In actual fact I would never dream of asking my sister in law to spend her holiday weeding. My brother and his teenage sons incessant use of his X-Box drove her to it! Like me Lisa finds the mind numbing effects of computer games less than entertaining. The stupid thing drove me nuts too but I would have spent time weeding in preparation for grass planting whether an X-Box was involved or not. It was very fortuitous though as we ended up weeding a space that was more than twice the size of what I had already managed to do prior to their arrival. She was like a human weeding machine!
With the addition of reticulation courtesy of Colin and his magic box of plastic bits my agility area is starting to become a reality. Grass runner planting has commenced and every day after work I’m adding a bit more. We have an area at the back of our garden that is full of overgrown grass runners so I’m just pulling them up and transplanting. It takes time but it will save heaps of money. I did the same thing for the dog pen and that now has the most magnificent area of grass you could ever hope to see. It helps that we don’t have dogs in there yet, but every time I look at it I still feel proud that I contributed to its creation.
Since I last blogged Sonic and I have done another couple of trials. One of which was the games classes at the Royal Show. To make a change from the first weekend at the Royal Sonic and I were actually successful, as opposed to lots of near misses. We ended up winning the Excellent Snooker class and placed third in Excellent Gamblers, just 2 points away from first place. It was a good day, Sonic was focused and I handled him well which equalled great team work and success.
Last weekend saw the GSDA Western Challenge Agility Trial. I have good memories of this event as Soda won the Masters Jumping class (her specialty event) a couple of times back in her hey day. The special thing about this trial is that you get really beautiful jarrah wood trophies. It is rare these days to get any trophy at all let alone one that is made of proper wood and not cheap plastic! Back then it used to be run on the main arena at the Canine to give it an even greater sense of occasion.
Both the masters courses required lots of control with off course choices for dogs everywhere and plenty of tight turns required. All in all I thought Sonic and I made a pretty good job of both of them. In agility I shoulder pulled to bring Sonic inside the next jump in preparation for a rear cross. Unfortunately I pulled too hard and he interpreted it as a turn and then went back up the dog walk instead of ahead of me to the jump. The rest of the course was clear. In jumping I turned early for a tight front cross and Sonic quite rightly came off the jump completely. I’m happy that I tried to change my timing as it’s clear that I need to, I’m just going to have to accept that I may pull him off jumps from time to time if I get it wrong. I’d still rather that than being late all the time like I have been. After that happened he completely blew me off when I did a pull through and ended up heading into the wrong tunnel entry so I’m going to say that we both screwed up… The positives from the run was that he was turning brilliantly tight yet still driving out of the turns.
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