Life With Big Dogs!

Portland Clicker Expo Day 2

2012-01-28T17:46:00.000-08:00

Today was day 2 of the Clicker Expo. I started off the morning by going to "The Education of Today's Trainer" with Aaron Clayton. This talk was an over view of the benefits of going to the Karen Pryor academy and becoming a certified trainer. I just wanted to get a general feel for what the program was about. I went out of curiosity. I thought it was an encouraging talk and hit very generalized questions. I don't really have anything in particular to say about it that mostly can't be found on the web site.

Following that was "What a Cue Can Do" with Kathy Sdao. I've never heard Kathy Sdao talk before (which is actually true for all of the presenters at this conference) so I thought I'd give it a go. This was a foundation level class (each class is given a difficulty level to better help people choose what's right for them), so it covered the basics. Sometimes it's good to go back over the basics. One of the first things she mentioned was the curse of knowledge. The longer you've been training and the more experienced you get, the more difficult it is to remember what it was like when YOU were first learning.

Kathy is a very animated and enjoyable speaker to listen to! She had some great video clips to go along with her slides. One of which was about Einstein the African Grey parrot where he tried out for some televised pet trick competition.

In general, the whole talk was about the basics of what a cue is. Cues tell you when you may do the behavior productively. They do not cause behaviors, reinforcement does. Cues should not be added until you have the behavior that you want and it's consistent! Each of the cues we use should be salient. They should leap out from the background. As such, they should also be distinct from other cues. It is also best to minimize compound cues. Her example was asking for a down. Often people not only do the verbal and the hand cue, they also tend to bend over. How do you know which of the three cues the dog is actually going to think belongs to the down?

Following Kathy was "The Right Touch" with Michele Pouliot. Her talk was great! There were two focuses of her talk. Using collar pressure and using body pressure to get behaviors. This was an advanced level class and the reason was because you are technically using negative reinforcement to get a behavior. If you are not careful it is all to easy to turn collar pressure into collar drags or corrections and body pressure into just physically moving the dog around. Her goal was to build this negative reinforcer into a positive opportunity for the dog and use just the lightest amount of pressure. Ken Ramirez touched on what she's done with Guide Dogs for the Blind, so I had a pretty good idea going into this of how she was going to cover it, but it was still great to hear in depth how she goes about things.

In order to train collar pressure, you start by having the dog tethered to a stationary object. The use of a stationary object is to avoid the handler actually pulling on the leash versus applying constant pressure, which is what you want. You have some sort of mild stimulus that causes the dog to lean into their collar. What you are looking for is the instant that they let up on the pressure. For this it's helpful to have your hand on the leash so that you can actually feel that moment when it happens and quickly click and treat. Gradually you get to a point where the dog chooses to not pull into the collar. This is advantageous when using collar pressure as a directional cue. You can use the lightest amount of pressure and the dog automatically yields.

Body pressure is trained in a similar manner minus the stationary object. The amount of pressure you use is just enough to be annoying to the dog. Not heavy handed pressure, but just enough. She used multiple examples related to freestyle for getting the dog to start volunteering behaviors. One of which was a paw cross. The dog lifts a paw into your hand. By the lightest of pressure on the side of that paw you are able to guide it into a position across the other paw. After a few repetitions, the dog may start to automatically put that paw into your hand if you open your palm up in the intended position.

After Michele's talk it was time for my favorite talk of the day! "Top OTCh" with Cecilie Koste. Her talk was about the basic skills that you need in order to be a top obedience competitor. This is important to keep in mind for the first recommendation that she makes. She recommends starting off with a serious obedience dog if you want to be a serious competitor. That's key. If you want to be a top OTCh competitor, then you should pick a dog that will get you there. If you just want to compete as high as you can with the dog that you have, that's totally fine. But if your goal is to be a world class competitor, you need to pick the right dog for the sport. I know that this can be a little disheartening sounding if you have a non-traditional breed, but she isn't telling you that you can't succeed with that dog, just that the dog you get should be dependent on the level at which you want to compete at. I actually really appreciate her honesty on this, since she had to have known that a statement like that isn't going to sit well with at least some of the people.

She then went into the 18 basic skills that you need to train your dog for in order to have a solid foundation for obedience. I know that it sounds like a lot, but it really breaks down well and you find these skills in the various exercises. I'll first list the skills then I'll go into the notes that I took on some of them that better described what to aim for for me personally. The skills are: look at you, targeting, sit, rear end control, sit at heel, gallop towards you, walk and look up, down, stand, stay, doggie zen, hold, let go, bark (her caveat was that if you are going to only do obedience, you don't necessarily want to train this), jump, scent discrimination, tracking, and go to person. And throughout her talk she had FANTASTIC video clips to perfectly demonstrate what she was talking about. Like I said, her talk was absolutely my favorite!!

Before I get into the individual skills, she emphasized the fact that you are getting the dog to OFFER these behaviors. You are not getting them by luring, cuing, or verbal encouragement. These skills are all things that the dogs are capable of offering up, you just need to set the dog up for success and then capture the behavior that you want. And while you are capturing and reinforcing these behaviors, you are NOT adding a cue in at all. The cue doesn't come until the dog is getting close to being competition ready and you are putting these basic skills together to create the exercises.

Rear end control. For this you are capturing hind leg movement and building from there. For backing up, you are clicking when the dog moves a back foot. Gradually you build up until they are actually walking backwards. To help the dog along, start out by having them positioned in between a wall and yourself. For teaching backing up while turning use corners. Gradually you fade away the wall and use lower and lower barriers until you aren't using any barriers at all. At that point, the dog will hopefully realize that your leg is what they are to stay in contact with and that is what will tell them the direction to go in. For coming into heel position (and this is something that I am absolutely going to start doing with my dogs) you start by using a box. You begin by moving in a clockwise motion around the box and click the dog for moving their back feet in a similar direction. Gradually you build up to the point where you remain stationary and the dog has to move into heel position to a point where they are in contact with your leg.

Gallop towards you. Start by training this skill when the dog is fresh and excited. Say when you get home from work and they're all happy to see you. You need a helper to hold on to the dogs collar while you walk 50 ft. away. Once you are in competition position away from the dog (it's important that you start by presenting the dog with the picture that they are going to see) the helper releases the dog. You click when the dog is at the speed that you want. Slowly you decrease the distance, but always clicking when the dog is moving fast.

Walk and look up. You start with the dog making eye contact with you. Click and treat. Then you reward for them making eye contact with you while you're moving backwards slowly. Then you increase the speed with which you move backwards. Then you start moving sideways and click and treat for the dog moving with you and making eye contact. Finally you move into heel position and reward the dog for being in position and making eye contact with you.

Stand. You start by simply capturing a stand. Then you capture the stand while you are slowly moving backwards. How do you get the dog to offer this behavior without you giving some sort of encouragement? You reinforce multiple stationary stands first. Then you start moving. The dog is not getting rewarded for just moving, so obviously that's not what you want. Maybe they'll try a brief stop in standing position. Bang! Click and treat. You've got to be ready to reward that possibly small hesitation so that the dog has something to go off of. Gradually you shape for speed.

Stay. First choose your dog's most probable position. Click and treat your dog rapidly just for being in the position. They are getting multiple rewards for simply remaining in this position, so why should they move? Always bring the treat to the dog. Gradually you increase the time before you click and treat. It's also a good idea to train this exercise when the dog is relaxed so they are less likely to spring out of position or move. That way you have plenty of stationary behavior to reward. Once that position is solid. You train the stay from the next probable position. The caveat being that you must get the dog to first offer this position before you start working with it.;0)

Doggie zen. I had never actually heard of this term before Cecilie's talk. The basis of it is that the dog gives something up in order to get it later. For example, you put a bowl of dog treats on the floor. The dog cannot eat it until give the release to do so. You put the food bowl down. The dog ignores it and works with you. Then you release the dog to the food bowl. The way that you add the cue in to this is that you wait until the dog is digging in. The dog then has to wait for the cue in order to go for the bowl.

At some point in your competition career there is a possibility that your cue will become broken. In other words, you'll give a cue and your dog will not respond appropriately. For this, Cecilie says to simply go back to these basic exercises and work on the ones for the competition exercise that broke down. Start small and build back up. It's then from these basic skills that you start to put together the competition exercises. Your dog therefore has all the tools to accomplish these tasks.

She mentioned that you could be thinking that this is rather overwhelming and now you potentially have a dog that is throwing all these behaviors at you. If you break things down again, you'll realize that there isn't really that many behaviors that they can throw at you all at once. When the dog is in heel position, what behaviors can they throw at you? Sit, down, stand, or go out. That's pretty much it. They can't exactly offer jump, because there's no jump. They can't offer a dumbbell, because there's no dumbbell. It's not as overwhelming as it seems. Through your training the dog also learns the difference between you in a position where it's okay to offer behaviors and you in a position where there are specific behaviors expected. Specifically, it's okay to offer behaviors when the handler is facing the dog and/or moving backwards (things are also a little different in Scandinavian obedience because they don't have a front position). When the handler is in "normal" position (i.e. heel position) the dog must wait for a cue.

When you start to train for the competition exercises, it's important to back chain them. The dog is most likely to perform the most recently reinforced behavior, therefore you're making your job that much easier and less frustrating for the dog. Once the exercises are good to go, you start training for actual competition. She was pretty much out of time when she started touching on this and didn't really get to go too in depth. But her recommendations were to use a variable rate of reinforcement and to train with distractions. The distractions should actually be a part of the basic skills training so that you can continue to build on them. You aren't really ready to compete until you and your dog are capable of succeeding at the exercises on the first try. There are no second chances in the ring. You should also increase the quality of your reinforcement.

Following her awesome talk, I went to her "Top OTCh" lab. In the lab the handlers were working on the basic skills that she talked about in her talk. I actually ended up leaving the lab early because I wasn't really gaining new information from the lab.

So there you have it! Two days down and one left to go!

Portland Clicker Expo Day 1

2012-01-27T19:01:00.000-08:00

Today was the first day of the Portland, OR Clicker Expo and I was really excited to see what was in store for me! I had a little taste of what was to come when Crystal went last year and posted about her experience. I got all registered first thing and then started going through my goody bag. Inside were a bunch of raffle tickets. The goal for the tickets are that you reward people basically for acts of "goodness" that are really defined by you. Kind of like you're clicking them. You can give someone a ticket for introducing themselves to you. You can give someone a ticket for the way they were mindful of their dog's needs during a lecture. Or in my case, you can reward someone for the fact that they brought their frenchie to the expo! It's all up to you and it really helps to inspire a positive attitude where everyone is going around looking for something good to reward. I love it! The tickets are good for a drawing for a basket at the end of each day.

As I was going through my registration packet and reading over the welcome material, I read a passage that I absolutely love and wish it was something that the general pet population would take to heart when out and about with their respective dogs. "Does your dog always want to rush up to other dogs and try to play? You may think your dog is being friendly, but to other dogs that behavior is incredibly rude. Your dog may be getting in the face of another dog that has worked long and hard to gain self-control in that situation. If someone's dog snaps or snarls at your dog, it is your fault, not theirs." This was also reiterated by Karen Pryor herself in her opening address. This is so incredibly true and I really appreciate that they emphasize this at the expo!

As I started typing up my experience from the talks, I realized that these posts could easily become incredibly long and/or take a matter of weeks to get all the way through. So in an effort to minimize this and create posts that don't make the reader feel like they are going through a long drawn out novel, I will do my best to summarize each day in one post and make them relatively brief. However, this is me that we're talking about here.;0)

After the opening session it was time to get down to business and go to the talks or labs of your choosing. The first talk that I chose to go to was "Oops! What to do When Mistakes Happen" by Ken Ramirez. First and foremost, Ken is a fantastic speaker! He completely filled up his two hour time slot and held my attention the whole time. No small feat considering that I was already starting to get a little hungry at the beginning of his talk. In order to talk about how he handles mistakes in training, he first had to give a little background on the various methods that trainers utilize. The first he talked about was a no reward marker (NRM). This is pretty much what it sounds like. The trainer uses a marker to indicate that the animal being trained has gotten it wrong. Something as simple as an Oops! Part of the problem with this method is that the animal can get frustrated at not moving forward and this can lead to a negative training experience.

The next "method" is the delta signal. This is essentially a warning before a negative stimulus happens. He likened it to his mother telling him to clean up his room multiple times with no effect. It wasn't until she used his full name that he knew she meant business. It was the use of his full name that was the delta signal that if he didn't do as he was told there was going to be a negative stimulus coming his way. One of the down sides to this method is that the delta signal can end up becoming the new cue for the behavior.

Following this is the time out method. Scientifically speaking, this is a negative punisher. This too can create frustration in the animal being trained. Time outs must be very well timed lest you punish the wrong behavior. Additionally, the time out doesn't actually teach the animal what behavior you WANT.

Next up was negative reinforcement. This is a subject that many people are not fully clear about. Negative reinforcement is using the removal (negative since you are taking something away) or avoidance of an aversive to increase a behavior. An example of this would be teaching a horse to neck rein. The aversive would be the pressure of the reins on the horses neck. The horse learns that they are to move away from the pressure. When they do so, the pressure, and thus the negative stimulus, is released and they are therefore rewarded for their behavior. Negative reinforcement does not always mean something that is abusive.

Ken's preferred method of dealing with mistakes in training is by using a least reinforcing scenario/stimulus (LRS). You are taking an inappropriate behavior and dealing with it in a way that isn't frustrating to the animal and keeps them wanting to work. His preference is to use a 3 to 5 second neutral response. He had some great video clips (he actually had really great clips throughout his talk) to demonstrate exactly what he was talking about. For example, if the animal in question doesn't respond to a sit command, he would pause for 3 to 5 seconds and then move on to something that the animal will reliable do, so that he can reinforce that. The animal doesn't get rewarded for the inappropriate behavior, but the trainer and animal continue moving forward to other more reinforcing and reliable behaviors so that the animal realizes that they will only get reinforced for correct behaviors.

He then went on to discuss some alternate response training. This topic he plans to cover more thoroughly tomorrow during his talk on aggression. The notes I took on this topic were very basic.

After Ken's talk I went to a lab (workshop) with Michele Pouliot titled "Crosstrain! Teach Your Dog the Skills Critical for All Canine Sports." This lab focused on using the platform to teach a solid understanding of position to the dog. This position could be whatever you need it to be depending on what discipline you were interested in. The two most common examples were obedience and freestyle. I got a LOT of really great ideas from this lab that I can't wait to try out with the dogs!! It also added a few more items to my list of "must have" training tools. I have a feeling that list is never going to get much shorter.;0)

The strongest advantage to the platform is that it is a well defined space for the dog to be on. Once the dog learns to go onto the platform, there isn't a lot of room for them to futz around on. The platform essentially doesn't allow for crooked sits. You are able to constantly reward the dog in perfect position. The platform also allows the handler to be in the goal position so that the dog not only learns what position they're supposed to be in, but what the handler looks like when they're in that position. Too often while we're training, we're correcting the dogs position, which throws us out of the stance that we should be in. The dog learns that ideal position for them involves us being twisted into some shape. When we're in the correct position, the picture changes for the dog, so they change their positioning in order to get their picture of you back the way they were rewarded in. If that sentence made any sense!

She also emphasized magnetizing the platform. You build up so much reinforcement for the platform that the dog is practically climbing on it as you're putting it down. They're excited to get on there and into the position that they KNOW they'll get rewarded for. From there you start using the verbal or physical commands that you want the dog to know and it's a piece of cake for them to associate the correct position with the command!

Following Michele's lab I wen to "Shaping Procedures for the Agility Trainer" by Eva Bertilsson and Emelie Johnson Vegh. I have their agility book and just recently started reading, so I can already tell that a lot of what they went over in their talk will be reinforced in the book. Their talk, by far, was the hardest for me to wrap my head around. I am going to try my best to summarize what they were talking about, but I know that it won't be half as good a job as they did. And hopefully it will come out at least moderately clear!

First and foremost, you must understand that these two ladies are the masters at breaking things down. This is part of the reason why it took me a little bit to fully catch on to what they were describing, since I tend to have difficulties breaking things down into smaller steps. Not only do they break things down into smaller steps, but they break them down into MINUSCULE steps! Seriously! The best example I can give is that before you want a specific behavior, figure out where you want your dogs head facing and reinforce that. If you have a behavior in which you want the dog moving forward, like you do for agility, then you wan their nose pointing forward. So reinforce that, and only that. Because you want the dogs nose pointing forward, you don't want them looking any where else lest they add that into the behavior. This particular example was much clearer to me when they showed a video clip of this exact thing. The reinforcement was so rapid that the dog didn't have a chance to look any where else. Therefore the ONLY behavior that was getting rewarded was this position.

Obviously as part of this shaping process, the reward is very important. How you give it, where you give, how frequent, and even what it is, will effect the end goal. There was a fair bit of description on this, which was best illustrated by the nose forward position. Rewards given rapidly to the dog in this position did not allow for any of what they call "garbage behavior."

They continued to further break things down in a sort of mind boggling circle. In essence, the taking of the reward is a behavior in and of itself that also must be trained. You don't start into a training session with a picky dog and a treat that they've never had before. If you present them with something unknown, they may take the time to sniff the treat and taste it. At that point, what you originally were trying to reward is not what's actually getting rewarded.

To further screw with my mind, the method that they used to explain all of this involved starting at the end. You start when the reward ends. Just the reward ending can be a cue for another behavior. You give the dog a cue, they execute the behavior, you reward, then they stare at you to figure out what comes next. The end of the reward you just gave is what's cuing them to stare at you and wait for what's coming next. This is something that I TOTALLY never thought about like that before. They're talk was basically filled up with little brain benders like that. I just wasn't used to thinking like that and it took me a little bit to wrap my brain around it.

That's really as much as I'm going to attempt to describe from their talk. I'm really afraid that I'll butcher anything more that I haven't already! Their talk was great and I definitely recommend that if you get the chance to hear them speak, you should.

I also gained some ideas for ways that I can go about getting Ruthie used to and ready for the tunnel (I'm a bad trainer and have not done any work with trying to get her to go into the tunnel since she very adamantly told me that she's not a fan). It's little things that I just hadn't thought about. I'll talk more about them as I actually start to implement them with the Mighty Midget. I also learned a little Swedish from the talk! It turns out the the word slut means the end!LOL That was a pretty funny moment when at the end of one of their video clips the word SLUT popped up in big bold letters!

Phew! I made it through and hopefully anyone still reading this did as well! Tomorrow is another day and I'm looking forward to it. Now to figure out what to do with these poor neglected pooches of mine....

Idita Walk 2012

2012-01-26T20:41:00.000-08:00

February 1st is the start of the 2012 Idita Walk! The premise of the Idita-walk is that you shoot for walking 1,049 minutes between February 1st and March 31st. Once you sign up and pay your "entry fee," you gain access to an online log that will allow you enter your daily totals throughout the course of the event. It's a great way to encourage people to be a little healthier, get their dogs more exercise, and promote the Iditarod a little. I've already signed myself up for it this year and I'm looking forward to keeping a better online record of how I'm doing.

I participated in the event last year and exceeded my goals. Of course it helps that I didn't go crazy over board because I knew that I would be wanting to up the stakes this year. I am going to continue to only count the time I spend with the dogs towards my daily minutes. However, I'm going to add in a little twist.;0)

Two years ago I did a little pedometer challenge. I've been wanting to do something with that again and I think this is the perfect opportunity! Starting February 1st all the way through the end of the Idita Walk, I'm going to wear my pedometer and I'm going to do a weekly breakdown as to where I'm at with the dogs with regards to activity minutes (we do a lot more than just walking together, so I figured I'd call it activity minutes versus walking minutes) and where I'm at personally with the pedometer. Since it's been a while since I've done the pedometer challenge, I don't really know roughly how many steps I'm putting in in a day. I'm going to use February as my baseline period, figure out my average daily steps, and then shoot for increasing that average during the month of March. I haven't yet determined how much I want to try to increase by. We'll just have to see how that pans out.

Last year my goal for the Idita Walk was to put in 2,089 activity minutes with the dogs. I am going to increase this goal for this year to 2,500 minutes. I think this could be a lot of fun! Anyone else planning on joining in either via the Idita Walk or just doing this as a personal challenge?

And with that I'm off to take care of doggy toe nails and get ready for the start of Clicker Expo tomorrow morning!

Books of the Month

2012-01-25T19:55:00.000-08:00

“One Second to Glory” by Lew Freedman is the story of Iditarod Champion musher Dick Mackey. The book gets its title from his 1978 victory in which he won by one second. The story begins with a brief overview of Dick’s childhood and how he got to Alaska in the first place. It follows him through his early years and chronicles how he got started into mushing and eventually racing. If you’re a dog history buff and love reading about how things got started, then you absolutely will love reading about the early years of the Iditarod. Dick Mackey did it all from competing to race marshaling to flying a bush plane on the Iditarod trail. And since the story is transcribed directly from him, you get it in his own words.

