She's Always Ready to Play Jenga.

Image by Susan Foster.

I sometimes participate in a monthly six-word photo story challenge on Medium. When I saw that "play" was the prompt for July, the idea for this photo and the following two-sentence "story" came to mind.

The tower falls. We try again.

~~*~~

These six words do tell a story, but they leave out the details of why and how this came about. 

During a long, cold winter when temperatures were well below zero, I tried to think of ways to keep our dog entertained. So I taught her some tricks. 

One of which was how to play Jenga.

She caught on much more quickly than I anticipated. Almost right away, she got the concept of taking just one block from the tower.

Image by Susan Foster.

She doesn't like to take turns, but the "wait" command helps out with that.

Image by Susan Foster.

Most difficult of all was getting the main objective of the game across to her ... that the blocks must be removed gently from the stack so that none of the other blocks fall. Sometimes she does this. But often her enthusiastic approach causes the block tower to fall. 

Image by Susan Foster

We're still working on that. We stack them up and try again.

When we finish playing, she helps me put the blocks back in the bag. This cleanup effort requires lots of prompts, but I've seen toddlers be less cooperative.

Image by Susan Foster.

I was not the first person to teach a dog to play Jenga. I got the idea from this video on Instagram that features a dog named Secret, probably the best canine Jenga player, ever. Secret and Mary, her human, set the bar for the rest of us pretty high! I doubt that we will ever get that good, but it's fun to try.

~~*~~

In addition to the original small blocks, there's even a giant version of the game of Jenga, with jumbo blocks that stack to over five feet high, I wonder what our dog would think of that!

~~*~~

One word of warning: Jenga blocks used with canine players may become riddled with tooth marks. It's pretty tempting for a dog to occasionally chomp right down on them!

This blog post contains affiliate links for products I believe in. This does not affect the price of items purchased, but I may receive some compensation. 

Have you ever seen a dog play Jenga? 

Why Are Social Media and Technology So Challenging?

Do you ever struggle like I do?

Yesterday's mistake.

If you subscribe to the emails from this blog, you probably wondered why the subject line of the email I sent out yesterday (March 24) said "Happy St Patrick's Day." In fact, I bet you thought it was old news and never even opened it.

Ugh. 

I know I'm out of practice, but social media and technology seem more difficult now than they ever did to me. I make mistakes while using my phone, sending emails, and posting content on social media.

I make mistakes when I send texts

Have you ever composed a text and then sent it to the wrong person? I've done this, more times than I'd like to admit. Autocorrect has assisted me in many not-so-helpful ways.

I make mistakes on social media

I've made a bunch of mistakes while trying to acknowledge or comment on other people's posts. Spelling errors, double comments, neglecting to acknowledge the posts of my dear friends  ... you name it, I have done it.

Just yesterday, I somehow managed to add the same post to Instagram not once, but THREE times. How on earth did I do that? The first two times the content just didn't seem to load, so I kept trying. And then, later, all three appeared. Before I noticed this, people had liked and added comments on all three posts. Now, I have no idea what to do. Delete two of them, or leave my mistakes for all to see?

I make mistakes when I send blast emails (See yesterday's for proof!)

I work hard to craft an interesting weekly newsletter for my blog subscribers. I came up with the idea to change the subject title line every week, to make these emails look more interesting when they appear in the subscriber's inbox.

On March 17th, my email had the subject title, "Happy St. Patrick's Day." I thought I'd changed that wording to "Happy Wednesday" before my email went out on March 24, but for some reason that edit didn't stick. The subject line of the email remained, "Happy St. Patrick's Day." 

Of course, I didn't notice until the email was already sent. How many of my followers do you think, would have clicked an email when it referred to a holiday that occurred the week before?

Do you make mistakes like this, too?

How to stop making these mistakes