Weekend Wrap Up!

Well, it was a good weekend! Yesterday at the rally trial, BOTH dogs qualified on their advanced runs!:o) Bess got third place with a score of 91 and finished her Rally Advanced title! And Heffner got fifth place with a score of 87 for his first leg. While I would like to say that they were good runs, both runs were disappointing and that's mostly my fault. They way I'm doing my entries is that I send each dog's entry in separately. I mail off Bess' first and then a few days later I send in Heffner's. Usually, the dogs are entered in the order in which the entries are received. I have found that it works best for me to run Bess first and Heffner second. Bess is so full of energy and needs more of a warm up and time to settle down. Heffner does better coming out of the crate, getting a minimal warm up, and then going right into the ring. It just seems to work better that way. For whatever reason, Heffner was scheduled to go first and Bess followed with one dog in between them. AKC trials are not terribly lenient about you switching the order that you run your dogs. Sometimes you can get a ring steward who is okay with that and will switch the order of your dogs, but not always. This was one of those times.

Our end result was that Heffner had too much standing around time and got too much of a warm up. By the time we got into the ring it was warming up, he was feeling it, and he wanted to lay down. Literally. On the course we had a halt, sit, stand and walk around your dog. He did the halt fine, but would slide right into the down. We actually redid that station more times than we were supposed to and got pretty well docked for it. On the up side, his left pivot was good.:)

Bess did not get enough of a warm up and was HIGH as a kite when I got her out of her crate. So while she was more lively than Heffner, she was also more disfocused than I'm used to with her. The course was also a pretty tight one. To the point where I just about tripped over two of the station signs during my walk through. And I don't mean that it was tight for a giant breed. I really had to check my striding and I think that parts of it would have been tight even for small dog people.

In then end, it wasn't a bad trial. And Heffner was GREAT in his crate! I even left the building with Bess to get her titling picture and he didn't wine, paw at the crate, or make a fuss! We are most definitely making progress!:) For that alone, I was incredibly proud of him. And I'm pleased with myself for not getting overly stressed running both of the dogs with only one dog in between. Sometimes I just get overwhelmed having both dogs and trying to manage them both at the same time. Separately they're fine, together, they can be the gruesome twosome trying to drive mommy nuts!

We also got our pictures back from the August rally trial! The pictures are by Steve Hill at Casual Pet Images. Here they are:

Our ring time ended up being later than expected and we didn't leave Eugene until after 3pm. Which meant that we didn't get home until almost 5:30pm. And then I had to take care of the dogs and head off to a little gathering of friends to celebrate Adam's birthday. So I didn't have a chance to update the blog yesterday. But today I did have some time to put together the miscellaneous video clips that I have of the dogs! I actually took a fair amount of video last month and it ended up spilling over into a second clip since YouTube will only allow up to 10 min. per clip unless you upgrade. I will warn you, the first one is looooooooooooooong, but there are cute moments of the dogs. The second one is much shorter. I hope you enjoy!

And I just had to throw in this cute picture of Trouble curling up to Bess last night.:)
Today I went out to Thriftway to pick up some more pork kidney, since they seem to be the only store around that carries it. I am seriously in love with this store!! They are the next best thing for me to have Willamette Valley Meat Company close to home. They have such a variety of meats and a variety of cuts of meats! And great prices! Not as great as when I buy in bulk, but better than most places. I was able to pick some random pork portions for Heffner and I even stumbled across rabbit! I've been wanting to try some rabbit out with the dogs, but it's something that I don't really want to buy in bulk. I picked up some of the cut up portions and have it thawing in the fridge and will probably throw in a few small pieces for their dinner tomorrow night. It's fun to be able to spice things up a bit! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, they also had turkey necks!! I have NOT been able to find turkey necks at a regular store outside of buying a whole turkey. So I picked up one of those to eventually try out with Heffner to see how he responds to turkey. I'm probably going to cut it in half because I really don't want to give him large portions of any protein that we were testing out. Thankfully his system is fully settled back down again and things are good.


After I got done mowing the lawn and had curried the dogs, they each got a half of a pigs foot for some fun gnawing in the back yard. Heffner went right to it.
Bess wasn't sure what to really do with it, except play with it a bit.
In the end, she got bored with it and Heffner happily finished it off. I think I'm going to try pulling out the beef bones next weekend and see how Heffner responds to that. While the weather is still holding, I like to give them bones to chew on outside. They can soak up some vitamin D and get some gnawing in without having to be in their crates to contain the goo.