The Mackey family is a very well known mushing family, with several Iditarod champions. Some of whom are multiple winners. While the story doesn’t really focus so much on the children growing up, it does give you a glimpse into the childhoods they had and what helped to shape them into the iron competitors that they are today.

What I did find pretty interesting and didn’t realize before reading the book, was that Dick Mackey essentially founded Coldfoot, Alaska. This may not sound interesting in and of itself, but he started with a ramshackle “diner” and gas station, that actually turned into a real town and truck stop. In an area that sees temperatures hitting 60 below and colder, this is no small feat considering that your construction time frame is essentially limited to the “summer” months.

The book does tend to jump around a lot as far as time frame from chapter to chapter, which can be a bit confusing at times. Once you realize that the entire story line is not necessarily chronological, you’ll get over that.;0) I do also get the feeling that since this is the story that is being told to the author many years after things have actually taken place, some things may be remembered with rose colored glasses. Again, you’ll get over that for the good story.;0)

All together I thought it was an enjoyable book and fun read since the Iditarod is coming up in March.

"The New Complete Great Dane" by Noted Authorities (I seriously LOVE how they phrased that!) is a great book for someone interesting in the breed and it's history. For those who have a mentor in the breed already, there are countless moments in this book that I swear it's verbatim what you will hear! It actually kind of cracked me up a little at times.;0) There are also times where you can tell you need to read between the lines of what's being said or NOT said to get at the crux of something.

Regardless, I found this a very enjoyable book to read and I feel that anyone with a love for the breed with also find it highly enjoyable.

RCC Wrap Up

2012-01-24T20:46:00.000-08:00

Lets see, I left off with Day 2, which was Thur., with Bess getting her second Beginner Novice leg. Friday was a slightly less busy day that had Bess and I competing in Rally in the morning and a later ring time for danes meant no ring conflicts!! Three days of no ring conflicts! Woo hoo!!

I would post the Excellent and Advanced courses that we ran on Friday, but the print outs weren't all that great and things were not entirely clear. This was one of those times where a walk through was a necessity. Our Excellent run wasn't too bad. I had some glimmers of Bess perking up a bit, though she still seemed stressed. I'm changing up our warm up routine quite a bit and I think it's helping at least a little. We ended up qualifying with a score of 87. After the last time we were in the ring, I will pretty happily take that score.

Next up was Advanced. I walked the course. I even watched the competitor ahead of us correctly finish the course. For some reason, I thought it would be cool to create my own station about half way through the course.:o/ I was so convincing to myself that I didn't even consciously realize what I had done. Until the end. When the judge let me know what happened. Ug! Regardless, our Advanced run was better than our Excellent run and I was throwing a party when we crossed the finish line. So NQ and no RAE leg. Bummer! However, things are looking up for Bess and I in rally!

After we were done with rally I took Bess over to the FitPAWS booth so that I could say hi to Bobbie and also check out some of the equipment that they have and see what I needed to add to my list of must haves for this year. Specifically I wanted to try Bess out on the donut and see what she thought. Since she's gotten so used to getting all four feet on our giant core disc, I had a feeling that she would most likely try to do the same thing with the donut. And she did! Let me tell you, that thing is a lot harder to stabilize when you're not entirely ready for a large dog to do that! Bess enjoyed herself and got to try out a variety of products that we don't already have. Bobbie gave me some ideas for additional exercises to try. And since it just wouldn't be Rose City Classic without me doing some shopping, I bought the donut and then on Sunday I went back and also picked up the inflatable ring to help stabilize it a little bit better. New toy!

Saturday I was only doing conformation with Ruby. I had no desire to compete in any performance events over the weekend when the spectators come out and things get crazy and annoying! So instead, I did some shopping!:0) I picked up some awesome new collars for the dogs that I'll share in another post.

Sunday was conformation again and thankfully slightly less crowds which was really nice! While I was somewhat glad that things were coming to a close, I was also really sad to see everyone go. There's the closer to home crew who hits up all the relatively local shows that I always love chatting and hanging out with. And then there's the people who travel from a greater distance that I don't get to see terribly often. We had people from California, Arizona, and Canada at this show. It was fabulous to have everyone together and have multiple days to hang out and chat. It was just sad to see them go and know that it was going to be a while until I see them next. Thank goodness for Facebook.;0)

So that was our crazy extended weekend in a nut shell (I apologize for the lack of pictures in this post, hopefully I can make up for that soon!). Lots of fun, great people, good show, and great dogs. I have some videos that I need to find the time to put together. Kennedy was nice enough to take video of our Beginner Novice runs! I'm not exactly sure when I'll have those videos together because this upcoming weekend is the Clicker Expo in Portland!! This will be my first time going and I'm really excited! I'm signed up for all three days!:0)

Happy Birthday Heffner!!

2012-01-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

Happy 6th birthday to my very special boy!! Heffner got his most favorite toy in the world as a present today, the iBalls!! It takes him about a year to really kill them and he is absolutely smitten with them! As soon as I got it out of the package he was hopping all around me trying to get at it. It was really cute!

The above picture is him curled up with his prize just a bit ago. Taking a nap after some training, going for a run, and being a general spaz with his new toy.

I also picked up the three pack of the small balls for Bess and Ruthie. Though it turns out that Ruthie thinks Heffner's ball is pretty awesome. Even though it's bigger than her head, she manages to pick it up and carry it around the house with her. Since it's Heffner's new toy, I haven't let her do much of that. And once I pulled out the small iBalls, her focus turned to that and she's been happily rolling around on the floor with one in her mouth for the past half hour or so. It was quite entertaining when all three dogs were squeaking their respective balls at once! And of course, Adam was totally egging them on!

I realize that I haven't posted anything since Thursday and I apologize! I just got so busy and tired. I even managed to take a four hour nap on Saturday!! I'll do a final recap tomorrow. I hope that everyone had a great weekend and a gentle Monday!

RCC Day 2

2012-01-19T19:22:00.000-08:00

Holy tired Batman!! This morning I was very thankful that both conformation and obedience had middle of the day ring times. That meant that this girl got to get some serious sleep! And yet, I find myself now feeling seriously tired. And all I did was a whole lot of standing around. I don't quite get it.

At any rate, I still don't have any video to post, but I do thankfully have more good news. Bess got her second BN leg today with a score of 192!! I am going to stop myself right there and be happy about that. I caught myself starting to totally tear apart our run and turn everything into a negative. I think I need to work on that. I got compliments on Bess from some other people outside of the ring, both people that I know and other exhibitors that I haven't met before. This was very sweet of them and I think I need to be less mentally harsh on Bess and I and focus on the positive.

I'm having a hard time right now separating what I've seen that she's capable of in practice versus some of the lack luster performances that we've had in the ring. I just don't know what all the factors are that cause this disconnect between her and I when we get into the ring. Just as I've started focusing on being more mentally there in the agility ring, maybe there are things that I need to do for obedience and rally that will eventually help our performance?? And maybe I'm just already starting to freak out about rally tomorrow. That's probably more likely. We've struggled so much with rally lately, that I have to admit that I'm dreading going into the ring tomorrow. This is definitely not the mind set to have.

So here's to having a little yummy hard cider tonight, relaxing with the dogs, and getting myself mentally prepared to stay positive and only think of positive outcomes. And I need to not freak out if we start to have little problems!! Maybe I should take that yummy cider to the show with me tomorrow and partake before entering the ring???

RCC Day 1

2012-01-18T20:21:00.001-08:00

Holy long day Batman!! We got to the Expo Center today at about 6:45 am. And we left at roughly 7:00 pm. You see, I didn't bother to check and see what our obedience ring time was for today until I arrived. As it turns out, obedience for the working group specialty wasn't starting until 2:55 pm. Oh yes, and ALL ring times were delayed by a half hour due to the inclement weather. And our obedience ring just happened to be running an additional half hour behind. That meant that the working group specialty obedience classes didn't start until 4:00 pm. Yikes!

While I was able to take Bess out to walk around for a bit in between things, she still had a pretty long day of just hanging out. Thankfully she hung in there and we made it through our Beginner Novice run. While the run wasn't exactly what I was hoping for as far as attitude from her, I am overall happy with how things went. We ended up with a score of 190 and took 1st place in the A class!:0) Yay Bessy!!

Unfortunately I didn't do as much videoing today as I had thought I would. I sort of spent my time chatting, playing with dogs, and eating. Hopefully I will get enough clips tomorrow to put something together. In the mean time, I'm completely beat and going to go pass out.

Fingers crossed that tomorrow goes well and I'm hoping for a little more happy attitude in the ring.

Here We Go!

2012-01-17T22:36:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow morning begins the big Rose City Classic cluster of shows!! I'm pretty excited and glad that things worked out with my projects at work that I can not only take the time off, but I'm not leaving a ton of stuff behind that I'll stress about.

I did a little shopping yesterday and picked up a new pant suit as well as a new skirt set. Oh yeah, and freaking pantyhose. I killed the last pair that I had whenever the last time was that I wore them, and I almost forgot to buy more.

I've got what little I needed to pack all together. I've got Bess in Beginner Novice tomorrow and I'll be showing Ruby in the great dane specialty as well as the working dog specialty. Hence why I will be wearing a pant suit tomorrow so that I can maximize my comfort and still get the job done in both rings. There will be some sparkly shoes gracing my feet fo' sho'!

I'm currently a little paranoid about what the weather will bring over night. For those of you who may not know, in the Pacific Northwest we usually get pretty mild winters, which equal a day or two of snow that quickly melts. Which also means that none of the cities and towns regularly keep any equipment on hand to help maintain icy or snowy roads. This is bad when we do get snow. And has a lot to do with why things generally shut down even with only an inch of snow on the ground. Tonight we are actually predicted to get a few inches of snow. And some reports say that we will get sleet in the morning. Definitely not something that I want to deal with while I'm driving. So I'm giving myself plenty of time in the morning to get there and I'm just going to keep my fingers crossed that 1) the roads aren't that bad, 2) there aren't hardly any people out on the roads, and 3) the weather isn't all that bad by morning. Snow on the roads I can handle pretty well. Icy, nasty overpasses I'm not terribly thrilled about.

Anywho, it's high time that I get to bed. Wish us luck and I will hopefully have a positive update as well as a video to post tomorrow!:)

Movie Monday

2012-01-16T19:27:00.000-08:00

We got snow!!! Sort of. It's amazing what a little bit of elevation can do. At our house, the snow melts and is very sad. Drive out towards the coast and BAM! It's sticking! I wanted to give the big dogs a chance to play in the snow in an area where it was actually sticking and accumulating, so we headed out west this afternoon (since it's a holiday today, I got the afternoon off). Incidentally, Ruthie is NOT a fan of snow. She's rather disgusted with the cold and not thrilled that I still insist she must go out and potty.
And now to the actual topic of today's post, Movie Monday.;) I took Bess and Ruthie down to visit my parents yesterday and took some video of their time there with my parents' golden retriever, Jazz. He's about 10 months old now and really doesn't know what to make of Bess!

If you'll remember from a previous Movie Monday, Ruthie has a weird obsession with plastic bottles. For whatever reason, my sister has left a variety of empty plastic bottles around my parents house. Ruthie kept finding them every where in the house and was pretty much in hog heaven. These bottles weren't always empty though, so they kept getting taken away from her. What she learned from that was that if she looked hard enough, she was bound to find a bottle. This even extended to outside. There was some recycling sitting outside in their breezeway, and naturally, she found the bottles!

Anyhow, we had a great time! This weekend was a meat packing weekend and I am trying to avoid finishing up the cleaning in the garage. I just happened to off balance a plastic tote that contained turkey tails on Saturday. There weren't very many tails left, but there was plenty of meat juice left. It wasn't pretty. And now I need to finish cleaning that up, but I'd really rather not!!

Avoiding Burn Out

2012-01-13T19:04:00.000-08:00

You ever get to a point where you're trying to pack so much into a day, while trying to maximize your training time, that you feel like you just can't do it any more? I periodically hit that burn out point when it comes to training and keeping the dogs in shape. It happens to me a few times a year where I just hit a wall and have to take a break from my training and conditioning regime and not do anything. Granted, I feel horribly guilty at the time, but I just get to this point where I can't continue scheduling my every non work related minute in order to try and maximize my dogs' abilities. I just hit overload and my brain shuts down. The weird thing about it is that I totally recognize this pattern I have, but I don't do anything about it. More recently I've been analyzing my patter of burn out, and trying to figure out how to avoid it.

Before competitive dog sports, my focus was training for triathlons and small scale road races. The grand scheme was to gradually build up to the point of running a half Ironman. A full Ironman takes such total dedication to training, nutrition, and sleep, that it really wasn't practical for me to have that as a goal. I read everything I could get my hands on with regards to sport specific training, cross training in other areas, nutrition, and how to structure my work out cycles. I became totally and completely obsessed with structuring my weekly, monthly, and yearly exercise regimen! It's no secret that I have a crazy love affair with Excel. My obsession with structuring my triathlon training centered around my excel files. I tracked every single exercise, every single day. I had multiple tabs to let me know where I should be throughout the year in my training, what I should be focusing on, and what points I should be hitting in what sports at what times. It was great in a very OCD sort of way.;0)

It was this sort of attention (or OVER attention) that kept me from over training and burning out on my triathlon training. I was always eager for more and excited to hit my goals and be in the kind of physical shape that I wanted to be in. Never mind the fact that it felt freaking awesome to finish those races and still feel strong after crossing that finish line! So why on earth am I experiencing burn out with regards to my dog training and conditioning regimen?? Considering how incredibly anal retentive I was with my triathlon training, it's a wonder that I didn't just walk away from the sport within the first year! And yet, I'm now involved in a sport that I feel so much more passionate about and I routinely hit periods of burn out. What gives?

The key to my triathlon training (besides my OCD tendencies), was periodization. More importantly, the four week cycle of building for three weeks, followed by a RECOVERY week. That week of recovery every fourth week was key. I had three weeks of building and challenging my body. Just as I was starting to reach the point where it was getting to be a bit much, I had a week where I was "lazy" and could mentally check out. My workouts were cake walks. I still got them all in, but they instead of pushing me to my limits, they were rejuvenating. So why on earth haven't I thought to do this before with my dogs???

From here on out, I am going to periodize my dog training and conditioning schedule. I think we're all familiar with the "phenomenon" of taking a short break from a dog sport and when you come back, both you and the dog are refreshed and seem to have a new zest for the sport. Isn't that weird? ;0) The dogs and I all really need this. While they continue to be happy to work with me and do anything I ask and go anywhere I take them, it's still nice to have those periodic spikes in interest and activity. It keeps the game exciting, keeps burn out at bay, and keeps us all in a good mental place. And the mental aspect of training and competing is something that I'm paying more and more attention to now a days.

Anyway, this was something that has been tumbling around in my head this week because I hit a bit of a burn out patch. I really wanted to get this post out there while I was still feeling enthusiastic about it.:0) And I've also been toying around with the idea of doing a few spring triathlons this summer. Some of the funner ones that I know I will enjoy. Who knows.;0) Happy Friday everyone!!

Training Thursday

2012-01-12T19:37:00.000-08:00

I'm not entirely sure what's going on with YouTube, but I did figure out how to get my video to upload without taking several hours. For whatever reason, as long as I continue to type in the description box and make general tags to the information regarding each video, it continues to upload. If I stop typing or stop making changes, it stalls. Annoying, but at least today's video only took a few minutes to upload!!

It turns out that teaching the hand touch to the dogs wasn't that difficult after all. They already check out my hand for treats, so it wasn't difficult to get them to at least sniff my hand. Once they got a few clicks, they figured out what was going on. Bess through in a few paw hits just for good measure on the first video.;0) And no, I have no idea why on earth her tail is tucked in both of her clips. She tends to do that. Sometimes she'll just randomly stand in the middle of a room with her tail tucked and I have no idea why. I'm just chalking it up to one of the little idiosyncrasies that make Bess so unique!

And for whatever reason, I do just happen to be wearing the same hoodie in both clips. At least on the second portion my socks match.;0) And if you notice in the second half, Ruthie is starting to do some big girl stays! She's now starting to do down stays outside of her crate while I work the other two dogs on lower excitement exercises, just like I require for the danes!!

I'll stop yapping now and just post the video.;0)

And here's the other video that I never got around to posting. Just some random shots, mostly of Ruthie.

For this week's challenge we're going to up the anti on the hand touch. I want to see some "extreme" hand touches!! Lets spice it up a little! You could add distance to the hand touches. Add height to them. Require the dog to hit your hand multiple times in a row. Or even require that they hold their nose to your hand for a hand touch with duration. Whatever idea pops into your head involving a hand touch, GO FOR IT!!

And if you participated in last week's challenge, post a link to your blog post or video in the comments so that others can see how different people and different dogs went about it!!

Technical Difficulties

2012-01-09T22:10:00.000-08:00

YouTube is being a royal PITA tonight and has already taken over an hour to try and upload my 2 min. video. I've never had it take this long before!!>:0( Movie Monday may be postponed to Tuesday at this rate since I would like to go to bed and the video is only at 33%. Has anyone else been experiencing issues with YouTube? It took longer than usual yesterday to upload Ruthie's video, but not this long!

Obedience Match - Le Midget

2012-01-08T19:55:00.000-08:00

Today was all about Ruthie (photos courtesy of Danielle)! The Pacific Northwest French Bulldog Club was putting on an AKC conformation and obedience A match today. There are three different level of matches within the AKC. The most common seems to be the C match where most anything goes. You can train in the ring, you can use food, you can use toys, you name it. Today's match was an A match, which means that it is run JUST like an actual dog show. Therefore, there's not supposed to be any training in the ring let alone food or toys. It's about as close to a real trial as you can get. The club needed to put on this final A match in order to fulfill their requirements with the AKC to become a licensed breed club.
I think they did a fabulous job! We had a very understanding judge, great ring stewards, and just a generally fun group of people throughout the day. And get this, there were entries in all three of the regular levels of obedience! (I should also mention that because it was an A match there was no Beginner Novice so Ruthie was in a straight up Novice class) The bitch entered in utility and open is my obedience instructor and her partner's dog. She was definitely the best behaved and trained frenchie entered (go figure!)! The novice dogs were absolutely the entertainment! Oh boy!
The two boys entered in Novice were having a grand ole time! Ike did really well until he got to the heel off lead portion when he first got distracted and I think figured out that he wasn't attached. At one point he went tearing out of the ring and went visiting. He's a pretty social little guy and I have to admit that it was pretty funny. Next up was Ruthie. She's just so cute! We got video of her run and I'll go through that after I plug it in here. Following Ruthie was Remi. Remi was also all about having a good time and trying to go do some visiting. All three were a freaking riot! But it gets BETTER!! And for this I really wish that we had video!!
Do you know what comes after the individual exercises? That's right! Group stays!!!lol I laughed so hard that I was crying and almost peed my pants! The three of us go into the ring in a fairly orderly fashion. Getting the dogs situated and sitting still took a few moments, but it got done. Ruthie was in the middle of the two boys. At this point I should also mention that Remi and Ike (the two boys) are best buds. They LOVE playing with each other and are like little tasmanian devils whirling around the ring when they're set loose together. They are a riot to watch. But I digress.;0) The dogs are all in position and the handlers are told to leave their dogs. We all start to leave and Jill lets me know that Ruthie got up. I turn around and walk towards her to reset her. That was apparently the boys cue that it was play time. They start ripping around the ring together, having a blast rough housing with each other after all this serious stuff. I didn't think too much of it and thought that I could just call Ruthie and she'd come to me like she has previously (this has happened during our team practice before). Nope! Ruthie had to tell those boys who was boss! She goes tearing around the ring after them! So there's three handlers trying to wrangle three tasmanian devils whirling about the ring while our poor judge is just standing there watching the melee. I was dying laughing! I honestly cannot do it justice! Everyone outside the ring was roaring! I finally just picked Ruthie up once she paused in her regulating of the boys. Needless to say, we didn't attempt the down stays.;0)
Would you like to see the video of our cute little run? I figure that this video will serve as a great baseline as to where we started so that I can look back and be awed at how fabulous Ruthie has gotten.;0)

As you can see, she's pretty super cute!:0) Her automatic sits are really reliable. Still crooked, but dude, she's more reliable than either of the danes. The stand for exam is kind of where things started to break down. Sooooooooooooo, I realized as I was trying to get her to hold a stand that we've only ever practiced the stand command when I've had a treat in my hand. While she's munching on the treat she's totally happy to stand and stay, now that we actually have a stay with distance. Hence why she just continued moving forward and didn't stop like she's been doing. But again, still comical. And I swear that she can hold a stay while I walk around her! It's just not solid yet (obviously!).
The off lead heeling wasn't awful. I see it as a definite plus that I have a dog that is generally pretty happy out there and isn't dragging way behind me. So what if she doesn't necessarily end up on the correct side of me. Details shmetails! I am pretty proud of her moments of self correction though. And did you see those automatic sits??
Then came the recall.lol Two thumbs up for her holding her stay while I walked all the way to the other end of the ring! Do you think she figured out what the judges signal was for?;0) Then again, that was a pretty happy little recall! And yes, our finishes are still very much a work in progress. Overall, super cute little dog who I'm very happy with how she is coming along in obedience. I think she is going to be a VERY fun dog to trial if things keep going the way they are.

