The Week In Review

Heffner's new Rally Advanced titling picture came! I decided not to wait for the judge to get done with Rally Novice to get a picture since it was already after 7:00pm when we got this picture taken.

This week has been crazy busy at work and at home. My work hours have been quite packed and filled with early mornings. We thankfully have such a great group of people working together that we were able to pull everything off and keep it all on schedule, but it made for a really tiring week.

So I had early mornings at work, which entailed either skipping the dogs' morning exercises or getting up earlier than usual to fit them in. Which I did opt to do on a couple of days. Once I got home from work I would quickly feed them so that they would hopefully chill out while I did my physical therapy exercises (I am totally getting stronger and can see differences!!). I have opted to baby gate them OUTSIDE of the room that I do my exercises in. They're just too "helpful" when I'm trying to do them. Once that was done, it was time for a little training and then our combined cardio! By the time Friday came around, I was feeling pretty fried from basically hitting the ground running from the time I got up to the time I went to bed. But it was all worth it when I got to sleep in this morning!

We had a bit of excitement on Thursday night. The weather was too gorgeous and I opted to take the dogs out for what was intended to be a quick one hour hike instead of the jogging that we were otherwise going to do. It was so incredibly nice out and both dogs had a blast running around. As we were getting back to the truck I decided to take them down to the near by creak for a little drink and playing in the water. I figured it would only tack on an extra 10, maybe 15 min. Plans changed when Bess got hot on the trail of some elk that had wandered through. When she disappeared around a corner, Heffner and I went looking for her. Which lead to him smelling the elk and also giving chase after everyone. I opted to take the "easier" trail to the hill top they were running around and that's when I realized exactly what they were chasing. The "trail" that I was taking was churned up by several elk hooves. I'm not entirely sure how many there were, but far more than one. Anyhow, the dogs had their fun, no one got hurt, and they came back quite pleased with themselves. Heffner not too surprisingly, had the better of the two recalls. Bess took her time coming back.

In all, our little side trip tacked on an extra half hour, which meant that it was getting pretty dark by the time we actually got back to the truck. While the recall off of running elk wasn't what I would hope it would be, their recalls otherwise have gotten a lot better. When we go out hiking I practice random recalls with them. Our first recall of the night was about 15 min. into the hike and was so awesome that I wish I had been filming it! I called their names and the command "here" and both of their heads simultaneously whipped around and they started trotting back to me. There were some good cookies for that immediate response!

Otherwise it's been business as usual around here. I got to sleep in this morning because we didn't have any dog shows, trials, or matches scheduled for today. That was really nice! Though the dogs really don't like it when I sleep in. They both kept poking their heads into the crack of the bedroom door to see if I was going to get up. Bess finally just started whining at about 8:00am. Which is something in and of itself since she's much more of a moaner and groaner than a whiner. AND Adam had already gotten up and taken them out to potty. It's a rough life when you don't get breakfast on time.;0)

I hope that everyone is enjoying their weekend!