Sometimes it is hard to fathom how life has gotten so busy. I can't remember it being like this five or ten years ago. Now it just feels like there is never enough hours in the day and between the hours of 5am and 7pm I'm lucky if I sit down for 10 minutes. This is with a household of dogs that I consider pretty easy to manage in comparison to what we were dealing with only eight or nine months ago. Finding half an hour to sit down and update my blog is almost impossible. But I'm determined to squeeze it in even if it's only happening every few months. Maybe I just need to give up work 😉
 |
| My beautiful Pooh Bear |
So young Rain is officially grown up at 13 months of age. The puppy fat has gone and she is looking lean, mean and ready for action. She is quite the character and is loving agility, which is the best although I could do without the crazy barking. She is slightly mad which I believe I can blame her mother for....lol! The big highlight over the last couple of months was the Tamas Traj seminar back in July. I was a bit overwhelmed going into the seminar. While we were in a novice group, that group consisted of some of our top young dogs and our best handlers so I was thinking we may be in over our head with our skill level! I felt quite nervous for our first few sessions but as the day went on Rain showed me over and over again just how much she has learned and how good her skills were for a dog that was not quite 12 months of age. There is certainly no downside to placing importance on putting in the foundation skills. Before the seminar she would have done no more than three obstacles together so for her to run a challenging course broken down into three pieces was pretty amazing. Tamas was great. Such a lovely guy with a great sense of humour while being direct and straight to the point. I loved the "just run faster" and "do it better next time". It was a great group and so many laughs. So important to not take yourself seriously and laugh about it whether it was good, bad or very ugly!
 |
| 1 year old |
Tamas's course design lecture was fantastic. It was the perfect accompaniment to what I have already learned from Jan. You always have different takeaways from these things and I think the information I got from Tamas has meant that I feel more confidence when I design a course. Before I would design something and then worry about it until I saw dogs running it. Now I feel like I can look at it and know that it is good. I finally judged my first classes on Sunday since doing Tamas's course and the courses ran exactly how I knew they would. Everyone loved them and so many smiles coming out of my ring whether it was clear or otherwise. That felt good and it certainly gives me a level of confidence that I didn't have before. Tamas really places an emphasis on a dogs take off and landing spot and that has really crystallized my thought process. I think more judges need to understand the full impact of a dogs take off and landing when they are designing courses. There is huge gap there in a lot of what I see.
 |
| Goof ball |
Since Tamas was here I've signed up for Dave Munnings online handling course as an auditor. It means I regularly get new sequences to work on and the people who have working spots post their videos so plenty of information there to help work through them. I enjoy having new and interesting things to work on. I get bored trying to come up with stuff. I had started actual jump training with Rain but I've put it on hold as she has strained her calf muscle on her left hind leg. Nothing major but she wasn't using it to power off properly so obviously she feels sore. She is going to physio to help it heal and we'll wait until Leigh gives us the all clear before we get back into it. Before it happened she was jumping 500 like it was nothing so I'm not overly concerned and no rush. The break from jumping has given us a chance to spent more time focusing on her running dog walk. We lost a couple of months as I had to get my dog walk resurfaced. It had been sitting out in all weather for about six or seven years so it was well overdue. The training process hasn't all been easy going, it has taken quite a while to get the concept across with rear feet hits on a mat. But I think we have made some good progress over the last month and she is becoming more consistent. Once we get through some proofing on the low dog walk it will be time to start making it more real. She absolutely loves the dog walk and when we are in the agility arena you can barely keep her off it.
 |
| Sonic loving his underwater treadmill time |
We are also now at the three month point post Sonic's total hip replacement. He is somewhat fat after eight weeks of inactivity and good eating but we are now starting to make a dent in that to get him back to normal. He's been going to rehab every week and with the help of the underwater treadmill he is getting stronger and stronger. We are up to two half hour leash walks a day plus his exercises. Even better he is off all his meds except the Lyprinol which is a supplement rather than a pharmaceutical as such. So feeling really happy with the outcome of what has been a pretty challenging few months. I'm sure that Sonic must be feeling pretty happy to have his life back and even more so that he can toilet by himself and not have me following him around on the end of a leash! Seeing him happily trotting around makes me smile in a big way.