It has also been decided that I MUST have pink sparkly shoes by the time we actually start trialing. I wore the gold ones today, but I definitely need an ensemble with Ruthie. After all, she doesn't have a kick ass competition collar for nothin'! I also plan on getting her a blinged out pink leash of some sort. I'm going to do some looking at Rose City to see if I can find what I'm thinking of amongst the vendors without spending a small fortune.

After the obedience match was done, there was some time to kill before the conformation could officially start. As further entertainment, our frenchie obedience team did a little demo. I have to say that we actually didn't do too bad! Considering how things had already gone during the stays, we opted to do only on leash work.

Once the conformation classes started, I was interested in watching how the handlers stacked the dogs. Frenchies are just a wee bit different than danes and I haven't really practiced much with Ruthie, so I didn't really have a great idea of how to do it. Jill and Danielle's Hellon and Ike free stack really well, but I was curious as to how you hand stack a frenchie. Good thing I was paying attention because I actually got to take two different frenchies into the ring! It was so fun!! The first one was a crazy little pied bitch who was absolutely hilarious and so excited! She was super fun! The second was a much calmer cream bitch.

After the conformation portion was done it was time for a yummy potluck! Once everyone's bellies were full, they started the meeting. Incidentally, I am now applying to be a member. Funny how those things happen! I even already have my sponsors!:)

To make an already long post not quite so long, it was a really fun day with really great people, and Ruthie and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves! It was very neat to meet new people, chat with people I already know, and hear positive things said about Ruthie. Great way to spend a Sunday!

Agility Trial - Big Dogs

2012-01-07T22:14:00.000-08:00

Today the big dogs and I were at an AKC agility trial. With the new year, I've made some agility related resolutions that I didn't mention on my 2012 goals. The biggest one is to be more prepared and to be more mentally present and be more mentally involved in the day. A lot of the errors that we have on course are because of stupid handler issues that are at times due to me just not being on top of my game. Doing things like getting the truck packed up the night before and having everything set so that I can basically just load the dogs up in the morning and head out to the trial site is actually pretty beneficial. It gives me some chill time in the morning. Makes it so that I don't have to get up quite so early and can get a little more sleep. And it just gives me an overall feeling of being more put together and prepared that will carry over into the day. I also need to have a better general attitude about being at the trial. I started to get to a point where I would go over in my head all the other more productive things I could be doing if I weren't at the trial or getting more anxious to get done ASAP so that I could get to whatever I had planned for the evening, even if it was just hanging out at the house. And finally, I didn't go out and do anything the night before the trial. I wanted to make sure that I got enough sleep that night and that I was seriously ready to compete in the morning. Basically, I needed to really focus on holding up my end of the deal!

I think things went pretty well because of this preparation! I'm not saying that we had a fabulous day and the dogs qualified on every run, but I think I was a better agility partner for them than I have been more recently. Our quality moments were better than they have been, though there's still room for improvement. Then again, there's always room for improvement.

I've also decided that I'm going to start bringing my laptop along to trials so that I can write things down as they occur so that I'm not trying to recall everything several hours after the fact! Or in cases like tonight where I start to run short on time, I would have this whole post already written! I'm going to give a short and dirty version, but I will at least include maps. I didn't want this post to spill over into tomorrow because we've got the frenchie A match. I do have other thoughts and ponderings from today's trial that I will save for another post. So here goes.
First up was Heffner in Excellent Standard. Overall, it was a great run and I was happy with it. Unfortunately we had one slight bobble on the weaves where he got distracted by something, started to pull out of the weaves, and when I tried to pull him back into the same spot, he skipped a pole. NQ. Drat! Otherwise, like I said, great run!
Next up was Bess in Excellent JWW. To me, the course looked like a bunch of serpentines with some other stuff thrown in. And it turns out, that's what the judge was actually going for (I happened to over hear a conversation that he had about the course)! Sweet! We actually practice serpentines and Bess totally rocked them this week! Overall great run, I mostly did well on my front crosses, but an NQ. I botched a front cross that caused a drop bar half way through. After that I was just going with it and I pulled her off a jump. D'oh! Otherwise she was totally working with me and I was very happy with that!
Then Heffner was up in Open JWW. It was not a great run. This is the run that got pondering a few things. I had a hard time getting Heffner's focus at the start line due to a poodle outside the ring. He didn't have any reactive outbursts, but his focus was shot. He actually went around the first jump when we started, which earned us a refusal. Once I got him back in the right spot and we started again, he knocked the bar. There were at least two other knocked bars throughout the course. The second half of the run was actually pretty nice and we were thankfully able to end on a good note. But for a dog who seriously VERY rarely knocks a bar during our practices (and I would know since I'm the one who has to reset them), it just gives me pause. And makes me potentially over think. But regardless, NQ.
Next up was Heffner in Open FAST. After looking at the send portion of the course, I knew it wasn't going to happen for us. I don't practice tunnels at all with the big dogs. Tunnels are strictly for trialing. And that send portion with a push to the opposite entrance regardless of which jump I chose, just wasn't going to work for us. I just don't work on that kind of thing with them. So it was that combined with a generally very lack luster attitude that I was getting from Heffner that made me decide to scratch him from the class all together. I wanted to end the day on a high note with him and we had thankfully done that with the last half of his JWW run. It was best to just leave it at that.
Next up was Bess in Novice FAST. Two thumbs up for a great course!! I loved it! Bess did have one quick fit of zoomies on the course, but we nailed the send, got all the points we needed, and finished with enough time. Qualifying run! And that run was the final run Bess needed to get her Novice FAST title!! Woot!
And our final run of the day was Bess in Open Standard. It's a good thing that bitch is cute! She took off to go check out the people and dog hanging out at the exit gate. I got her to come back, but then she did a lovely back jump over the triple. It was really quite well executed and showed some nice maneuverability. Just not exactly what I was going for. She did however totally nail her down contact on the A-frame. Wahoo!! And then I did this stupid arm wave thingy that totally sent her to an off course jump. Brilliant me! Not too bad of a run, but an NQ.

And now that I've wrapped that all up, I'm going to bed so that I can be rested for the frenchie match tomorrow!! Tomorrow it's all about Ruthie!

Training Thursday

2012-01-05T18:13:00.000-08:00

And now we're officially starting the weekly trick training theme!! As I mentioned previously, these tricks aren't necessarily going to be crazy difficult. And some of them will start out really simple and build up in subsequent weeks. With that said, I picked something that I haven't actually trained the dogs for, though it seems like a lot of people have. The hand touch. The goal is to get your dog to reliably touch your hand with their nose by next Thursday. You can go about it any way that you choose (obviously!), but I'm going to go the clicker route. I haven't done much clicker training with Ruthie, so my prediction is that it will take her a little longer than it will take the big dogs. Next week I'll have a video put together along with the next trick.

So who's with me?! :0)

Random Ramblings

2012-01-04T21:23:00.000-08:00

Some random ramblings for you today:

*Bess was a rock star last night at practice! I handled her differently than Heffner and it worked great (duh)! Now if I can just remember that on Saturday.;0) Also, if I actually honest to goodness RUN with her, there are less bars down. Novel!

*I, personally, need to work on sprinting. Thankfully I have three sprinting partners who are all too willing to help me. I need to teach them that tackling mom at the end isn't how it's supposed to go. This goes for The Midget as well. Additionally, I am slow.

*Heffner was a tightly wound spring and it was awesome! He is ridiculously fun to run.

*I need to suck it up and start actually training Ruthie's weave poles. Dang it!

*I also need to teach Ruthie a wait command on the teeter. The teeter has now become super fun to race across, whether I'm totally ready to catch the other end for a more graceful descent.

*I finally have a dog who can easily fit into a tunnel and she HATES them. I need to get a tunnel to practice with at home.

*Heffner thinks that heeling is amazing fun when mom is going all over the place and he never knows which way I'm going to turn.

*Bess doesn't like practicing heeling in her purple coat. Only the burgundy one.

*Bess is THE BEST snuggler.

*Ruthie wants to suffocate me with her face when I try to snuggle with her.

*I am officially a Board Member (that's right, I'm a BM!;0) ) of the Sherwood Dog Training Club!! Woo hoo!!

Tomorrow will start my goal of weekly "trick" training! I've got a list started, though I don't have 52 figured out just yet. Some of the stuff will start out really simple and then build on the previous week's "trick." I'm kind of cheating and giving myself a little extra time to build on stuff and make it better as I add in a new component. Some of the "tricks" are starting out really simple because there are either things that I just haven't gotten around to teaching any of the dogs or there are basics that I haven't gotten around to teaching Ruthie yet and I need a reason as well as a time line to get my butt into gear.

Happy hump day everyone!!

Movie Monday...

2012-01-02T18:23:00.000-08:00

...is an epic fail this week. Something is seriously screwed up with all the footage I took a couple weeks back while I was hiking with the danes. I can view the files just fine in Windows Movie Maker, but beyond that it's all scrambled. I don't know if it's the videos taken on that camera (it's a new point and shoot that Adam got to take on his trip to Germany) or if it's just the footage taken from that day. I need to do some testing. So unfortunately today's Movie Monday is a no-go.:(

I will let you in on what I'm planning for my video blog for the month though! Since the big Rose City Classic is coming up starting on the 18th of this month, I'm going to shoot all sorts of footage while I'm there. I've got a variety of friends who will be there competing in a variety of sports with a variety of dogs, so my plan is to bring them in on it as well and do some chatting with them! Hopefully it ends up turning out well!

Hello 2012!

2012-01-01T20:51:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!! While 2012 is only almost a day old, I'm pretty happy with how it's started! We had a nice laid back evening at our house with an old friend and his fiance, who I got to meet for the first time. Then today I headed out with Bess and Ruthie for an obedience lesson. The lesson went really well and I was happy with how both girls are progressing! Bess is getting ever closer to an actual honest to goodness dumbbell retrieve! It's taken a long time and we still have a LOT of work ahead of us, but she's starting to get it. And once she's really got it, I know that she'll fully enjoy it. At the moment her enjoyment is hesitant. She's not entirely sure of what I'm asking her to do and why I keep building on what she's already mastered. We also had some off leash heeling that was wretched today! Yay!!

Ruthie was also doing a great job as well! We have a stay! There are still aspects of the stay that we need to build on, but thank goodness it's there. And she actually has a stand stay as well! This may not seem terribly impressive when you consider the fact that she's a finished champion and conformation dogs do a whole lot of stand stays. However, I pretty much broke her stand stay once we brought her home. Sit was the first thing that she learned and she got heavily rewarded for it. As such, it's her fall back behavior. We've had to put some time in getting the stand stay back.

We also had a little frenchie team practice! Good lord these dogs are adorable! Each practice we improve more! We did some group stays today and while Ruthie's group stays are still rough, she is greatly improved from where she was at previously. Yay!!

And Ruthie also has an competition obedience collar!lol The above picture is the collar that she will be competing with.:0) I have to remove the dangling thingy, but otherwise it fits within the rules. I asked our instructor today just to verify. I bought the collar originally because it was just too freaking cute to pass up. And at $10, there was no way it wasn't coming home with me. Then I got to thinking that it would be awesome if it could be Ruthie's competition collar! She doesn't pull on the leash at all, so I don't need to worry about the collar busting. And that collar combined with my shiny gold "obedience" shoes will definitely make us a team that stands out! Though I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing right now!lol I'm starting to think that I need some pink sparkly shoes to go with her collar. Maybe some pink sequined pants as well? Maybe a blinged out top? he he he.....At any rate, this upcoming Sunday we'll get to try out our ensemble as well as our skills at the frenchie obedience match. If nothing else, I promise to try and get at least some pictures. We'll see about video.;0)

Heffner pretty much got to bum around the house today. After I got home from the lesson and practice, I took a lovely nap on the dog beds with him that I think he enjoyed. We were up pretty late last night and I was totally zonked.

I hope everyone is having a great start to the new year!

2012 Goals

2011-12-29T18:11:00.001-08:00

I go into year long goal planning with a little trepidation. You just don't really know what the new year will hold. There could be injuries (we've had that), there could be set backs (we've definitely had that), and there are any number of unknowns that you really can't plan for. So completely ignoring all of that, here is what we're shooting for in 2012, broken down by dog and by sport.

Heffner

Agility

Our goals here are pretty mild because I go into it knowing that we aren't going to be trialing a ton. In AKC agility I would like to finish up his Excellent Standard title. We need two more legs there. And I would like to finish up his Open JWW title. Because for the love of gawd, I would like to no longer be in Open Jumpers!!lol I can't remember entirely, but I think he only needs to more legs there as well. For CPE agility I would like for him to finish up all of his Level 3 classes. I think he's at least half way there. And with the number of CPE trials that I think we should be able to hit this year, I think it's doable.

Rally

I am sooooooo excited that AKC is doing away with the honor station in Excellent!! This makes trialing Heffner so much less stressful! Now I just need to focus on getting him less stressed overall when in the ring. I've read up a little bit on the new stations and I think that we should be good to go on them by April. Because of these changes, I will happily wait until April to begin trialing him in rally again. Which means that Lodi will be our big welcome back to rally.;0) Our goal for 2012 is to get that RE title that I know he is capable of!

Obedience

For the most part, Heffner is retired from obedience. I use that phrase loosely because it's not like he really had much of a competition "career" any how. With respects to obedience, I will only be showing him at specialties. Because Beginner Novice doesn't have any group exercises, I would like for him to finish that title in the new year as well. There are more than enough obedience trials near us that this should be a totally doable goal. We will continue training however, because I would eventually like to show him in the versatility class. There's also that newer Teamwork class that sounds like a lot of fun and a different type of challenge.

Lure Coursing

Since the big boy did show some interest in the sport at the one practice that we attended, I would like to try him out at a few more practices to get a better feel for it and then possibly enter a trial and see what comes out. Our only goal in this sport for the new year is to try it out more and see what happens.

Bess

Rally

Bess only needs four more legs to get her RAE, but we seem to have stalled out. While her limited performance in the obedience ring seems to have improved, her level of depression in the rally ring is clearly evident. We'll keep working on this and see what we can do. I don't think that four more qualifying legs over the course of a year is too lofty of a goal. After that, she will be semi-retired from rally and will only be competing at specialties.

Obedience

We've seen some pretty great improvements in obedience and I'm really happy with the direction that we seem to be going! I've got her entered in a trial coming up in January. I was going to enter her in Graduate Novice again, but then chickened out. The trial site is going to be pretty crazy and distracting and I don't want to overload her too much and turn it into a negative experience. Therefore, I entered her in Beginner Novice. For 2012 I would like to put a BN on her as well as either a CD or a GN title. The BN is definitely doable. The CD will be the hardest because our off leash heeling is still pretty terrible and is the one thing that I'm really having a hard time figuring out how to fix. The GN would be the next most achievable after the BN due to the lack of off leash heeling. But we do still have the off leash figure 8.

Agility

Bess made huge improvements over where she started out at the beginning of this year. The beginning of this year so a total mental break down in the agility ring that took several months to fix. She's a stresser, and it had apparently built to the breaking point for her. We've had success this fall and I'm hoping that we continue to improve as a team. I feel like our runs are still pretty inconsistent because I'm not entirely able to trust her and am wary about her getting the urge to zoom. Which means a lot of looking back and stutter stepping on my part. This is not always conducive to good clean runs. I guess my goal for 2012 should be to trust Bess more on the course and hope that we start to jive better as a team. For her, I would REALLY like to finish up her Open Standard title. I'm on my laptop in the craft room (hubby is hosting poker night and I'm hanging out with the dogs since some of the people who come over are scared to death of them) and don't have my competition spreadsheet (remember, Excel and I have a serious love affair!!) to know for sure how many more legs she needs. I think it's two more legs. Those darned down contacts specifically on the A-frame are just killing us! I would also love it if she could get her Excellent JWW title, but since I have some personal hang ups in JWW, that one is going to take some work.

Lure Coursing

I would also like to try Bess out at more lure coursing practices. She didn't quite catch on to it the way that Heffner did. She was more interested in chasing the other dogs who were chasing the lure. We'll see how the practices go and maybe enter her in a trial.

Ruthie

Agility

I am trying to take things nice and slow with little pressure with Ruthie. She seems to really enjoy our time out at the agility barn and is catching on to things faster than I expected. I've tried some sequencing with her and once I realized that it works waaaaaaaaaaaaaay better to front cross with her than to do anything else, our runs actually smoothed out and we are starting to get more fluid! She has no qualms about the A-frame or the dog walk, but the dog walk is her absolute favorite obstacle on the course right now. Enough so that as I'm going around lowering jumps for her, I have to keep my on her because she will just run across it. The teeter is so-so right now. She does the full height teeter, but she's not a fan of the fast descent, so I'm slowing it down for her and that seems to make her much happier. We'll continue to work on it at her pace and it'll come when it comes. On the up side, she very willingly gets on it, it's just the going down part that she's not a huge fan of. My goal for her is to put her into a group class in the spring and see how that goes. My eventual goal is to enter her in her first trial in the fall, preferably a CPE trial since it's a gentler way to start trialing.

Rally

Everything really is a clean slate with Ruthie and we're just starting into the various sports. My only goal for her in the new year is to have her to a point where I feel comfortable entering her in the rally trial at the national specialty in the fall. I'm not shooting for any titles in 2012, I just want us to get started and see how things go.

Obedience

Our goals for obedience are pretty much the same as they are for rally. I want to have her to a point by the fall where I feel comfortable entering her in Beginner Novice at the national specialty. We're actually starting things off in January with a bang by going to an specialty A match! Are we ready? Nope! But it'll definitely let me know where the major holes are! On the up side, posing for all those Christmas pictures had me working on her stays daily in a fun way. And now she actually has a freaking stay!! Yay!!

Lure Coursing

LOL.....I put this on here because I included it for the big dogs. I don't think that lure coursing will be in Ruthie's future. It's not that she doesn't have the athleticism or the spunk, I just don't think that she'll see the point in chasing a baggy. And with those stubby legs, I'd have to make sure that she was running in only well mowed fields. I MIGHT bring her to a practice or two just to see, but there really isn't a goal for her in this sport.

I've also made a commitment to improving the ball studio in the new year. There's a ton of equipment and other things that have been on my mental wish list for a while now and I've decided to just suck it up and start adding things on a monthly basis. Some of it's little like adding in more mats. Some of the items are more spendy, like an 80 cm peanut ball. There's also a possibility that I will be moving the studio from the garage into this mostly unused room towards the front of our house. The dog crates are currently there, but we could pretty easily move them else where. It's a possibility, but would take some work and planning.

I've also got two bitches who will be getting spayed. We've been saving up for Bess spay and gastropexy so that we have the money up front and don't have to put it on a credit card. I'm shooting for doing that in May so that she'll have the summer to recover while we're in our "off season.";0) Once Bess is taken care of, then it'll be Ruthie's turn.

I'm also planning on starting a new sport with the dogs, but I'll leave that for the new year to reveal!;0)

2012 is looking like an exciting year and I know that regardless of how things turn out, getting to spend time with my dogs is the best part!

Changes Are A Comin'

2011-12-28T21:00:00.000-08:00

That title sounds so much more ominous than what it actually represents. But, since I do like to OCCASIONALLY be overly dramatic, I find it fitting.;0) I had thought about making a combination post where I talked about changes that I plan to make for the blog combined with what my goals are for the dogs in the upcoming year, but I thought that might get a little lengthy. So I'm splitting it up. Today will be about the blog and either tomorrow or Friday will be about goals (just depends on which day yields me more time).

I'm not planning on doing anything terribly drastic, just some little things that I would like to add in and kind of get a general feed back on what people thought. The first change that I'll make has to do with my Blogger Tuesday. Instead of picking a blog to highlight each week, I'm going to take it down to once a month.

