, 3. back up towards the door, 4. get her in front of you and 5. make her heel."

Sure.  No problem.  And then I'll perform Swan Lake.  Did you miss the part where I got tangled in the lead taking one step back?

"Oh, and remember to use your voice to indicate good from bad actions on her part."

Really?  You're going to add yet another thing?  Even the dog looked at her skeptically.

Eventually, she, like Jess, ended up rolling her eyes and accepting the fact that not only am I in no danger of ever winning America's Got Talent  I am in no danger of being able to walk down the street without  tripping over my own feet. 

Now all I have to do is wait for them to stop trying to change that, and let me go back to being clumsy and lazy.