There is nothing more exciting than your birds coming home to roost, especially if you’ve been waiting for years for them to roost up the nose of a tree face bird house.

My husband had been wanting tree faces, and he’d been wanting bird houses. The internet in all its wondrous glory led me to bird houses with faces on the front, so you can guess what my husband got for Christmas that year.

Offering the appearance of a carved wood tree face, I fell in love with the tree face bird houses I found. Some were actually made of carved wood while others were made of resin that simulated carved wood.

For me the ultimate tree face bird house was a bearded face with a big smile known as Old Man Face from the Birdie in the Woods series by Red Carpet Studios. The Old Man Face bird house had prominent nose holes for the birds to fly in and out of. The thought of watching a bird of paradise fly up his nose was something I just had to watch.

Anyone who was old enough in the sixties to listen to the radio will remember country singer Little Jimmy Dickens big hit, “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.” Even if you were not a country music fan, the song was memorable for its energy and lyrics, which tickled everybody in the sixties for various reasons.

Kids loved it, being in love with anything that involved sticking something up your nose. Hippies loved it for the suggestion of partaking of various snorted substances. Country music fans loved it simply because it was an energetic country song. And everyone else loved it for its finger-snapping beat and humorous lyrics.

The song was an all-around winner and it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the Old Man Face bird house. I hadn’t heard the song in decades but the bird house brought it back as if it were yesterday.

The other tree face bird house was also from the Birdie in the Woods series and was known as Zeus Face. He beckoned the birds with an open mouth to fly into. While the Zeus Face bird house lacked the humor of the Old Man Face, it was still a desirable tree face addition for our woods.

Both bird houses had clean out holes in the back, which is a must to keep your bird houses clean and disease free when the birds move out. Think of yourself as maid service for a birdie apartment complex, with the job of cleaning out the old nests when the apartment goes empty.

We hung both bird houses in the spring of 2010 and watched with avid interest for the birds to take up residence therein. Nothing happened. The birds shunned the bird houses and instead crafted old-fashioned bird nests up in the trees. We had a lot of trees so in reality, the birds didn’t really need bird houses.

All through 2010 and 2011 we watched for birds to take an interest in our tree face bird houses, and finally in the spring of 2012 we were rewarded. A small bird took an interest in flying up the nose of the Old Man Face bird house. I watched with child-like fascination as the tiny bird flew up the nose of the old man, hearing the Bird of Paradise song in my head as I watched, and I smiled with happiness. Those of us who remember the sixties tend to smile at the oddest things.

As for why it took so long for the birds to adopt our bird house, I concluded that maybe the bird houses had to “lose” their manufactured, human smell and take on the smells of nature.

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I’ve talked to quite a few dog owners as a result of writing Bad Dog to Best Friend. Once you write a book about training a problem dog, you find yourself meeting people with problem dogs everywhere you go.

One of those dog owners had been through several dogs and when her dogs hit that rebellious teenager stage, she’d ship them off to somebody else and go adopt a puppy. She never quite got the hang of training a dog so adopting a new puppy didn’t solve the problem, it just started the cycle all over again. From her perspective, she just hadn’t found “the right dog” yet.

What she didn’t realize is that there is no such thing as “the right dog.” Puppies come to us as blank slates and it is our job as the dog trainer to fill that blank slate with positive dog training. While there are certain factors based on the dog’s breed that will steer the dog in one direction or another, you are still in control of where your dog ultimately ends up on the training scale.

And if you think you are not a dog trainer, think again. The minute you adopt a dog you become his trainer regardless of how you see yourself. Not training a dog is just as powerful as training him, because he will be learning from you. Failure to take the lead results in a dog who hits that teenage rebellion stage, putting you at your wit’s end and sending your dog to the dog pound.

I tried to gently explain to my friend that learning the skills of how to train your dog carries with you for life. While that first bad dog may be a learning experience as our dog Dakota was, once you learn the proper skills of training a puppy, from that day forward all of your dogs will be good dogs. The dog training techniques will be with you for every dog you adopt thereafter.

Not only that, the dog training skills that you learn will rub off on your friends and family. If you have kids, you can teach them the skills so that their lives can be full of happy, well-behaved, well-adjusted dogs. Your friends will see your well-trained dogs and they’ll watch you for tips to take home to their own dogs.

So while taking on the challenge of training a problem dog seems overwhelming, it’s only overwhelming for the training of that one dog. You almost learn more yourself when you have to take on a big challenge, such as training a dog that you’ve allowed to travel down the bad dog trail.

It’s totally worth the effort to learn the skills of dog training so that all of your dogs can be happy housemates and make no mistake — owning a dog makes you a dog trainer whether you like it or not, so why not learn how to train your dog successfully?