I'm also toying with the idea of doing a weekly training challenge. I really enjoyed doing the trick challenges on the Smooth Sailin' blog at the beginning of this year. They got me trying new and different things with the dogs, and we all enjoyed it! It also helped to spice up our training time, something that I've felt has been a little lacking lately. The challenges would be fairly simple. It's something that I would be fitting in with all three of my guys, so nothing too complex that would turn me into a stress monster. I've started compiling a list already and I think it could be fun. I'd post videos of how our training of the "trick" went and if there were others who were regularly joining in, I'd like to include links to their blogs on my post so that other people could check them out and see how other handlers and various other dogs accomplished and went about the training.

Movie Monday is definitely staying! I'm having fun with that. And the weekly training videos would be separate from the Movie Monday videos. Videos galore!! What I would like to do is add a little something to it. I follow a few non-dog bloggers who do some video blogging and I LOVE their vlogs!! I thought that it might be fun once a month to do a video blog post. I have a few ideas about what I could start off talking about, but questions or ideas would always be welcome! It's fun to "get to know" someone who's blog you follow without being a stalker.;0) I have a fun idea for January that I'm hoping will work out!

And finally, as always, I have such a fun time taking daily pictures of my dogs throughout the month of December, that I wanted to try and find a way to keep myself going with it minus the "pressure" of joining a group. So I'm going to issue myself weekly photo challenges and I'll post the results here. I'd like to play with lighting a little more and some of the settings on my little point and shoot and I think this is just the ticket to keep me snapping away!

So those are the changes that are forth coming to the blog in 2012!! I hope you like the ideas and will like the actuality once I get going with it! If you have any thoughts or questions, just leave me a note in the comments section!:)

Blogger Tuesday

2011-12-27T20:50:00.000-08:00

We got an award!:0) And I'm finally getting around to posting about it.;0) Falkor and Famke as well as Luke gave us this award. Thanks guys!! This award fits in perfectly with my Blog of the Week thread too! Here are the rules:

(1) Thank the blogger that gave you the award and then add a link to their blog.

(2) Reveal your top five picks (with less than 200 readers) and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.

(3) Copy and Paste the Award to Your Blog.

(4) Hope that the people you’ve sent the award to forward it to their five favorite up-and-coming bloggers, and keep it going!

My top five picks are:

1) Gemini's Leo the Lionhearted. This is a blog about my friend Kennedy's fluffy midget Leo! Leo competes in agility, rally, and obedience currently. He's full of cute spunk and is lots of fun to watch!

2) The Wild Life. This blog is about the life and times of an adorable black great dane puppy. They haven't posted anything in a little while and I'm hoping that this award along with maybe some more followers will encourage them to keep at it!

3) Shutter Hounds. This blog is about two retired racing greyhounds and their photographer daddy. I LOVE blogs with pictures, especially really good ones!:0)

4) Running with Kona. This blog is about the running (and life in general) adventures of Kona and her person. They go on some lovely runs and take some great pictures.

5) Northfield Natter. The focus of this blog is more on competition obedience, but these dogs seem to do it all!

So head on over and check them all out!

Not In Love

2011-12-26T18:05:00.000-08:00

I most certainly am not in love with December 26th. It's the one day of the year that I dread the most. December 26th means all the Christmas festivities and anticipation are over for another year.:( I strongly dislike this. Thankfully today has been a full day so I haven't had a lot of time to dwell on it. I went in to work this morning for a few hours. Then it was off to lunch with some friends from high school who were all in town. Then home to take the dogs for a hike and get in some cardio while it was still light out. And now I'm sitting down and collecting my thoughts for the week. Still no video for Movie Monday. Tomorrow I'll be posting about the award that we received!:) And then on Wednesday I'll talk about some of the upcoming changes that I plan to make to the blog.

In the mean time, since almost all of my Christmas cards have gone out, I thought that I would share our card with you.:) These are the pictures that we had taken back at the end of September by Alicia with Four-Legged Photo. We happened to pick the one day at the end of September that turned out to be hot and humid and also had some uncooperative ducks. Which meant that getting Bess' attention was difficult. At any rate, the pictures turned out great and I'm happy to share them with all of you! I hope your holiday was full of family, friends, and good times!!

And for anyone in the area who is interested, we received four referral cards worth 25% off a session fee, to give out. Drop me a line and I'm more than happy to give you a referral card!

Christmas Eve!!

2011-12-24T10:10:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas Eve!!! The day is almost here! I do have to admit that I think I kind of like Christmas Eve better than the day itself. There's all the anticipation. The magic of what's coming tonight. And just the general good cheer and build up. It's just all sorts of warm fuzziness.:0)

This morning I started my day off on the best foot possible by taking the danes out for a long hike. I opted to leave Ruthie at home because I knew it was going to be cold, I wanted to do a longer hike, and it was also damp. Being a low rider dog, even with a coat on, she gets way more wet than the big dogs just trucking along on the trail. And considering how mucky the big dogs' coats got, she would have been a total mud ball! So Heffner, Bess, and I headed out for an early morning hike so that we could get in a few good hours of actual hiking. The down side of that is that it meant starting our hike while it was still totally dark out. Thankfully I picked a trail that I know very well and am comfortable with at least the first portion of the footing. Even so, I still almost bit it within the first few minute. Figures! Other than that, it was a lovely hike and just what I needed!!

Since I haven't really done much actual updating on the blog, I did have a fun Thur. evening. I met up with my friend Elizabeth for a handling class! I mentioned previously that she had asked me if I would handle her dane puppy Ruby for her (did she really think that I would have said no???). Thursday night was a practice to see how we were going to mesh together and for me to get a chance to work her. Elizabeth has already been taking her to handling classes herself and has worked with her a ton, so she's already a really well behaved girl and great about letting me hand stack her. Really the only work that needs to be done is for her to get more used to working with me so that she's totally comfortable. Our first show together will be the big Rose City Classic in January! I'm so excited!!

Other than that it's been a whole lot of getting things done at work and finishing up Christmas shopping.

I hope that everyone has a great Christmas Eve and a very merry Christmas!!

2011-12-23T21:22:00.001-08:00

Happy December 23rd! I should have time to post tomorrow, but just in case I don't I wanted to wish everyone a very merry Christmas!!

Wordless Wednesday

2011-12-21T22:01:00.000-08:00

Some Days....

2011-12-20T21:08:00.000-08:00

Happy December 20th! Today when I got home from work I was having one of those days where I had a very short fuse with the dogs and they were pushing all the right buttons. I get home and after letting everyone outside and then back in, I hear some odd rustling upstairs in the media room. Heffner apparently got bored today while Adam and I were at work. He's none too thrilled that his best buddy Bess is getting crated during the day now (she's in season) and obviously is having a hard time keeping himself occupied. So he decided to bring it to my attention that I had not in fact cleaned up the various bags, napkins, and boxes that were used to house the food that I brought home for the movie marathon this past Saturday. He did this by shredding everything. Everywhere. Thanks Heff....

So while I'm getting that all cleaned up, Heffner and Bess are expressing how excited they are to see each other after such a long separation, by rough housing that turns into humping. I just wish that had been the only problem. Except that Bess often loses some bladder control when she's in season. It's annoying, but it happens and then goes away once she's done. We already had an incident this morning in the ball studio where she peed through her boxers and onto the giant core disc. Then today in the hallway, it happened again. And now she's down to her last pair of boxers until I get another load of laundry done. Super! At least we now have a carpet cleaner of our very own to clean that kind of stuff up!

And my only complaint about Ruthie today is just that she was uber whiny in the car while she was waiting for it to be her turn at the agility barn. So really it's just the big dogs that were driving me crazy.

Weekend Update...

2011-12-19T19:45:00.000-08:00

Happy December 19th! The goal for this shot was to get a footsies only picture. But when you're a midget and short little legs, this ends up including your cute little face.;0)

And yes, if you're keeping track, I have fallen off the wagon and I missed two days worth of pictures, but I have a good excuse! Saturday was the annual Christmas Movie Marathon with the following line up:

Holidaze
Claymation Christmas
The Year Without a Santa Claus
Twas the Night Before Christmas
Santa Claus is Comin' To Town
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
Frosty the Snowman
Frosty's Winter Wonderland
A Charlie Brown Christmas
A Garfield Christmas
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Classic Holiday Stories
Pee-Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
A Christmas Story
The Santa Claus 2

We had friends and family in and out of the house throughout the day and it was a lot of fun. Until the evening, which is usually the more fun "adult" part of the day. It was either something that I ate or I didn't wash my hands well enough after feeding the dogs, but I got suddenly and rather violently ill. To the point where I couldn't leave the bathroom. Which is super awesome when you have friends over that you don't get to hang out with often enough. Pretty much a little ways into National Lampoon's I was hugging the toilet. Not so great. So I missed taking a picture. Then the following day I was still feeling rather ill and spent most of the day in bed. I finally got up in time to go see the Nutcracker with some friends. Well worth it! But came home pretty beat. Which leads us into today. And I still don't have a video for Movie Monday. D'oh!

But I do have a funny story!;0) Tonight on our run, the danes and I got pulled over by the police. We were almost home and starting to cut through the park near our house when the lights flashed. I knew that it had to be directed at us since I hadn't seen anyone else around at all. Sure enough, I turn around and the officer rolls down his window. He then asks me if my dogs are great danes. Yep! A couple of dog loving officers wanted to ask about my dogs.:0) The other officer in the vehicle has a mastiff and her interest was perked when they saw me jogging by with my guys since Bess has similar coloring to her mastiff. So that was kind of neat. The dogs got to go up and say hi and it was a funny end to our evening.

I hope that everyone's Monday has treated them gently! And holy crap, it's the week before Christmas!!!!!!!

Excited!

2011-12-16T18:37:00.001-08:00

Happy December 16th from Santa's little helper! he he he Isn't she adorable?!

I am currently letting out a big sigh of relief! I made it through the work week, barely. I got the bigger chunks of house cleaning done that I needed to do. And tomorrow is the Christmas Movie Marathon!!! Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

The down side is that I have a mountain of laundry that still needs to be folded and few minor things to get done. My cousin Dylan is coming from Ft. Lewis to spend the night and be here for the "opening ceremonies." I'm really excited to have him here because he's been deployed for the last while. Not only is it great to have him back on safer soils, but it'll be great to physically have him here!

So once again, apologies for the lack of content, but I must jet to finish things up. I hope that everyone is having a most enjoyable Friday and here's to a wonderful weekend!!

Competitive?

2011-12-15T19:36:00.000-08:00

Happy December 15th! Tonight I was very firmly reminded of exactly when the danes get the most competitive, and specifically Heffner. I took the big dogs out for a run and along part of our route we just happened to get caught behind someone running towards the MAX station. Unfortunately for me, the dogs don't seem keen on the idea of someone being ahead of them. There gets to be a lot more pressure on the leashes as the dogs really lean into them in an effort to catch up to and pass this person who has the audacity to be ahead of us! All I really wanted was a nice little jog. Instead I got a reminder that my dogs can run me into the ground any time any where.

And with that, I really need to clean some floors. We received a blog award that I really want to get to and I'm hoping that I will be able to by this weekend or early next week. I hope that everyone is looking forward to a good Friday!

Scheduling Fun

2011-12-14T19:44:00.001-08:00

Happy December 14th! I took a series of pictures last night out by the Hillsboro stadium in an attempt to capture the pretty lights in the background. Trying to do that while also getting all three dogs in the frame while also trying not to use a flash that washed everything out AND while getting all three dogs to look at the camera, proved to be too much for one very cold photo shoot. Bess seriously thinks that the red light on the camera means that the camera will eat her soul if she looks directly into it. Hence why I end up with a lot of shots with her NOT looking directly at the camera. If you could only see all the out takes and deleted shots that I get! So the above picture was the best out of the lot. Because I had a feeling that things weren't exactly going to turn out the way that I had hoped, I also took a shot of just the pretty lots from the angle that I preferred, and that thankfully turned out well.:)
I have other things that I would like to catch up on with the blog, but I am finding myself very fast running out of time with various holiday activities looming, so my posts this week will also unfortunately be pretty short on content. I apologize that it's been a little boring around here lately! I hope that the pictures help! And I have some changes/additions that I would like to do with the blog in the new year that I will introduce once my favoritest holiday has passed and I can breathe again.;0)

And did I mention that I did a HORRIBLE job scheduling all my projects at work this week and next??? There wasn't really anything that I could do about it with the time frames that I'm working with and the various needs of the projects, but good lord! I'm running myself ragged at work and I can't wait to come up for air from that as well! (this is how this post got it's title ;0) )

Blogger Tuesday

2011-12-13T21:41:00.000-08:00

Happy December 13th!! For today's Blog of the Week, I'm going to revisit a blog that I've posted about before and referenced in other posts. It's a blog that I would like to bring additional attention to right now, because this team is about to embark on a very exciting trip and I would really like for as many people as possible to cheer them on. The blog is Danes Can Q.:0) Kennedy and Vegas have worked very hard to get where they're at and I do not envy them the schedule that they have. So head on over and wish them lots of luck at the AKC agility invitational!!

And here's a few more pictures for today.;0)

Pictures With Santa

2011-12-12T19:46:00.000-08:00

Happy December 12th! I would have had a Movie Monday for you today, but the Movie Maker program kept crashing my laptop.:( I actually captured footage of a deer coming down onto the "road" the danes and I were on and the initial pursuit. Definitely proud of myself for that one! Hopefully I'll get whatever the problem is cleared up this week.

And since I still have a boat load of laundry and cleaning to do, these pictures of the dogs with Santa are going to have to be enough.;0) Enjoy!

Home!!

2011-12-11T18:22:00.000-08:00

Happy December 11th!! Everyone is home now and settling back in. It feels so good to be home!! I am trying not to think about how much we have to get done by Friday this week. Ack! The house needs some serious cleaning. Especially after lugging in all of our gear from the trip. The tree still needs to be decorated. The Lego Christmas village still needs to be constructed. And I need to get everything ready for the Christmas Movie Marathon on Saturday. Ack! Oh yes, and because I took almost all of last week off from work, I had to cram a metric butt ton of work into this week. This shall be a great reason as to why taking a vacation during December is not a very good idea for me.

Oh yes, and it looks like Bess will go into season any day now. Which is actually perfect timing! She should be out just in time for at least some obedience/rally trials, if not also an agility trial. And this works out great for the trials I have planned for winter and spring. Which then leads into her getting spayed in the summer! Occasionally these things work along a time line that I prefer.;0)

I hope everyone had a great weekend!! I promise to start taking actual pictures of the dogs now.:0)

Dec. 10th

2011-12-10T07:49:00.001-08:00

Happy December 10th! Today is our last day in Whistler and all I can think about is seeing my pooches tomorrow!! Adam and I are going to do one more day on the slopes to help pass the time and then it's packing. I hope everyone is having a great start to their weekend!

Dec. 9th

2011-12-09T16:07:00.001-08:00

Happy December 9th!! It's kind of hard to tell, but both the red and the green are in there, but the green is more muted. I'd lighten the picture, but then it would wash out the prettiness of the lights against the darkness. So you'll just have to take my word for it.;0)

Today has been another lovely day on the slopes! Adam's really getting the hang of snowboarding and REALLY improved a lot today. We were actually going down one of the shorter green runs together towards the end of the day. I have not too surprisingly discovered that I really enjoy skate skiing. Considering how much closer it is to cross country skiing, I shouldn't have been that surprised. And I love doing tight, sharp turns where I get to really dig in with my skis.:)

I believe that we're going to do another day of skiing tomorrow and Adam is so far game for trying a longer run, so that should be pretty fun! Happy Friday everyone!

2011-12-08T08:12:00.000-08:00

Happy December 8th!! I am happy to report that yesterday's skiing was actually really great! The group that I got into for my lesson turned out to be at a lower level than I needed, but our instructor was great and was able to give me different challenges and grill me more on my technique. Once I actually got up on my skis I realized that I have actually become a better downhill skier thanks to all the skijoring that I've done with my dogs!

I hadn't really thought about it, but I've had to utilize a LOT of the same skills that I need for downhill skiing with my cross country skis while getting pulled behind the dogs. I'm way more confident on the skis now than I was the last time I was on downhill skis and I'm a lot better at last second changes in direction and speed. And here I was worried that spending so much time on cross country skis was going to mean that I was clueless on downhill ones! That was a really pleasant surprise.

At the moment I am "patiently" waiting for Adam to get ready so that we can head back to the slopes. I'm not sure what the rest of our party is going to do, but I want to ski a lot more today!

I also have some pictures to post of Ruthie and Remi! Many thanks to Diane for nabbing these!

Dec. 7th

2011-12-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

Happy December 7th! This is one of my stalkarazzi pictures. Now that more people in the neighborhoods around ours have put up their decorations, I've found myself wishing that I was able to nab a few more pictures. These will do though.

We made it Whistler in one piece. Dropping off the danes was the hardest. They've been there before and they will be excellently taken care of, but I still feel horribly guilty none the less. When we got to the condo that we're renting with two other couples, I was a little worried about the snow. There's snow, but not a ton of it. Adam and I have lesson around lunch time since it's been several years for me since I've been on down hill skis and he's trying out snowboarding. So we'll see what the conditions actually feel like.

I am finding it hard not having my dogs here though. We went out walking around yesterday evening to get some dinner and check things out. There are a ton of people here with their dogs. I'm trying to decide whether it's separation anxiety that I have or a co-dependency problem.;0)

Stalkarazzi

2011-12-06T06:20:00.001-08:00

Happy December 6th!! I took some pictures last Thur. night when I took the dogs out to do some Christmas house stalking. So I've got a memory card preloaded with daily shots. Therefore I won't be entirely silent on the blog while I'm gone. Still have to keep up with the photo challenge!

We're heading out in just a bit, so I better actually go help Adam pack the truck. Happy Tuesday!

Reindeer?

2011-12-05T21:13:00.001-08:00

Happy December 5th!! The dogs all wore these same antlers for some of their shots with Santa, but I wanted a "normal" shot of them at home with the antlers on. And Ruthie even helped me out with a ridiculously cute shot that I couldn't have possibly posed any better myself! But first to the rest of the pictures.;0) This next picture I could swear that she looks rather large in.
And The Midget does make some of the best disgruntled faces around!
And oh gawd, the cuteness!!

She kind of reminds me of Max from The Grinch. The poor little dog with the antlers that were too big for his head to hold up.
Today has been a pretty hectic day. Tomorrow morning Adam and I are meeting up with some friends in Whistler. And I have had to go through the whole process of getting things ready for a departure both at work and at home. After a very frustrating morning, I have come to the conclusion that I am sick and tired of going some where. The getting ready to go. The dealing with stuff that you inevitably forgot about, while you're on vacation. And then the dealing with everything once you're back. I've had to do a little too much of it more recently and I was honestly at my breaking point this morning and was ready to just not go at all. However, it looks like we are still going and I'm going to just have to take a chill pill or three and get my act in gear.

I'm also already having separation anxiety from my dogs.:0( Ruthie got dropped off with my friend Diane, who has a frenchie named Remi. Remi is also one of the frenchies on our obedience team. They've met before and Diane and her husband were awesome about taking her while we were going to be gone. The danes will be boarding up at Gramma G's. It's right on our way north and is obviously the perfect place for the danes to be. So while I will miss my dogs, they will all be in great hands and I just need to once again, chill out.

I'm looking forward to lots of fun in the snow! It's been years since I've downhill skied! I'm also bringing along my cross country skis as well as my snow shoes. It is going to be really weird playing in the snow without at least one dog with me. I haven't done that pretty much since we brought Heffner home. Weird!

Anyhow, I hope that everyone's Monday has been gentle and that the rest of the week is looking great!!

Tree Hunting

2011-12-04T15:47:00.001-08:00

Happy December 4th! Today has been a pretty packed, but enjoyable day so far. I thought the above picture was pretty funny after I took it. Ruthie can have the most disgusted look on her face sometimes!LOL

Our morning started off with a trip to PetUtopia with the danes for a core strengthening, i.e. on the ball stuff, demo with Bobbie. She was doing a demo and I think a certification of some people from FitPAWS. She wanted to give them a wide variety of sizes of dogs and I just happen to have two dogs on the giant end of the spectrum who get worked with these exercises on a very regular basis.:) I was very honored that she asked us to come and do this! In addition to Bobbie being a friend, she is a fabulous instructor who is very knowledgeable about a lot of dog related topics. Not only that, but she's always pushing herself to learn more and to try new things. Working with her is always a blast and I feel like she has really helped push me in the beginning to try new things with my dogs and think outside of the box.

But I digress! Each dog got about a half hour to strut their stuff and go through some of the exercises. It was a lot of fun AND I even got both dogs some exercise! While we were all talking, Bobbie brought up something that I had totally forgotten about. There was a local TV station that a bit on the classes that Bobbie was teaching at PetUtopia and we were asked to come and join. Both Heffner and Bess got to be on TV!! Here's the clip.:0)

After our portion, I stuck around a little bit to watch the next couple of dogs. From there I headed out with the danes to do a light hike, which was awesome! Then we came home, they relaxed and I started doing a whole lot of chores around the house that I haven't been able to get to during the week. Once Adam got home, he and I headed out with Ruthie to pick out our Christmas tree.

Since we generally load the tree up into the back of the truck for easy transportation, bringing the danes along doesn't work out. However, Ruthie fits quite nicely into the cab of the truck, and she did get ditched in the morning while I was playing with the big dogs. I felt it only fitting that she got an outing of her own! Here are some of the pictures from our little outing:

Taking the tractor ride back to the truck.

And now I need to finish up the food that I'm bringing to our obedience club's holiday party!! Definitely looking forward to that!:0) I hope everyone had a great weekend!

Who Wore It Best?

2011-12-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

Every fashionista wants to be known for wearing an outfit well and making a statement. Sadly, my dogs are stuck with what I have and find amusing to put on them. I had this idea the other night to put the dogs in my matching ear warmer and scarf (that matches the danes' Christmas coats) and see who was the cutest. I'll let the readers decide. So tell me, who wore it best (and sorry that the pictures are a little dark; I obviously need to work on my lighting)?

This morning Ruthie and headed off to meet up with our frenchie obedience team members. Regardless of how our team actually ends up doing, we are definitely going to be the cutest stinkin' team out there!! Especially if Remi and Ike decide it's play time during the off leash heeling portion! I am very happy to say, though, that we had a successful morning practice and we have definitely improved since our last practice. I just need to work on remembering to keep me eyes on the handlers on either side of me so that I match my pace and what I'm doing to them. It gets a little hard to do that when I'm focusing so much on Ruthie. She was doing really well and she actually had some stays!! Not long distance ones, but we are much improved from before!

Then in a little less than an hour, I'm packing up all three dogs and we're heading out to get some pictures taken with Santa! I almost let the opportunity slip away from me, but when I saw Margie, the owner of PetUtopia, post about still having spots open, I got on it! We've gotten pictures of the dogs with Santa there for the past few years and the pictures are by far better than what I've seen at most places. I'm planning on getting there a little early so that I can hit up one of the fabulous employees to help me wrangle all three dogs, since Adam is otherwise indisposed with a little Christmas event of his own this afternoon. Thankfully Margie knows that Heffner has personal space issues and she is always really awesome about helping me out and making us and the other customers as comfortable as can be.:0)

And at some point today, I swear that I would really love to take a nap! I got home pretty late from Cavalia last night and we had our obedience team practice sort of first thing this morning. Cavalia was great though! It was definitely a feast for the senses and there was so MUCH to watch!

I hope everyone is having a great start to their weekend!

Nutcracker Princess?

2011-12-02T06:04:00.000-08:00

Happy December 2nd!! I had to post today's picture in the morning because I won't be getting home until late tonight and wasn't sure that I'd quite remember to post it.;0) I have a thing for nutcrackers. I LOVE the ballet performance, and will happily be going to see it in a couple of weeks with some friends. In general, I just love the whole nutcracker story and the figures themselves. There's such a variety out there! I scored this year's guy from JoAnn's while I was picking up the material for Ruthie's Christmas coat. He was 60% off!! I LOVE Christmas sales on Christmas items!:0)
I couldn't resist him. I call him Mr. Fabulous.:0) And here's what the nutcracker table looks like minus The Midget.

Today's picture was having fun with a little dog that I can put in places I can't physically put the danes. Though, in fits of zoomies the danes have each leaped up onto that table and used it as a launching pad. Thankfully those were isolated incidences and they were REALLY going crazy when that happened. I swear that it's not a regular occurrence for the big dogs to climb up on a table!

And finally, last night's stalkerazzi mission with the dogs, camera, and me hiding in bushes around peoples' decorated houses was a success! Or at least I think it was. I haven't actually looked at the pictures that I took as of yet, but I have to admit that it was pretty fun "sneaking" around like that. I had to make sure that the occupants of the house couldn't see me taking the picture, that there weren't any pedestrians about, and definitely that no one was about to exit the house while I was taking the picture. Totally fun! And a fun way to kill an hour and a half with the dogs.;0)

I hope everyone has a wonderful Friday! I'm looking forward to some hopefully awesome elfing at work! And then this evening I'm having dinner with some friends and then we're going to see Cavalia!!

HELLO December!

2011-12-01T18:49:00.000-08:00

It's finally the month that I wait all year for!!!! I can't even begin to explain how happy I am that December is here.:0) We started our Christmas elf fun at work today too! I do have to admit that I'm a little disappointed in the participants so far this year. I expected that at least one person would go big this year (I can't because it would absolutely give away who I have) and I even had hopes that more than one person would compete for most awesome Day 1 prank. I was sorely mistaken. That's not to say that there weren't some cute things done, it's just that nothing compared to the person last year who got their entire desk individually wrapped in wrapping paper. It as epic! I may have to give up the ghost on who I have and just go crazy!!

So yes, welcome to December!! The above picture of Ruthie was actually a chance shot that I happened to like. It turns out that she thinks the Christmas countdown snowman is evil. I could NOT get her to hold a sit next to him. I finally got her in a down and had hunkered down to take a face on shot, when she quickly turned to make sure the snowman wasn't going to eat her, and I snapped the picture. She promptly darted sideways, because apparently he was not to be trusted. But at least I got the shot! And I also got a picture of her in her coat.
We are having a nice low key night at home and I think I'm going to take the dogs out for walks individually and paparazzi some of the nice outdoor Christmas decorations that I've seen popping up. Who doesn't want a crazy person with a giant dog and a camera in their front yard???

PIR and Photo Challenge

2011-11-30T20:11:00.000-08:00

This past Monday night, Adam and I headed out to Portland International Raceway with all three dogs for the annual Winter Wonderland doggie walk night! One night a year they close the track to vehicular traffic and allow people to come with their dogs. This is the first time that Adam has gone in years! It has rained pretty unpleasantly the past few, but this year we lucked out. No rain! Which also meant that there were a TON of people coming out to the event. I have to say, I do enjoy it more when there aren't so many people and dogs.

It ended up being a really nice night. Adam took both the girls, so that I could focus on Heffner and making sure that it was a more enjoyable experience for him.

As in previous years, the dogs were all decked out in their Christmas coats.:0) This year, with the addition of Ruthie, I had another coat to make. I went to JoAnn's on Sunday when I realized that I hadn't even bought the material yet and the event was the following night! I couldn't find any Christmas themed holiday fleece type material that I liked that was going to be similar to what the danes had, so I went a slightly different route. I bought some adorable Disney themed Christmas material for the top layer and then got a plain, lighter weight Christmasy fleece for the bottom layer to provide some actual warmth. I used a jacket that I had already bought for her as my pattern of sorts. Sewed it all up and I was pretty pleased with how it turned out! She actually likes wearing this coat a lot better than the coat I bought her. And it's pretty stinkin' cute!
I'll get a better picture of her in it. Seriously cuteness!!

Our plan of attack was to park, get the tickets, then go back to the truck and get the dogs. I did NOT want to stand in line with other dogs crawling up Heffner's butt and me getting more and more agitated and him ticked off. It would have ruined the night. As it was, it took us about 15 min. to go a half mile to get to a parking spot because things were so packed. That didn't exactly put me in the best mood. I was really glad that we had left the dogs in the car once we got in line. The line was HUGE! And during our enjoyable little stay, there were even a few dog fights between dogs in the packed line. Common sense does factor in at events like this. But I had a game plan and I was going to be damned if oblivious people were going to ruin my night!

I had brought along lots of treats because I fully planned on using this exposure to so many LEASHED random dogs to work on Heffner's edginess that I saw at the previous trial (though I have a feeling that had a lot more to do with being in pain from the three cracked toe nails on his rear feet, that I didn't see until Sun. evening). It worked perfectly!! I actually had him on a loose leash for chunks of the walk. And he also had some awesome heeling (go figure, there were treats involved)!! I made sure to give as wide of a berth to other dogs as I could and when some of the spacing was getting tight and people were walking way slower than I wanted to, I just asked to allow some space through and encourage the owners not to let their dogs sniff Heffner since he wasn't a fan. I did receive a few snarky remarks, to which I really wanted to ask them if they would prefer that I say something to them ahead of time and have my dog not react than to have me say nothing and have my dog react in a manner that would cause them to think that he was about to eat their dog. That's just one of those things that I don't get. When someone gives you a warning, it's in your dog's best interest to take heed. That and I REALLY don't like rude dogs. Even around Bess and Ruthie, I'm not a fan of rude dogs up in their business.

And I got pretty off topic there. The take home point is that Heffner was awesome! No outbursts at all!:0) Still going to keep up with the original plan to put some effort into that reactivity though. It never hurts!

In the process of enjoying the walk and also trying to make sure that we maintained a certain bubble around us, Adam and I didn't take very many pictures, so I don't really have much to share.

Which leads me into the next portion of this post.:0) Sam over at Mister Rugby Sevens UD is having a Christmas themed photo challenge of sorts. I LOVE Christmas photo challenges!! Even though I'm not always able to keep up with them, it's certainly fun to try. The past couple of years I've issued myself a photo challenge with the dogs to do a daily Christmas themed picture even single day starting on December 1st. Last year it was getting pretty tough to come up with fresh ideas for photos, but this year I have a new toy, er dog!;0) With Ruthie in the mix, I can do some new spins on photos that I've done before. I can't guarantee that I will be able to stay on top of the daily photos, but I'm certainly going to try! I'm hoping that I'll see lots of great pictures on other people's blogs as well!!

Blogger Tuesday

2011-11-29T17:16:00.000-08:00

As an amendment to yesterday's post, I realized that I hadn't actually asked Heffner or Ruthie to sit on the balance disc. I realized this as I was starting to work with Ruthie this morning and I decided to try it with her. And sure enough, the little squirt can sit on her smaller balance disc! I'll try it out with Heffner on Thur. morning, but I have a feeling that I'll have a similar result.

Now for Blogger Tuesday! My pick for Blog of the Week is Evolve Animal Services! The author of the blog holds a masters degree in Animal Science and a Ph.D in Nutritional Sciences. While still a relatively new blog, she has some pretty helpful and informative posts on canine nutrition. And what I also love is that she includes citations of papers that she references in her posts!! Totally awesome! So head on over and check it out!

Movie Monday - Conditioning

2011-11-28T21:20:00.001-08:00

Today's Movie Monday is conditioning related. This is an exercise that you got a little taste of from the Parades video. Basically I got all three dogs to balance on an appropriately sized core disc. For the danes, it's one of the giant discs. For Ruthie, it's a much smaller disc that I purchased at Fred Meyer. And just for kicks, I had Ruthie balance on the balance pod as well. Currently Bess is the only one who will go into a sit. She's got mad skills with her butt.;0) I don't push the dogs to learn any of the exercises and things usually just progress however the dogs are most comfortable. Often in a manner that I wouldn't have thought to try on purpose! That's actually kind of how I started working towards this exercise, actually.

We started with the paw shake while the dog's butt is on the core disc. While we were doing that, Bess started walking across the disc by first getting all four feet on it. So I figured, why not try getting them to balance with all four feet on it? Bess caught on really quickly and she picked it up fast. Heffner took a little longer. I don't think it was really until after we started working on the four feet in a box trick that he started experimenting with all four feet on the disc. And then once we added Ruthie in, I wanted to hold off on posting this exercise until I got her up to snuff.

Without further ado, here's the video:

Pictures!

2011-11-27T14:16:00.000-08:00

Lets just say that yesterday's Civil War game was a bit brutal for beaver fans. We lost. Kind of big time. I stopped watching for a while after the half when it was only 21-7, U of O. By the end of the third quarter or beginning of the fourth when I started watching again, it was 41-7, U of O. Yeah, not so great. We did end up scoring two more touch downs, but that was it. Thankfully I work in a lab full mostly of OSU grads, so we will have some commiserating to do. We do have one duck fan, but he's already been told that he's not allowed to say anything. 1) He didn't go to college there. And 2) he's not even from this country (Australia). Therefore, according to the rules of engagement, he doesn't have a leg to stand on and can only crow about victories to fellow band wagon duck fans.;0) On the up side, my dogs looked pretty stinkin' cute!

As promised, though a bit later than I had originally planned, I have some performance pictures taken at the national specialty. These pictures were very skillfully taken by Olga of Gadabout Photography! She did such a great job capturing pictures of my guys! I LOVE them!! These pictures are a combination of obedience, agility workshop, parades, and the one half assed agility trial run that I did with Heffner.

I hope everyone has had a fabulous weekend!!

Civil War!

2011-11-26T10:47:00.000-08:00

It's Civil War time folks! Today the Oregon State Beavers play the University of Oregon Ducks! Our little family bleeds black and orange since Adam and I both graduated from Oregon State. My dad also graduated from OSU as did Adam's dad and mom and several other members of his family. Our roots run deep for our school and we'll be rooting them on today! (even though the odds aren't looking terribly good in our favor)

And since I didn't have any Civil War worthy pictures of all three dogs, I decided to have a little mini photo shoot to hopefully get just the right picture. Of course, getting the "perfect" picture of all three dogs can be an exercise in extreme patience. But for whatever reason, all three dogs decided to humor me today and behaved very well for their pictures. Even The Midget, who is fond of pretending that she doesn't understand what "stay" means.;0) I was pretty pleased with how the above picture turned out! Naturally there are additional photos.:)

The Midget is NOT amused. Are they wrist guards or are they leg warmers???
Since I wasn't exactly sure how well I was going to be able to get all three dogs to hold still with the props I had in mind, I shot the pictures in stages. Here's the first group shot without any props other than Ruthie's "leg warmers."
Almost forgot the cute Beaver football, which Heffner and Ruthie thought was a stuffie for them.
Heffner had the distinction of being the one stuck wearing the hat.
And the final product is the one at the top of the post.:0) The flag that Bess is holding is one of those car flags that sits in the window. I warmed her up with it separately and gave her lots of praise for first putting her mouth on it and then for holding it. It was really awkward for her to hold. It's heavier on one end and the "bar" itself is oddly shaped so that it's not terribly conveniently shaped to fit in her mouth. The diameter is about right though. She's been used to working with her wooden dumbbell, so going back to plastic was also a little weird for her at first. Once she realized that she would get a lot of praise and cookies for holding it, she adjusted. Though I think she has a new found appreciation for her dumbbell.;0)

The National Continued - Final Wrap Up

2011-11-23T18:59:00.000-08:00

Well, these little wrap ups on our trip to the national specialty are starting to drag on well past the event itself. Since there isn't a whole lot more to tell performance wise, I wanted this to be the final wrap up. But I do have some pictures that I will wait until tomorrow to share so that I have an easy blog topic for tomorrow for when I'm in a food coma.;0)

Tuesday was agility and rally, with the top 20 in the evening. As of Monday night I thought I was fully recovered from whatever bug I had on Saturday night. So I was very surprised when I woke up Tuesday morning well before my alarm was supposed to go off, with an upset stomach. What on earth was up with that?? My brain also just wouldn't shut off. Thoughts were whirling around in my head at lightning speed and I had finally come to the conclusion that I was simply nervous. That's what it had to be. Never mind the fact that I hadn't otherwise been feeling nervous or that I don't usually get antsy ring nerves until shortly before I go in the ring. After about an hour of this and not being able to get back to sleep, I finally came to the realization that I really wasn't over whatever bug I had caught. I decided to just continue laying in bed and hopefully the upset stomach would go away as quickly as it came. No such luck. The minutes kept ticking by and I kept thinking of all the stuff I still needed to do with the dogs and myself in order to be ready to run. Finally at about 7 am I decided that I would scratch my first two agility runs, which were time to beat and FAST. No real hardship there. And hopefully by the time I had myself and the dogs together, I'd be good to go. Agility wasn't supposed to start until 8am and rally at 9am.

Wellllllllll, I did my best to suck it up and get all three dogs potty walked and fed. I had texted my friend Megan asking her to scratch us from our first two runs because I knew that I wouldn't be able to make it. And I was finally getting myself ready to go. Megan helped me track down some anti upset stomach stuff so that I could try to make it through the morning. My friend Faith picked up the stuff, brought it to me, and helped me walk the danes out to the field. I still just wasn't feeling all that great. But I thought that I could suck it up and make it through. That really wasn't to be.

I pretty much went over that morning in a previous post, so I won't go into the details again. It was a very disappointing day. I put so much pressure on myself to have the dogs ready for that week. In the weeks leading up to our departure I was tweaking both my personal schedule and my work schedule as much as I could to fit in training sessions, lessons, and matches so that we would be ready and actually look like we were ready. To have things so utterly fall apart on my end was heart breaking. My friends and the other competitors were really great and I don't know how I would have made it through that day without them. I can't even emphasize enough how awesome all the people were! Between the physical help that I was getting with everything and the general support, these people are some of the most amazing people that I know and I love them all dearly!!!

So there was a bit of a meltdown, but now that the time is behind me, it's not as big of a deal as it felt at that moment. There are other trials and there will be other national specialties. Though I have to admit that I am looking forward to going to the 2012 national without any dogs to be responsible for!!

And let us not forget that I had various specific outfits planned for the various events! But how on earth could you really have a themed outfit for an agility/rally trial? Simple, go with a super awesome kickball uniform!!LOL And I just happen to have some pictures with me in my super awesome get up, courtesy of Olga! I'll share her photography information tomorrow when I share the rest of the great pictures that she took of the pooches.:0)
Nice bright orange shirt (I think that everyone on our kickball team went to Oregon State, so it's an appropriate color), lucky shorts, nice garish knee high socks, and soccer cleats complete with matching orange laces.:0) If your performance isn't going to be great, you might as well look "good" doing it.;0) Needless to say, aside from the being ill part, I have a feeling that I stood out a little bit.

That night was the Top 20 and it was amazing! Unfortunately I don't have any pictures from any of that, but it was so much fun getting all gussied up!

And that pretty much is all the rest that there is to tell from this year's national specialty. I have a feeling that I won't be competing with the danes at another one until we have our next puppy (which I am happily on the waiting list for!), but that's okay. It just means that I'll have more money to do some shopping with at the ones in between!!

And now it's time to head off and do some serious relaxing before the big turkey day tomorrow. I hope that everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!!

Blogger Tuesday

2011-11-22T17:27:00.000-08:00

My pick for Blog of the Week is Rescued Insanity! I am particularly fond of the poem that she posted today and just enjoy reading the blog in general. The blog is about Shiva, a merle colored rescue, and her mom and their daily life. The blog is sprinkled throughout with various interesting web sites and blogs that Shiva's mom comes across. I've followed along as they've done some pretty fun challenges and have also brought my attention to other fun bloggers. It's just an enjoyable blog to read! So head on over and check them out!

Movie Monday

2011-11-21T19:33:00.000-08:00

Today's Movie Monday is a triple feature! I've got video clips of the danes taken from their agility runs this past weekend by Kennedy and her son. And not to be left out, I've got a funny video of Ruthie attacking a 2 Liter Coke bottle. Enjoy!