If you’d like to read the story of the problem dog that challenged us, Bad Dog to Best Friend shares her dirty deeds, head-strong nature, humorous anecdotes, and some of our tips in retraining her.

If you know someone with a dog who never quite got the hang of potty training, or who thinks the house is a giant chew toy, give them this book. Dakota was a semi-adult shelter dog who was the Queen of Bad Behavior and the Master of Dirty Tricks. Bad Dog to Best Friend takes you from Dakota’s awful beginnings to her amazing transformation, and includes detailed how-to’s for potty training an adult dog and stopping your dog from chewing your house to pieces.

Bad Dog to Best Friend: The Book The Transformation of Dakota Available in Paperback & Kindle

I’ve been on a diet for six months now (26 weeks if you want to get technical) and have lost 24 pounds. Now the thing about losing weight is that you expect all sorts of positive benefits from it. For example, being able to reach your feet easily to trim your toenails without contorting sideways like a circus pretzel.

At the onset of your diet, you dream of wearing shorts again without being embarrassed. At five feet tall it doesn’t take a lot of extra weight to be an embarrassment in summer clothes, and god help you if you wear shorts and want to sit down without anybody seeing your thighs spread out. If you can’t hide under a tablecloth, you nonchalantly lean against the nearest wall or tree to avoid such an embarrassing position.

Then there’s your feet. While you expect your belly to bulge and your thighs to spread out like a water balloon about to pop, you don’t expect your feet to outgrow your shoes. Yes, even the shoes don’t fit anymore when the pounds start piling on. I’ve got a closet full of skinny shoes, boxes full of skinny shorts and skinny pants, and a rack full of skinny dresses.

I pulled a t-shirt out of the drawer yesterday thinking to wear it, and my face scrunched up like old scrooge when I saw how small it was. Surely I had never been able to wear something so tiny? It looked like a kid’s shirt. I took it down to my husband and held it up and asked in wonder, “Did I really used to be this little?”

No husband should ever be in a position to answer questions about his wife’s weight. He can’t win no matter what he says. Bless his heart, he came up with the perfect reply: “Sweetie, it must have shrank in the dryer…” He truly is a gentleman!

My husband has taken a keen interest in my diet especially as I’ve been so successful with it. When you’re short, 24 pounds coming off makes a very big difference in how you look, and it makes a HUGE difference in how your clothes fit. My pants, at the moment, are falling off. I’ve been holding them up with a tied sash or safety pin, lacking any decent belts. Even then they want to inch down and he’s taken a great delight in giving them a tug when I walk by.

I had gotten tired of having no clothes to wear and had just bought two new pairs of pants before starting the diet, so I’ll have two brand new pairs of fat pants when it’s all done with. Then I can take a photo of me in the fat pants like they do on the TV commercials and post it on the internet. I don’t want to buy skinny pants yet because I expect to lose more inches before I settle into my happy weight, which will hopefully be the weight I was when I met my husband. Yes, I know you’re laughing at me but that’s the goal.

Everybody knows the benefits of losing weight such as fitting into your skinny clothes again and lower blood pressure. My systolic blood pressure (the top number) came down about 15 while my diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) came down by 15 as well. This moved me from the prehypertension stage into the normal blood pressure range just from losing 24 pounds.

There’s a downside, however. What nobody tells you is that there is a downside to losing weight. My butt hurts when I sit down and so do my upper thighs. The pain feels like bone pain. It goes far beyond what you’d expect from sitting on a hard chair and it happens even when I’m sitting on a soft, cushy sofa.

My first instinct was to panic, thinking that I’d contracted some sort of bone cancer, brought on by losing weight or spurred into overdrive from the loss of calories or vitamins. I’d never experienced a pain like this before and it did not feel normal, even though pain for me is normal as I have arthritis and other painful maladies that whack you as you get older.

Thank god for the internet, though. I plugged in “my butt hurts” or some similar key phrase into Google and was amazed at the number of similar stories that popped up from people who were dieting. I was not alone and my butt pain was normal. No big scary bone disease, the most likely culprit was the fact that I’d lost 24 pounds. (Warning: If you go looking for the butt hurts stories on Google, you better input “butt hurts after losing weight” because if you just put in “my butt hurts” the results will be rather graphic and not related to weight loss.)

So here we’ve got a downside of losing weight, you lose your padding and suddenly your leg bone and your butt bone pushes right up against the chair with no padding in between, and consequently your butt hurts. The suggested fix is to do exercises that build up your thigh muscles and tighten your butt muscles. Note that there are other more serious issues that can cause bone pain so you might want to go to a doctor and rule them out before assuming it’s the weight loss.

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