Agility Weekend Wrap Up

2011-11-20T15:34:00.001-08:00

This weekend we were doing some AKC agility up in Ridgefield, WA. Both danes were only entered in Standard and JWW both days. As you can tell by the above picture, we have a little something to celebrate! It was an overall great weekend, and I'll just start off by saying that Bess qualified in Open JWW both days to finish her Open Jumpers title!! Now for the nitty gritty.;0)
First run of the day on Saturday for both dogs was Open JWW. Thankfully there were enough dogs entered in our height class at that level that swapping the dogs out wasn't overly rushed. I had taken Bess out earlier that morning to run her around off leash. Thankfully this trial site is on a really big chunk of land with several buildings and amphitheaters that weren't in use, so I could find a vacant out of the way grassy area to let The Crazy off leash to hopefully burn off any zoomies she might have had. Sure enough, on our first long distance recall she went tearing all over the place! I ran her around for about 30 min., which also had the lovely side benefit of warming me up.:0) I felt pretty good about the course and where the dogs were at mentally that day and I was looking forward to running. Bess started things off with a really lovely, clean run. I was so happy! Jumpers has been a bit of a curse for us in AKC lately. Part of it has been me not mentally always being there because I have my own hang ups about the class, but I've been working on that and I think I'm starting to get over it. Certainly after this weekend I shouldn't be saying that I don't like it! I put Bess back in her crate and got Heffner out. I had just the right amount of time to warm him up and get him focusing on me before we ran. It's a delicate balance with him. I don't want him out for too long, otherwise he can start getting stressed and the commotion of the agility trial can get him to a point where he starts giving other dogs the hairy eye ball. But I also don't like just ripping him out of his crate and putting him out on the course. So the perfect balance on Sat. and he also had a nice, clean run!! Woo hoo!! Both dogs qualified and Bess was even fast enough to take fourth place.:)
Next up was Excellent Standard with Heffner. Again, another lovely course (actually all the courses this weekend were really nice!). The ONLY spot on the course where we had a blip was towards the end of the weaves. Something caught either Heffner's eye or his nose and he popped out of the weaves and started to head towards the trailer parked on the other side of the fence at that end of the arena. I had seen a few other dogs get distracted by this corner previously, but didn't think it would be an issue for us. We restarted the weaves and he finished them the second time with the rest of the course falling nicely into place. Unfortunately it's excellent, so NQ.
Next up was Bess in Open Standard. She had been in her crate for a few hours and I probably should have taken her out to potty before we ran, but I'm not even entirely sure that was what the problem was. Between the tire and the dog walk, she decided to run straight to the exit gait. I got her back and we did the dog walk. And then she lept over the contact. Bleck. We carried on, and then our weaves went to crap. She kept trying to enter on the second pole. It took us the full three tries in order to get them completely correct. And then came the a-frame. I gave my easy command a bit early and she stopped right at the apex. But I figured I could get her to just slowly come down. And she did. Until she was about to put a toe into the yellow, and she leaped off. Bleck. But the table to the jump to the chute were good! And then she ran around the outside of the final jump. Um, yeah. Not even sure what was going on. I took her outside and she did pee a lot, so maybe that was the problem. We'll just say that was the problem in order to ease my mind. Obviously, NQ in standard.
I think I have decided that I hate tall to small days. While it does usually mean that I get to go home a little bit earlier, somehow I end up being more frazzled. The way things were shaping up, I was headed for some serious conflicts between Heffner in Standard and both dogs in JWW. I hate conflicts. They just frazzle me. Sometimes it's not so bad, but others it just makes me off kilter. Today it did that and I wasn't in the right frame of mind to be running Heffner. Who was also really on edge today, but I'll get to that. Our Standard run was okay. He was slow, but didn't get a warm up. And we knocked a single bar. All together, only knocking the one bar really wasn't that bad considering he wasn't getting a whole lot of help from his handler. So NQ in Standard. And we immediately went from the Standard ring into Open JWW. They had held the class from starting until we were done with our run because Heffner was the second dog in the class.
JWW was very blah for Heffner and I. Again, me not being in the right place mentally for him definitely has a negative impact. Not exactly a revelation there, but definitely something that got driven home for me today. The run lacked umph, and was trotting most of it. We had one dropped bar, but otherwise it wasn't bad. So NQ for Heffner in JWW. I put him out and got ready with Bess. Bess was focusing well and definitely on her toes. Which worried me a little bit because I hadn't had time that morning to take her out and run her like the previous day. But she hung in there. She went and visited a little after one of the jumps, but she came back and had a clean run! Q for Bessy!! And she even took first place in the class!! And finished her Open JWW title!! Woo hoo!!
After more waiting, Bessy was up in Open Standard. I made sure to take her out and potty her, so she was empty going onto the course. We knocked a bar on one of the jumps and I can't remember why. Then we had our nemesis the a-frame. She was better today, but still missed the contact. I really thought she was going to hit it. But right now it seems to cause her physical pain to touch the yellow zone of it. We'll see if we can work on that. Though I have to say that she has been really great in practice about touching it. Maybe it's just that the trial a-frame has horrible acid smeared on it and I haven't been able to tell. I be that's what it is!!

Overall, it was a pretty weekend. We had fun hanging out even though it was pretty cold. The chance of snow thankfully didn't happen during the trial, which made me happy while I was driving. But poor Heffner seems to have tweaked something today. He's favoring his front right leg. He also managed to split a back toe nail pretty badly at some point and I'm sure that doesn't feel too good either. And like I mentioned, he's been more on edge this weekend and he had some reactive outbursts on both days. This definitely stresses me out. We've got the next month off from all trials and I'm going to use that time to work on some desensitization. It's helped in the past and hopefully it will help again. I'm also going to work on it at the next trial we're going to in January. If I feel like things are still bad at that point or we're not seeing much progress, Heffner will be taking some time off trialing until it's better under control. I just can't handle having a 150 lb. dog taking offense to everything and making it known. Plus, if he's too a point where he just can't cope with the trial setting any more, then that's a clear sign to me that he is done and I need to remove him from the setting that is causing him so much stress. If we weren't jiving in the ring like we have been, this decision would be a lot easier. Fingers crossed that we make some progress over the next month!

I hope everyone has had a great weekend and here's looking forward to Thanksgiving!!!

The National Continued - Parades

2011-11-18T16:22:00.001-08:00

Monday night of the national specialty was the Parades evening. I was really looking forward to that! It had already been a pretty long and full day, but I had put a lot of thought and effort into what I was going to do for each dog and I was really excited! My theme was the Backstreet Boys as I mentioned in a previous post. Heffner would be going in with their song "I Want It That Way" and Bess was going in to "Larger Than Life." And as I also mentioned, I was going for specific outfits for our events, so we'll start there.;0)

As a true BSB lover, I have been to MANY of their concerts. I chose one of the concert t-shirts I have from when all five guys were still in the group and was a shirt that I particularly liked. Hence the picture at the top of this post. For the pants, I wanted to make something a little more original with a little bit of my own "flair." Two pounds of "awesome" gems and a cheap pair of jeans later, I had the perfect pair of pants! Due to Heffner's routine, I needed to leave the front of the jeans mostly free of designs, but that left my entire backside to embellish. After a little thought, I put A.J. on one back pocket (my favorite BSB guy!), BSB on the other, Heffner's name down one leg, and Bess' name down the other. I loved it!! And because I had been running short on time before heading out to AZ, all of this was done from the hotel room.
Okay, so my super awesome outfit was complete, but what should I do for the dogs? A few months prior Kennedy had said that she would make the dogs a couple of special collars for the event, she just needed to know what I would like. She gave me some questions to ponder and get back to her on ideas. I really didn't have anything to give her. So I put out a plee on the blog as time was getting closer and I still had nothing and needed to give her enough time to actually make the collars. She read my plee (and probably the desperation in my words) and we did some emailing back and forth and got it figured out. I send her some pictures from the CD jacket as well as a couple of other group shots that I liked of the group and she came up with a truly custom job for the dogs!! The collars are AMAZING!! My only regret is that these special collars didn't get nearly the recognition that they deserved! Thankfully I can give out some serious props on the blog.:0) I really am in love with these collars!! Kennedy did such an amazing job, especially considering that I didn't really give her a whole lot to work with. She came up with the idea, figured it out, and produced a ridiculously awesome custom item! And the price didn't even reflect the amount of creativity that she put into it. If you need something really special and unique done, I definitely recommend hitting her up!;0) Without any more rambling, here are some shots of the collars.:0)

With all these little touches, I was stoked to get my dogs out there and show them off! About a half hour before the parades were scheduled to start, I started inflating the giant ball. That was fun. I had to find an out of the way space to use my VERY loud air compressor that wouldn't tick anyone off. Thankfully no one was around in the crating room, so I got things going in there. And of course, about half way through someone came in with their dog to get something out of their crate. Needless to say, they were a little surprised and wary at seeing this random person inflating a giant ball with a very loud contraption. Thankfully it was over and done with pretty quickly and I got everything set up near the ring. My friend Megan was going to help me balance the ball for Heffner and also be the lookout for when I should start getting him in line. I quite literally couldn't have done it without her!!! Everything went off without a hitch for both dogs. There was one small exception with Bess. I haven't done the four feet in a box with her for a few months now and I forgot to reintroduce it to her so that she could remember what to do. Part of what I was planning on doing in the ring with her was to have her do that trick with the tiny box. With all the excitement and everything going on, she just wasn't entirely sure what I was asking her to do, so we skipped that. And yes I have video!! My wonderful friend Faith was recording both dogs for me!! Here's the video.:0)

It was amazing being out there with my dogs and showing off some of their skills! As you may know, and hence why I have this blog going, I'm pretty damned proud of my dogs. We have our ups and downs, but regardless of that, I'm proud of them and everything that they have accomplished. They mean the world to me and it felt so good for them to have their individual time in the spot light. It also felt great that I had friends in the audience who were hooting and hollering for us. I have some pretty amazing friends.:0) That single event was absolutely the highlight of the trip for us and I'm so glad that I had that special moment with each of my dogs.

And we got some pretty cool ribbons!
But I do have to say, the Great Dane Club of Northern California parades ribbons are bigger! he he he....'cause we all know that size does matter.;0)
And thus concludes the first very full performance day that we had. In order to set things up for the agility and rally day, I'll remind you of what had happened just the day before and the fluids that I consumed that day. Obedience, the agility workshop, a surprise birthday party, and the parades were all on Monday. The previous Saturday night I had spent puking. Pretty much all of Sunday I had spent in bed recovering and not really feeling up to taking in a lot of fluids. By Monday morning I was feeling better, and had popped a couple of Advil and also downed a couple of Cokes to get me a little more alert. I didn't drink a whole lot of water that day even though it was hot and I was spending a lot of time out and about in the hot weather. So lets tally that up. Vomiting tends to dehydrate you. I was in a hot dry climate, which will also dehydrate you some. I drank a couple of Cokes, which are diuretics and cause you to pee out what moisture you have in your body. I was also doing a lot of running around with the dogs in the heat. And I didn't drink much water at all. I setting myself up for some serious dehydration!

And with that, I need to go get ready for dinner with some friends and then get ready for a cold weekend of AKC agility with the big dogs!! Happy Friday everyone!

The National Continued - Agility Workshop

2011-11-17T19:26:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try and wrap up the rest of our national specialty trip in the order of events. After our morning obedience runs, we had the agility workshop. I got working spots for both dogs. My original goal for the workshop was just using the opportunity to work them on the equipment in the exact ring that we would be competing in the next day. We hardly ever do any outdoor trials and after all the travel getting to AZ and then throwing their schedule completely out of whack, I figured that both dogs could use the time. Unfortunately the work shop had been originally scheduled for the morning, but that got altered so that obedience could be in the cooler morning time slot. I don't regret that, I just regret having a working spot and running my dogs during the heat of the day. And it was hot. I'm just not really a hot weather person. Hence why I take the summer off from competing with the dogs.;0)

The workshop wasn't entirely what I was hoping or needing it to be. Right now, the biggest problem I have with both of the danes is me. If our runs end up being NQs, 99% of the time (leaving a little room in there for Bess' zoomy runs) I do something little that screws us. And that's annoying. While it's nice to generally not be making huge mistakes right now, it's still frustrating to be doing stupid little ones that cost us a run. And I'm finally to the point where I'm getting irritated enough with myself that I'd actually like to be more proactive in doing something about it. So what I needed out of this workshop was for someone to really hammer me on my handling. To catch me as I'm doing these things and explain to me why I'm causing the problems that I'm causing. That's basically what I stated during our individual introductions as to what we hoped to gain from this workshop. That wasn't quite what I got out of it.

The two pieces of advice (and I got this more from one of the instructors than the other) that I personally got from my time in the ring were to not worry about the contacts and just run with my dog when Bess goes into zoomy mode. To just run with her and encourage her because she's showing such great enthusiasm for the sport. I will tackle these pieces of advice separately, but first a disclaimer. The two people putting on the workshop are accomplished handlers and have each put a MACH on their respective dogs. That in itself is an achievement and kudos to them for getting there. I'm not knocking their skills as handlers. They are also both very nice people. However, not everyone is cut out for putting on a workshop.

Piece of advice #1, don't worry about the contacts. I can honestly say that I have never had someone tell me that. And that specific piece of advice was handed out to more people than just me. I have put in enough time with my dogs and training contacts to know that if I just ignore the contacts, the contacts WILL be blown. With this knowledge in hand, I'm not going to intentionally blow a run by ignoring the contacts. Heffner, for the most part, will always nail his contacts. He usually needs a reminder on the down contact of the a-frame in order to decelerate and hit it. If Bess is not reminded about her contacts, she absolutely will use the a-frame as a launching pad. And that's exactly what happened this past weekend during her otherwise lovely standard run. I forgot to give her the "easy" command, and she ran with it. I also cannot just run with her while she's on the dog walk, which was another piece of advice that was being handed out. If I do not stay with her, she will bail. For whatever reason she still gets weirded out by the texture on the dog walk and she will happily use the excuse of me getting too far ahead of her to bail off the dog walk. I don't want that to develop into a habit, and since I know what my dog will do, I stay with her.

Piece of advice #2, just run with her! This piece of advice was doled out during Bess' first run when she did a little zoomy loop. If you've been reading this blog since back in the late winter/early spring, you know that Bess' zoomies got to a very debilitating point and were a very obvious manifestation of her stressing out. We couldn't get through a single run without massive zoomies. Hell, we couldn't get past obstacle #2 without her taking off! It took MONTHS to get her to a point where she has them only occasionally, BUT they are short lived AND she comes back to me. We didn't have that before. After the first recommendation to just run with her and encourage her, I was a little dumb founded. I have never heard anyone tell someone that they should run with their dog when they take off. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Then when we were getting ready for her second run, they had me play with her a little bit in what I think was supposed to be an attempt to get her more excited to play WITH me. That doesn't really work with Bess. I really have to go to the line with a calm dog or else we are screwed. But I figured hey, we're doing a workshop and we might as well try it a little and see if it helps. It didn't. She took off. At which point I was then encouraged to run with her, play with her, encourage her. WTF??? Running with her will only encourage her to zip around more. Trust me on this one, I do actually know my own dog. Not to mention we have been down these many roads before. Bess got so amped up from being cheered on for her zooming that she ran right out of the ring. Awesome. At that point, I was done. My dog had just been encouraged to do what I had spent months gently working her out of. Even worse, she had been encouraged not only to rip around the ring, but rip right OUT of the ring. And in the very ring that we were supposed to be competing in the next morning. To say that I was upset, was an understatement. I had already put Heffner back in the air conditioned room before that run, and I then put Bess away as well. I was pretty confident that I had just totally shot myself in the foot.

While I understand that it can be beneficial to be pushed to try new things, as an instructor, you always need to remember that each handler and each dog is an individual. Just because something worked for you and your dog, doesn't mean that it is appropriate for others. And you also need to understand that the handlers often do actually know their own dogs well enough to know when something isn't a good idea. That was frustrating. My philosophies and goals for my dogs are different than what they have. I also have different expectations of my dogs both inside and outside of the ring. All of that plays into how I run my dogs the way I do and why.

By the time I decided to call it quits, I had so many things buzzing through my head. It really made me think about the goals that I have for my dogs and where my priorities are at. While I enjoy competing with my dogs, it's not the entirety of what we do. It's great to have competitions on our schedule so that I have something to keep training and working towards to push myself to keep improving and working with the dogs. However, the reality is that I'm not a super competitive person. I'm competitive in that I compete and I enjoy doing well when it happens. I don't enjoy competing weekend after weekend though. It burns me out. Two weekends a month is more than enough for me! Add to that the fact that I take the summer and December off from competitions, and I have to be realistic about my goals for my dogs. As far as agility is concerned, I flat out won't be competing enough for a MACH to be a goal for any of my dogs. And that's even if we got to the point where we were just running awesome and were guaranteed to have a high Q rate. I just don't want to trial that much for it to be realistic. Now that's not saying that once we reach a certain level, I'm calling it quits. I still plan on continuing to compete, I just don't have that pressure to get the perfect runs every single weekend. Nor do I really want to travel all that far for trials to ensure that we keep racking up those points and legs. I'll do what's convenient for the dogs and I and call it good. I have friends who are quite competitive and they have competitive goals. I admire that about them. But then I see the schedule that they've set for themselves and the tremendous pressure that they place on themselves, and it makes me realize that I really have made the right decision for me and my dogs. I just can't, nor do I want to do that.

After this experience, I was understandably very concerned on Saturday morning when Bess' first run of the day was spent with her racing around the ring and NOT coming back to me when I called her. I was seriously afraid that the encouragement she received had left a lasting mark. Thankfully after that run she worked with me and my fears were alleviated. No matter how fast her potential is, I prefer a controlled and accurate Bess to one who's mind is about to explode so badly that she ceases to listen to me. I am a failure as her partner if I allow our connection on the course to disappear.

So not quite the experience I thought it was going to be, but on the up side, I still had a surprise birthday party ahead of me as well as Parades with both dogs. My evening could only get better!;0)

Pictures!

2011-11-16T18:35:00.001-08:00

I'm feeling a little blah today. It's already been a long work week and it didn't help that I got a phone call at 1:30am about a freezer at work that was beeping. As it turns out, it wasn't even one of our freezers, so I lost some sleep (literally) over that for nothing. And I'm not quite sure how on earth the security guard decided that I was the contact person for that. But oh well. Moving along. ;0) In the spirit of my lack of energy today, I'm just going to post the most recent agility picks of Heffner and Bess from this past weekend, taken by my favorite photographer, Joe Camp. Enjoy!

Movie Monday

2011-11-14T18:48:00.000-08:00

Ack!! Falling behind again!! I still have posts about the national specialty that I would like to finish. And the danes and I just had a CPE agility weekend. If I don't stay on top of my posts for competition weekends, I inevitably get very behind. Since that time has passed, I will summarize by saying that overall we had a good weekend. Sunday was better than Saturday. Even when I wasn't keeping it together, the dogs were. Bess had some zoomies on Saturday morning, but thankfully that was the last of it. On Saturday both dogs qualified in Jumpers only. On Sunday Heffner Qed in Standard, Wildcard, and Colors. Bess qualified in Wildcard and Colors. No Standard Q due to vaulting off the A-frame and completely skipping the down contact. Ug! Otherwise, it was a very good weekend!

And now for Movie Monday!! Today's clip is actually pretty short. It's a little compilation of Ruthie on the A-frame and dog walk. She hasn't done a lot with them and I'm really pleased with how well she's doing them so far! Next month we introduce the teeter and we'll see what she thinks of that. So far her response to the contact equipment has been that she doesn't really see it as anything different other than it's easier to run along the dog walk than it is to run in the dirt.;0)

Happy Monday everyone!!

The National Continued - Obedience

2011-11-09T17:57:00.000-08:00

As promised, I'm going to break down the performance events from the national specialty in order to not make Monday's already lengthy post even lengthier.;0) Today we'll start with obedience (and I promise that next week I'll get back to more regular and "normal" posts). I'll start by also saying, that this trip was not only about the dogs and the performances, but about my planned outfits.;0) I had specifically planned out what I was going to wear in advance. Even things weren't going to go quite as I might like them to, we were going to look good trying!!:0) My obedience outfit consisted of some pants with dane heads beautifully painted on them that I got at the 2009 national specialty. I loved the pants, but really hadn't had any where to wear them. This seemed like the perfect opportunity! And of course, I couldn't forget the awesome pair of gold sparkly shoes that are now going to be my competition obedience shoes!!

Obedience was moved from it's originally scheduled time slot of the afternoon on Monday that 31st to the morning of the 31st. And thank goodness!! It was getting hot even towards the end of the morning! With some help, that morning I had set up my canopy and the dogs' soft crates and we were pretty much good to go. As the time was drawing nearer, I took Bess away from the hustle and bustle and put her through a bit of a warm up. I didn't want to work her too much and have her start to get warm and decide that she was done, but I wanted to feel confident going into the ring. We did a bit of heeling, a bit of on leash dropping, and just a smidge of dumbbell. We had done a little bit of work with the dumbbell the previous two nights at the end of her evening potty walk and I felt pretty good about how she was working with her new dumbbell (which I will have to do a separate post on, because I love it!!). Just a little bit of waiting and it was our turn!

One of the many reasons that we entered Graduate Novice versus one of the other classes, was that there wasn't any off lead heeling. While Bess is totally capable of all the exercises up through Graduate Novice, we've struggled with a few aspects of competition. Namely that she stresses out and really shuts down. The other difficulty for her that I've found both in competition as well as in practice is that she has a harder time thinking and working on grass. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but I'm chalking it up at least in part due to her sensitivity to texture. At any rate, our off lead heeling even in a training situation is most definitely less than ring ready. I don't even know that it's match ready. We're struggling, but we're working on it. And as with everything else, I know that with time it will improve. I just have to be patient and plug away at it.

I am going to recount the exercises as I remember them, but not necessarily in their actual order. However, I do remember that our first exercise was the on lead heeling. It started out a bit rough, but I think it started to improve as the pattern wore on. I don't entirely remember, but I don't think we had a single sit during the halts. While the heeling pattern was rough, there were absolutely parts of it where I could tell she was thinking and working through it. It's just tough for her right now. Glimmers of hope are much better than nothing at all. So I will take that!

Our next exercise, I believe, was the off lead figure 8. I had totally forgotten that this was off lead. If it had been on lead, I know that we would have fared better if for no other reason than the fact that I would have been willing to give up some points for a tight leash or two to remind her to stay with me. As it was, she got distracted on one of the turns and decided that sniffing the butt of one of the people who was the post was far more interesting than continuing on with me. When I called her to heel again, she did come up to me, but on the wrong side. And there was some wandering off. However, we did get a sit at the very end! Sometimes, you just gotta take what you get!

Next up was the dumbbell recall. I am very happy to say that this was her BEST exercise!! For that alone, our run was a success! She had a good recall. No slinking along like a beaten dog. She came to front. She dropped the dumbbell when I asked her to. And she finished. THAT was awesome!!

Her recall over the high jump was also quite good, though our finish didn't happen.

The drop on recall was an okay recall, it just lacked the essential drop part. Oy!

And finally the recall over the broad jump. This was weird. Bess actually went around the broad jump! I can't even remember when the last time that happened if at all! (yeah, yeah, how many times have you heard someone say that at a trial!!)

After only recently getting up the courage to review the videos, I have to admit that it didn't look quite as horrible as I had built it up in my mind. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't good, but it wasn't as awful as I was thinking it was. I have hope. And I'm very happy to see how happy she was in between exercises. She is starting to grow into the mental image that I have of us as a team in the ring. That makes me happy.:0)

A while later, Heffner was up in Beginner Novice. Poor Heffner! By the time he got to run it was quite warm and the flies had really been bugging him. And also not entirely in his favor, the intact male running before us had marked on the course. Yikes! But I was already willing to give up some points for a tight leash, and you better believe I wasn't going to let him get distracted and stall out at that spot! The heeling was okay. More par for the course for him. We had no sit on the halt. The figure 8 wasn't so great and I made the mistake of starting off in a different direction than I normally do with him. He was acting a bit distracted so I started off with him on the inside, and I think that just set him off from the get go. Normally he's quite good heeling on the outside of the circle, but not so much this time around. His sit for exam was great! The flies just wouldn't stop bothering him for his sit stay and unfortunately he stood up. But at least he otherwise stayed where I put him.:0/ And the recall was just bad. He didn't come on the first command and he didn't want to come to front without a lot of help. Oh well! Much to keep working on at matches!

The National Recap (long)

2011-11-07T13:48:00.000-08:00

Oh boy!! If you're going to read this post in its entirety, I recommend grabbing something to drink as well as something to munch on, because this could take a while. That's what happens when I pretty much drop off the face of the cyber earth for almost two weeks!! I will try to be relatively brief, but we all know how that goes with me. ;0) I'll just start by going in chronological order of the trip. As the trip wore on my concept of what day of the week, let alone what date it was, went completely out the window.

To start the trip, we had two and a half days of driving. Thankfully I enjoy driving, otherwise this trip would have started off on the wrong foot. I crammed the truck as full of stuff as I could, while still allowing myself technically enough visibility to change lanes relatively safely. The first day of driving I was doing solo and meeting up with my travelling buddies in Idaho. My planned route took me through the gorge, an area that I absolutely love and don't visit often enough. Naturally I decided that since I was on my own, had no real schedule, and only had to meet up with people at some non-determined time that evening in Idaho Falls, ID, I could do a little sight seeing. :0) Our first stop was only an hour into our drive. We stopped off at Multnomah Falls. I've been there with the danes individually, but not all three dogs and not at all with Ruthie. A nice guy offered to snap a picture of us, and then we were off. There is a LOT that I could have stopped and seen on the trip out, but I quickly realized that if I did that, it would take me most of the day just to get out of the gorge, never mind the rest of Oregon and part of Idaho! I amused myself by taking pictures along the route and posting them onto Facebook. Which I later got a talking to by a couple different people.;0) The first day was long, but otherwise uneventful, and as I was checking into the first motel, I bumped into some other PNW dane people! We were all tired, but excited to be on our way to what we were sure was going to be an awesome week.

Day two of driving was full of lots of relatively boring scenery. It was beautiful, but also pretty bland. We drove through the rest of Idaho and into Nevada. Our stop that night was the Motel 6 in Las Vegas! All three of us (Georgia, Stacie, and I) really would have loved to do a little sight seeing while in Vegas and make a fun night of it, but we each had multiple dogs that we were responsible for and were uncomfortable just leaving them in the motel, in an area that was a little questionable. Questionable to the point where the Motel 6 actually had security personnel walking the grounds 24/7. So while staying in Vegas sounds exciting, it's a little less so when travelling with dogs.;0)

Day three of travel started out with a foreshadowing of things to come. Stacie had been sick all night and was just barely able to keep it together enough for the final five hours to Litchfield Park, AZ. Later on I would wonder how on earth she was able to do that! It was our final day of travel and I was super excited to reach our destination. As I pulled into the resort (The Wigwam), I was just about bouncing in my seat! The place was GORGEOUS and I was excited to be there!! As a lovely topper, as I was pulling in, I saw two friends of mine, Steve and Kim, out walking their dogs! And as I was checking in, there were two other friends, Vickie and Pam!! I don't know how other people are, but when I'm travelling somewhere and I see someone I know, it adds to my excitement level. I was pretty much on cloud 9 at that point! I was then escorted by one of the bellhops in a golf cart, to my room. I quickly got the dogs into the air conditioned room (it was in the low 80's at that point and the danes were definitely starting to get hot) and unloaded all of our stuff and got settled in. The room was nice and spacious and the resort was just plain gorgeous!! The rest of the day was spent getting settled in, pottying the dogs, and figuring out who was there already and making our first grocery run to Walmart.

Saturday was the independent specialty. The entry was limited, so the specialty didn't last well into the evening as the one in 2009 had when I last went. I watched a little, but I had my three dogs to take care of as well as some jeans that still needed bedazzling before our parades "routine" on Monday night. Saturday was my first real taste of juggling of all three dogs. And at this point I should probably explain why I had all three dogs. I was a little paranoid previously about mentioning anything because I had just heard a news story about how burglars are using Facebook to figure out which houses to rob, and that kept me from mentioning a whole lot on either Facebook or the blog. Adam was out of the country for work until Oct. 29th. And I was leaving on Oct. 26th. I couldn't just leave Ruthie at the house with my in laws feeding her once a day when they came to check on the cats. And finding someone to watch her for those few days also was a head ache I wasn't really looking forward to. She's not fully housebroken still and she can make some rather interesting noises when she is displeased at being stuck in a crate. That and I would have to make arrangements for Adam to pick her up while I was gone. All the little details were proving to be enough of a head ache that I decided it would be "easiest" just to bring her along for the ride. Therefore, The Midget got to come along to the national specialty. And I digress.

The welcome party was also Sat. night. We had fun munching on food and chatting about what we thought the week was going to hold and then headed off to our rooms, since the next day was the first day of the futurity. Little did I know that I was going to end up missing the whole day. I'll spare you the gory details, but I was getting sick all Sat. night. By Sun. morning I had finished, but couldn't remain upright for more than a few minutes without feeling awful again. Pottying and feeding the dogs that morning took me almost two hours to get all the way through. I spent the whole rest of the time in bed with the two danes curled up next to me. Closer to dinner time, I was feeling well enough that I took Ruthie out for a more extended walk since by dint of her not being fully housebroken, she spent most of the day in her crate.

Monday was destined to be a very busy day and one where I really should have planned better. Due to warmer temperatures, all performance events were rescheduled to the morning time slots since they were ALL being held outside on the front lawn. Therefore my schedule was going to be obedience with both dogs in the morning, agility workshop in the afternoon, and parades in the evening. A very full day in hot weather where I should have been hydrating myself. Instead, I let this fact escape me even though I know better and I already know that I don't tolerate the heat very well. I started off the morning feeling okay, but popped some Advil and got a Coke to sort of jazz me up. At least half of this decision was not very wise. I wasn't thinking about the fact that getting sick all Sat. night had already started to dehydrate me. Then I spent all day in bed and didn't drink much better. And I was in a very dry, hot climate to boot. And I was running around in the sun all Monday. And the liquids I was taking in were ones that were diuretics. Not a good combination at all. However, I did feel pretty good throughout the day. That would late come crashing down on me. But back to Monday.

Our first task of the day was obedience. First up was Bess. We had set up our canopy, but the temperatures were already getting warm by the time her run came around. I warmed her up a bit and she didn't seem to be having a lot of difficulty thinking on the grass. As I was typing this paragraph up and realized how much I still had to talk about, I've decided that I will leave the performance portions of our trip for separate posts. Otherwise this post is going to get seriously ridiculous! I will sum Bess' performance up by saying that we unfortunately got an NQ. Overall, I can't be terribly unhappy with how she did though. She was much happier and performed much better in obedience than she did in rally. That alone makes me happy! Sort of. Heffner's run was also an NQ, which wasn't helped any by the flies that were every where bugging the dogs. The flies were actually a huge bother to Heffner while in the ring and huge bug-a-boo to the performance events overall. In all, only ONE SINGLE DOG qualified in obedience. I don't remember exactly how many were entered, but there were multiple dogs in each of the levels, including the optional titling classes. There was one novice dog who had a lovely run, but went down on the down stay. Which, of course, was in the blazing hot sun, with flies buzzing about. I will save my rant on the conditions for the performance events for a later post.;0) And did I mention that we got to meet Kathie, Jackson's mom???? That was pretty cool!!:0)

After obedience was over with, I put the dogs back into the air conditioned room while we took a little break before the agility workshop. A little break that turned into a much longer break as things were running a bit behind for the set up. I won't say much here, but I do plan on writing an entire post on the agility workshop, what I took away from it, and the importance of knowing your dog and specifically what your goals and how this plays into the way that you run your dog. Unfortunately for me, the agility workshop was not entirely helpful and may have actually set things back a bit with Bess.

Immediately after the workshop, I put the dogs away again and headed over to the motor homes. There was a surprise birthday party for one of the people from our neck of the woods. The hosts were amazing and really decorated things up to the nines!! It was amazing and it was nice to take a few minutes to relax before I had to get things ready for parades. Parades started at 7, so I was shooting for getting things set up right around 6:30pm. Heffner was going to be up on the giant ball that we have (which meant hauling along our air compressor!) and Bess was going to do some balancing on the core disc and I was hoping to do the four feet in a box as well. I tried to find the most out of the way place within the building that I could to inflate the ball because the air compressor is seriously loud! I was able to mostly find a good spot and got all of our stuff set up off to the side ring side. My friend Megan helped to stabilize the ball for Heffner, I had super awesome music (Backstreet Boys!!), super awesome custom BSB collars (thanks Kennedy!!), awesome bedazzled jeans, and some neat little tricks to fill up our time.:0) I have to say that the parades was the most fun that I had with the dogs while we were there!! The people I knew were hooting and hollering for us! It just felt so good to be out there with my dogs and for them to get acknowledged for what they've accomplished!! I do have video and I do have some pictures, but I'm going to save that for another post.:0)

Tue. was the low day of our time there. Tue. morning was agility and rally with both dogs entered in everything. I woke up early that morning with a churning stomach and my head just spinning. Initially I thought it was just nerves. It wasn't quite like what I had Sat. night, but it just wouldn't go away. Finally as time was ticking by and my alarm had already gone off, I realized this was more than just nerves. For one, I wasn't nervous about the day. Something was wrong. Agility was scheduled to start at 8am. I texted my friend Megan and asked her to scratch the dogs from their first two runs which were FAST and Time to Beat. I already knew that I wasn't going to make it for that. I struggled through pottying and feeding the dogs and started texting to see if anyone had anything with them that could quell nausea. Someone did and my friend Faith ran down to the agility field to pick it up and bring it back to me. I sucked stuff down and then Faith helped me get the danes down to our tent and their crates. I still wasn't quite right. I decided to scratch Heffner from rally because I knew that it was going to be incredibly difficult to make it through with him. Bess came up first and she did okay for the honor dog. I actually thought she was going to go down at one point because she kept sniffing at the grass. It quickly became apparent that she wasn't really into it that day. It was finally our time to run and our run fell apart at the start. After all the work that we've put in, we're still having issues with rally. I couldn't get her to sit at the start. Oh dear. The rest of the run wasn't good at all. I almost pulled her off the course because it was so disheartening. I didn't realize it at the time, but I NQed us by completely missing a sign. Not that that was difficult to do since the rally signs were located at the tops of these holders that actually allowed the breeze to blow them sideways to the point that you couldn't read the sign. Regardless, our run was atrocious and it pretty much broke me. We've put in so much work, so much time, and I've been looking forward to entering the dogs in this event for a year now, and it all fell apart. It didn't help that I was still feeling like crap. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was pretty severely dehydrated. I couldn't eat any food without feeling nauseous. I scratched Bess from her remaining rally run and got prepared to attempt to run Heffner in standard.

Standard is far and away my favorite class. And since Heffner is a little easier to run than Bess, I was planning on giving it a go with him to see how it went and that would determine what I did for the rest of our runs. Unfortunately, that fell apart as well. Things just weren't going well on the course. I wasn't running him like I normally do (no kidding!), and we were having bobbles that we don't normally have. When he ran around the tire jump, I decided to call it. The judge didn't realize what was going on when I asked to be excused and thought that I was pulling off the course because of our mistakes and offered to let me take him over one more jump for motivational purposes. I told him that I wasn't feeling good enough to continue. Some people got worried that I wouldn't make it to put Heffner away, but I knew that I at least would be able to make it back to the room to put him up. Besides, it was really best that I make it back to my room alone because I pretty much had a melt down. Like I said, we put in all this time, effort, and money and I looked forward to this event for a whole year, only to have everything completely unravel right in front of me. I had so many emotions going through me at that point, and just really needed to have some time to myself. I was also feeling incredibly guilty for bringing the dogs along on this trip where they had to spend so much of their time shut up inside a hotel room and weren't able to get off leash to stretch their legs. I just kind of lost it in my room. I got myself together enough to head back to the tent where Bess was still crated.

Bess was actually up just as I was walking back, and they asked me if I wanted to try running her. I knew that I wouldn't be able to. Another competitor, Keri, offered to try running her and I told her she could give it a shot, but I wasn't sure how Bess would do since she's never been run by someone else. I stayed out of sight and tried watching. It didn't end up working. Keri got her up to the ring entrance and it became apparent that Bess was looking for me and was just going to run out of the ring to come find me. It was worth a shot. I had Bess hang out with me on the cool grass. I am really bummed to say that I completely missed watching anyone else's rally or agility runs. I really wanted to be supportive of everyone else, but at the same time, I couldn't get off the grass without feeling ill. I finally got Bess put away and tried to eat something. I also started downing bottles of water because I had started to realize that I was mostly likely quite dehydrated. You know you're pretty dehydrated when you can down four bottles of water over the course of an hour and a few hours later, you still have nothing to pee out. I wasn't in very good shape. I headed back to the room to continue hydrating, take a nap, and get washed up for the Top 20 event that night.

The Top 20 dinner and judging was amazing!! My friend Danna and her boy Justin had made it into the Top 20 and she was really excited/nervous to be there. Another dog from Oregon, Brew, was also in the Top 20 again and was there. It's just amazing to see these top winning dogs in "real life!" Some dogs I was more impressed with after seeing them than I was after viewing their adds. It was also just fun to get all dolled up and go to the event. I didn't last terribly long though. About half way through I started feeling ill again. I headed back to the room, took a break and got changed. Then I headed back to the agility field to take down my tent and crates and head out to Walmart to pick up more food for the dogs as well as some more bottled water.

Wed. dawned bright and early with me feeling mostly normal. Heffner and Bess were scheduled for echocardiograms first thing in the morning. My friend Chris came over to help me get them both over there. I had originally planned on videoing at least one of the exams, but I forgot my camera in the hotel room and don't have any footage. The ultrasound was very cool!! And I am VERY happy to say that both dogs came out clear!! Not that I was really worried, but until I knew for sure, it was a slight nagging doubt. After returning the dogs to the room, I took another little break and got geared up to watch some conformation. The entries this year were almost half what they were in 2009 when I last went and it didn't take long to get through to winners dog. The day ended much earlier than I thought it would, so it was back to the hotel room to drink more water and take another nap. I was starting to feel better, but I still could only do a couple of hours at a time upright without feeling ill again.

I took my little nap, and then it was time to get ready for the Halloween party!! And yes, if you're keeping track, our Halloween party was on Nov. 2.;0) There was a planned group dance to Thriller as well as some other fun stuff planned. The decorations were awesome and people were really dressing up! I dressed up as a random '80's chick, complete with crimped hair! I only lasted about an hour at the party before I had to head back to the room. I tried to eat some food, but it was making me ill and I had to cut my losses and head back to rest up.

Thur. I was feeling much better and excited to have a basically "free" day where I would get to watch conformation all day!! Wed. had been all dogs and Thur. was all bitches. There were lots of lovely girls out there and I loved watching them all!! Thur. night a bunch of us got together and went out for dinner at a close by Mexican restaurant. It was awesome to sit back and chat with everyone! A lot of the dogs from the northwest were doing quite well and making cuts or winning their very large classes. Lots of reason to celebrate! This was also the first real meal that I was able to eat all week without feeling sick afterwards!!

Fri. was the best of breed judging day. Again, it was very exciting to see all these fabulous danes out there!! Fri. was also the first day since we arrived that I felt normal all throughout the day. Talk about just in time! After the judging was over, there was an awards dinner that many people were going to. I had already chosen not to buy tickets for it and use the time to start packing up my stuff and getting the truck ready for an early departure Sat. morning.

Then Sat. morning we checked out of the lovely resort and were on our first leg of the trip home! We ended up taking a different route home because most of the way that we had taken getting there, now had snow on the ground and there were areas with winter storm warnings that we wanted to avoid. I would like to say that the first part of our trip was smooth sailing, but we had some bumps along the way where we got a little lost and there was some turning around in some not so great neighborhoods. We decided to really push it that first day and make it to Sacramento by that night. It made for a long day, but it was totally worth it.

By that point, I realized that the drive home was basically the drive that I made from Lodi for the northern California specialty. Georgia wanted to watch her speed more since she drives a rather eye catching giant red van. I followed her for a while, but then I decided that I really wanted to push it and try to make some good time and get home with a little time to spare. Everything worked out well. It was lightly snowing through the pass, but the roads were nice and clear and we didn't have any issues. I made one stop that included refueling, grabbing "lunch" from the convenience store, and taking the dogs for a nice long potty walk, and then we were in it for the long haul home! It felt sooooooooooooooo good to make it home while it was still light out!!

And that, thankfully, brings us up to today. I technically still have today and tomorrow off from work for vacation time. I'll be going in tomorrow afternoon because I already know I'm going to have some long days ahead of me and it's going to easily take me through Fri. to get fully caught up. I've used the majority of today to go through the unpacking and laundry process. I took a break and took the danes out for a hike that we all needed. After two weeks of being stuck on leash or in a hotel room, they really needed to stretch their legs. And I needed to get out in the woods and soak up the wonderful area that we live in that I now appreciate so much more!!

There will be more to come about our trip, including some pictures and video, but I think this post is long enough at this point!! I hope that everyone is doing well and I look forward to getting back to making the rounds reading other blogs and getting back into a rhythm of keeping up my own blog.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand............................48 days until Christmas!!!!

On The Road!!

2011-10-26T20:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday after work was a whirlwind of trying to get the dogs some exercise while also getting everything packed up. It made for a late night. We hit the road today and have stopped over in Twin Falls, ID for the night. tomorrow is going to be another long travel day that will take us all the way through Las Vegas (ha ha) and out the other side. I'm not sure where we're going to be stopping tomorrow night. Obviously my days are pretty packed, especially making sure that all three dogs are taken care of. I most likely won't do much updating on the blog at all until Friday evening, once we're ensconced in the host hotel. I have updated the Facebook page for our trip with some pictures, and that's pretty much going to be the only thing that I'm able to update while on the road. I hope everyone's having a great week and wish us luck!!

Movie Monday

2011-10-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

Wow! I haven't posted since Wednesday! Needless to say, things have been busy. Thur. evening I went to see the photographer who took our family portraits and to get things set up for her to print a Christmas card for us. The pictures turned out great and I was really excited about them!!

Then Frid. night we had our final obedience match before the national. It went pretty well! Bess had a very happy retrieve with the dumbbell in her mouth, which is pretty huge. We're having some serious creeping in issues on the drop on recall, but we'll keep slowly, but gently working on that over the next week. Heffner was pretty decent. Distracted on his helling portion, as is usual for him, but otherwise solid enough for Beginner Novice.

Then early Sat. morning we headed up to Elma, WA for a CPE trial. I've driven up there a few times and knew that I could make it in two hours. I had planned for that. What I hadn't planned for was first getting stuck behind a cop on I-5 for 40 miles, and then getting stuck behind a semi for a bit. That didn't help. I showed up to the trial grounds just in time to set up crates, put danes in them, and walk the course. Heffner was the first dog on the line. Needless to say, the first run did not go well for either dog. It was generally just an off kind of day and that has a tendency to happen when I start my day off frazzled. Bess Qed in two out of her five runs and Heffner only Qed in one run on Sat. On Sun. they both Qed in two out of their four runs. I would like to remember off the top of my head who Qed in what, but I'd have to look at my spreadsheet because that whole weekend is now a blur! The most notable run was by Bess on Sun. in Standard. This judge had a tendency to put two tunnels back to back. That has a tendency to amp Bess up. She took off in a zooming loop, came back and finished the rest of her run for an otherwise clean run. Even with that zooming loop, she still managed to beat Heffner's time on the course!

And today I have been busy getting things set up at work for my absence and running a myriad of errands in order to be ready to leave on Wed. morning. Tomorrow is going to be crazy!! But I can't think about that right now!!

After all that rambling about to generally catch up anyone who has managed to continue reading, I do in fact have a video for you!! I edited it in the hotel room on Sat. night.:0) This video is just about putting together a variety of objects to work the dogs' muscles. You can start out simple with just a few objects and continue adding on as many as you want. You can also increase the difficulty by having the dogs change positions while on the objects. Without further ado, here's the video:

App Me Baby!

2011-10-19T19:30:00.001-07:00

I think I mentioned previously that I've finally joined the world of the smart phone users. I got the latest version of the iPhone just last week, which is the reason I was late to the obedience match. So far, I am loving it!! I've already used the maps app that comes with it and love that. I've gotten some recommendations from friends on which apps come in handy for what reasons, but I thought I would ask those of you reading this blog if you had any apps that you thought were must haves! Hopefully everyone is able to comment on the blog (I'm still having problems leaving comments on a few other blogs)! So what are you app recommendations?:0)

Tonight my obedience instructor was able to fit us in for an obedience lesson!! It's the last one that would work before we leave, so I was very thankful! After a little warm up, Heffner was actually doing really well! I would be ecstatic if I could have that dog in the ring!! Bess has also shown a lot of improvement. Her drop on recalls are great in the house, but she's creeping quite a bit elsewhere. We'll work on it and it will get as good as it gets before our actual ring time! I'm not going to stress over that. Ruthie got left at home and once I got home and let her out of her crate she was literally jumping off the walls!! That frenchie has got some serious spunk!:0)

Things are otherwise well. Between work and everything else, I'm having to start very well organised and am definitely feeling like I'm running a marathon. Tomorrow after work I head on over to the photographers to look at our proofs, pick some pictures I like, and get our Christmas cards ordered. Definitely looking forward to that! And now I've got some dogs to exercise!

Blogger Tuesday

2011-10-18T21:57:00.000-07:00

My pick for Blog of the Week is Two French Bulldogs!! You knew it was bound to happen and I can only hold out on the cuteness for so long! As the title implies, this blog is about the lives of two adorable french bulldogs. It's a very cute blog! And best of all, there are pretty much always pictures with the posts.:0) If you want some cuteness over load, head on over and check them out!

This morning I had a little mini (slightly redundant aren't we?) anxiety attack after reading an email. Slight back story. This year's great dane national specialty is being held in Litchfield Park, AZ. The festivities start in just under two weeks from now. All of the performance events are being held outside. ALL of them. Because the weather is generally warm still during that time of year, there are understandably some concerns about running dogs in performance sports during the heat of the day. In order to hopefully alleviate this problem, all performance sports will be run in the morning. This gets complicated for the rally and agility day. Because those trials are on the same day. And both trials are now being held at the same exact time. Heffner and Bess are entered in everything. That's four agility runs per dog (time to beat, fast, jww, and standard), one rally run for Heffner, and two rally runs for Bess. I did a little math in my head and I will have to know 8 different courses between the two sports, well enough to fully support my dogs during their runs. This is freaking me out a little bit. Oh yeah, and then there's the little part about running the dogs back and forth between the rings and also getting in my walk throughs. It's going to be insane.

After getting that email, like I said, I had a little mini anxiety attack and being me, I posted it on Facebook. And I have to say, I have some of the best freaking friends!!! My post was just me stress word vomiting, and then I have these wonderful people volunteering to help me hold my dogs or just help me in general. I love these people!! It's instances like that that are a perfect example of why I love going to these events. The people rock! In the end, not only did I get awesome offers of assistance from awesome friends, but I was reminded of why I love seeing and getting a chance to hang out with these people.:0)

In other news, Ruthie got introduced to the dog walk tonight. She thinks it's awesome. She also thinks that racing me to the end of it is one of the best games ever! I've been practicing with her walking on curbs, which are MUCH narrower than the actual dog walk, just so that she thinks more about foot placement, gets a better idea about keeping her balance, and gains some skill at drawing her legs more towards the midline. This last skill is definitely more difficult for a dog with such a naturally wide stance. She's been rocking it though and can race along the curbs now with no problem. So I figured the dog walk wouldn't be an issue. And it wasn't.:0) Gotta love that awesome little frenchie!

Movie Monday

2011-10-17T18:58:00.000-07:00

This week's Movie Monday is of some clips I took last week during our agility barn rental time. Part of the warm ups that I do with the danes are some long distance recalls. This is possible because they both have stays. Ruthie is still working on hers.;0) I also recorded a little bit of our weave pole practice. I don't practice weaves very often with Heffner because 1) he's already pretty solid with them and 2) he really throws himself into them and I don't want him torquing his spine on a lot by practicing them. He already loves them, so it's a good reward for him.

Now that Bess is getting more reliable with her entrances, I need to work on building up her speed and confidence a bit at the beginning. She picks up speed as she goes along and starts using a more efficient one footed style. I would love to get her to the point where she can do that from start to finish through the weaves, but I want solid, gradual improvements and am not going to push her on this.

I'm slowly working on some foundation work with Ruthie, so we don't have anything terribly interesting to show. I just took some random clips of her going over jumps. She's so stinkin' cute when she's out there and she LOVES running along side me. And do you realize how much more difficult it is to "watch" a small dog out of the corner of your eye? It's rare that I lose sight of the danes on an agility course and I've totally taken that for granted. With Ruthie I'm finding that even my arm will block her from my sight. And heaven forbid she decides to race ahead of me and try a front cross on her own. That has caused me to almost eat dirt a couple of times!! Running a midget dog is going to take a lot of getting used to!

And finally, here's the video:

Productive Weekend

2011-10-16T11:23:00.001-07:00

So far it has been a very productive weekend for me! Again, helps to relieve the stress when I can mark multiple things off my to-do list. I've got most of my road food figured out and am going to wait until Friday night to pick up my food for the agility weekend. I popped by Plato's Closet to pick up a pair of cheap jeans that I don't feel bad Bedazzling the crap out of. Stopped at Claire's to pick up a few remaining accessories for my Halloween costume. And then it was a quick stop at PetSmart to pick up cat necessities and a new Zoom Groom for the dogs! The rest of the day was spent playing with the dogs, getting chores done around the house, and then going to the ballet in the evening with some girlfriends. Awesome day!

But I haven't updated about Friday night's obedience match with the danes. I ended up getting there pretty late and actually missed Heffner's Beginner Novice run completely. I was waiting at the house to sign for my iPhone, which requires a direct signature in order to be delivered. I didn't want my Saturday to be wasted by having to stick around the house waiting. Thankfully I at least got there for Bess Graduate Novice run. And I am VERY happy to say that we have a recall!! And a pretty enthusiastic one at that! I changed my "stay" command from an actual stay to a wait this past week. I saw another handler at the previous match use that command instead of stay and it got me to thinking. Bess has awesome stays. Even in the face of some crazy distractions that have cropped up at times, she's held her stays. I was starting to think that maybe the stay command was too strong for her. She has a wait command and it's generally my pause command and is very light. It seemed to work pretty well! We did have a couple of times where she still held her stay, but otherwise it was great! She came rip roaring up to me! Even with her dumbbell! The down side to these enthusiastic recalls that she currently has is that our drop on recall has gone out the window, at least temporarily. I'll be working on that this week. I have a feeling a lot of it had to do with me brain farting and giving a slightly different cue than what I've been using at home. I kept holding my arm up in the air for an extended period of time and her drops have always been not so great when I forget and do that. As long as I have a quick up and down motion, she's pretty solid.

At this current time, we're not futzing with perfectly straight fronts or worrying about crooked sits on the finish. She's come a long way and I want to get a firm foundation in the behaviors and have her firmly in the mind set that she CAN think through these situations in competition and still perform them before I start asking for more accuracy from her. My obedience instructor is completely in agreement on this as well. We need reliable behaviors before we start nit picking.

After everything was over I did take Heffner in the ring and sort of do an informal run through on my own. He was distracted as usual, but did pretty well. The heeling portion is going to be our bug a boo because that's when he has a tendency to do some sight seeing. Otherwise I feel pretty good about where he's at.

The weather so far today is pretty awesome! I started the day by taking the dogs for a hike and it was just gorgeous out! I'm finishing some things up around the house and then I'm heading north to go visit Stacie and Jere and their crew, which means that I get to see Greta!!! Greta is Bora's sister. So excited!!

Agility Photo Bonanza!

2011-10-13T20:32:00.000-07:00

What a difference a day makes!! I got into work at 6:30am today and everything went REALLY well! I feel like I have a better grasp on things at work and things are coming together to-do list wise for the national. Saturday is going to be my big errand running day with Sunday being my fun day.;0)

I also believe that I have a new pair of obedience competition shoes! Adam and I stopped off at Famous Footwear tonight and I found a pair of shoes that I like regardless and I thought it would be fun to actually compete in them. I'm going to wear them at the obedience match tomorrow night and see how they hold up and also break them in a bit. I'm sure my obedience instructor is going to LOVE them!lol

And as promised, I have some new agility pictures of the danes for you!! All pictures are by Joe Camp, who does a fabulous job with his shots!

Food Poisoning Not So Good

2011-10-12T18:45:00.000-07:00

I managed to get a bit of food poisoning that knocked me out for most of Monday and part of Tuesday, so you'll have to pardon my absence. That totally threw me for a loop and has caused a little bit of chaos in my work and home schedule. I also managed to sleep through my alarm this morning and wasn't able to get any training time in with the dogs, which definitely put me in a not so great mood. And then more scheduling "issues" at work have sent me into a bit of a stress tailspin at the moment. Grrrrr!

I will have some new agility pictures of Heffner and Bess to post soon! I bought a CD of pictures from the CPE trial that we were at two weekends ago, from my favorite agility photographer. I have one more CD coming and I'll be sure to shall once I have them all. I did download some random pictures that have been sitting on my camera for about a week now and I'll just share those now.

Today Heffner had another chiropractic appointment. It took a lot less time to get him adjusted today. Things are looking great and I feel that he's in great shape heading into our trip to Arizona!

I'm slowly accumulating a long to-do list of things that need to be taken care of before we leave for Arizona. A lot of the items are little things that aren't really of high importance, but I feel need to get taken care of prior to our departure. It's going to mean using most of my lunch breaks next week to get everything done, but I can feel little bits of stress dissipating as I check things off my list.:0)

For instance, I have GOT to get a cheap pair of jeans to bedazzle for part of our parades costume!:) Definitely high priority.;) I need to purchase my on the road snacks for the trip and also for the agility trial that we're going to be attending the weekend before we leave. And why on earth did I think it was a good idea to enter an away agility trial the weekend before I leave for two weeks???? While I know that I will enjoy myself, I lose that precious weekend to finish up planning and last minute things. Not the brightest idea that I've had.

I did finally take out my awesome canopy that my darling husband bought me for my birthday. I'm really glad that it's not the EZ Up brand, because if it was, the company would have had a nasty email coming to them from me. In short, the canopy is not easy to put up and I didn't even get it all the way up. I spent an hour putting it mostly up and then taking it down. And as is the way of things, I now cannot get the canvas top to fit back in the bag like it so magically came. Not too surprising. I am definitely going to be begging some help from friends in Arizona when it's time for this lovely to go up. I'm also hoping that the host hotel will allow us to leave the canopies up for multiple days since I will be needing it for more than one day.

Bess is also making me twitchy. If she goes into season exactly six months after she went in last time (which if you'll remember, was the day before a trial at a specialty), I'm screwed. She'll go into season I believe literally the day before the obedience trial. I'm crossing all that I've got that she'll wait until after we get home to go into season, but it's really making me paranoid. She's started getting super clingy and lovey, more so than is normal. Which is usually what she starts doing about a month before she goes into season. Not a great sign. I just have to keep her away from any in season bitches (in season bitches have been known to trigger other bitches into coming into season) and keep her from getting stressed on the drive there. Sure thing! The prospect of driving home with her in season and in the canopy with Heffner is also unpleasant. Oy!

But no worries, if I didn't have anything real to worry or stress about, I'd come up with something.;0) At any rate, I know that I've got an awesome weekend ahead of me and that's keeping me going!!

Not Too Shabby

2011-10-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

What am I doing right now? Avoiding bagging the 300+ lbs. of meat that I have thawing in my garage! I'll get to it, but I also wanted to get a post written before I once again became too unmotivated to.

Last night I had both danes entered in our obedience club's match. Heffner was in Beginner Novice and Bess was in Graduate Novice, the classes that they'll be competing in at the national specialty. Over all I would have to say that their performances weren't too shabby. I knew that we'd have things to work on and after doing full run throughs, I've got a better idea of what specifically we need to work on before next Friday night. Thankfully our club is having matches every Friday night in October and I have both dogs signed up them.:0) I'm trying to be as prepared and trial ready as we can be.

Bess was up first. The Graduate Novice exercises are relatively new to her. And to up the funness of it all, her recalls have been an issue of late. As in I call her, and she holds her stay like a freaking champ! Two thumbs up on the stay (and the reason why I'm going to try using a different word with her in hopes of getting over that), two thumbs down on the recall. Our instructor has been fabulous at giving me some ideas on how to work through this with her and they have been working as of late. But in a higher stress environment where Bess would prefer to let the stress reign and not think through these exercises like she is fully capable of, our recent work went down the tube a little. But that's okay, I figured out how to fix it and I also figured out how she gives away when she's not going come on the first command.;0) She's a trixy little minx that one! You see, her ears give her away. If she's going to come on the first recall command, she's giving me great ears. By giving me great ears I mean that her ears are fully alert, forward, and she is clearly waiting for my command. If her ears are off from this position by a hair, then she won't come on the first command. This is very good to know. And she was also very consistent on this. Oh yes, and did I mention that the majority of the exercises in Graduate Novice involve recalls?lol All I can say is thank goodness for our obedience instructor and thank goodness for our awesome obedience club having these matches that will have the dogs and I in better shape for the trial!!

Overall and considering Bess' proclivities of late, she did very well and I'm incredibly pleased with how she is coming along. And she totally rocked the Open stays!! Since Graduate Novice has an out of sight down stay, we went in with the Open dogs and did the full stay exercise. She nailed it!!

After more runs it was Heffner's turn in Beginner Novice. I am toying with how much warm up time he needs. The way that we do our obedience lessons, he doesn't get much warm up time at all and he can totally handle it in that low distraction setting, but how much time do we need in a trial setting? So I gave him very little warm up and treated it more like we were getting ready for our lesson and I used food rewards during the run (Bess does not get food rewards during her runs, though she may get some in between exercises where we actually go up to the table outside of the ring to get them). Due to Heffner's reactivity, and the fact that he hasn't gotten out much this summer except on hikes, I wanted the cards stacked in our favor in this instance. He was definitely distracted by the furry dogs, i.e. golden retriever and border collie. But we worked through that. He is fully capable of learning that depending on the setting he really needs to learn to work through this reactivity. He's learned to deal with it in an agility setting, now he needs to learn that obedience is very similar. We had two particularly distracted moments during the run, but overall, not as bad as I thought it was going to be. We are definitely going to have to work on the front now because he's decided that coming to front includes a down instead of a sit. Oy! Again, things to work on and be prepared for next week. I'm going to try giving him a longer and better warm up and see how much that helps him or if it makes a difference at all.

Ruthie got to come along for fun to watch. She was very good in her crate and I only heard her whine a little bit while I was behind the curtain during Bess' stays. I toyed around with her a little after both danes were done and most of our stuff was loaded back into the truck. She had some adorable fronts and her attention on me is just awesome!! She was working really well even without any food rewards.:)

So two thumbs up for last night!! I hope everyone's weekend is off to a great start! Now I'm off to the garage to immerse myself in raw meat for the next several hours.

Blogger Tuesday

2011-10-04T17:12:00.001-07:00

My pick for Blog of the Week is Denise Fenzi's blog!! She is a professional dog trainer who is known for her motivational style of training to help build drive and motivation to make for great competitive obedience teams. While her blog is still relatively new, I've enjoyed it so far! There is great commentary on dog training in general and helpful videos on what she's talking about. I think this an appealing blog for anyone interested in training! So head on over and check it out!

In other news, tonight we go back to agility barn rental times each week now that the weather has cooled. The exciting part is that I'm going to be taking Ruthie along with us each night! I'm not pushing her agility training and I'm taking things nice and slow and am putting heavy emphasis on a solid foundation. It's going to be really nice to be able to actually work her around real agility equipment and start getting her used to obstacles like the chute and the tunnel. And also teaching her that pottying happens OUTSIDE the ring!;0) Wish us luck!!

Movie Monday

2011-10-03T19:15:00.000-07:00

The votes are in and Bess' Parades music will be "Larger Than Life!":0) Now to get the CD burned, the dogs' individual schpeels written, and everything mailed off! With Kennedy's help, we've come up with some ideas for the dogs' collars that I think will be really cool!!

And now on to Movie Monday! Here is the conglomeration of video clips that I took of the dogs at the beach a couple of weeks ago. There are some really cute moments on there! The danes and Ruthie running around. Ruthie chasing the sea foam. Ruthie digging a hole under the truck. Bess laying Heffner out on the sand during a fit of zoomies. And this hilarious zoomy that Ruthie had which ended in a what looked like a drop on recall. Cute stuff! Enjoy!

CPE Trial

2011-10-02T21:13:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I had both danes entered in a CPE agility trial down in Turner, OR under one of my favorite judges. I didn't have any time yesterday to post after the trial due to a dinner engagement, and I've been tied up with other things today and don't have a whole lot of time left today to get this post together. So this is going to be surprisingly short and sweet (I think). Here goes!
We started off the day with Jackpot. I had a looping plan that I was going to do with both dogs and I knew that the jackpot portion of the course was absolutely doable with either dog. All I had to do was basically kill time until the buzzer blew and I could do the jackpot. Pulled that off without a hitch with Heffner. Sweet! Bess had other ideas. She was getting a little stressed by the trial site and just let it rip on the course. Thankfully she didn't knock a single bar and in her crazy zoomies managed to take some additional obstacles and thus ensure that we accrued enough points in the opening. Oh yeah, and she almost took the judge out on one zooming pass. D'oh! End result: Heffner Q with 1st place and Bess Q with 2nd place.
Next up was Standard. Heffner had a lovely run, but was starting to get a little sore from a combination of things that I'll go into later. He initially refused both tunnel entrances. Thankfully CPE doesn't count refusals, so his run was clean. Bess had a mostly good run. I made the bad decision of trying to race her to the end of a straight tunnel at #5 and almost paid dearly for it with a very near miss collision as she shot out of the tunnel like a bat out of hell. There was an audible gasp from onlookers. The rest of the course went otherwise well. End result: Heffner Q with 2nd place, Bess Q with 1st place.
Next up was Wildcard. The game plan was to do as few tunnels with the big guy as possible, which meant that I would do two As and a B on the course. That went off without a hitch. Next up was Bess. Everything was going well until we looped around to do the weave poles at #7. The tunnel was just too much for her to resist and she took the tunnel. That would be an off course. There are no off courses allowed in Wildcard starting at Level 3. D'oh! End result: Heffner Q with 1st place, Bess NQ due to off course.
Our final run of the day was Colors. On this course, I failed Heffner. It's a short course. There's no reason to get lost on it. It's not overly complicated. It doesn't have so many twists and turns that it would be understandable if a handler wasn't paying enough attention and got lost. However, that's exactly what I did. After he came out of the tunnel, I got lost. I spent some time bumbling around. I think there may have been a dropped bar in there, which is an automatic NQ in Colors. I felt awful. I thought I was on my game and really being mentally there for my dogs, but I totally dropped the ball for Heffner. Not the way that I wanted to end the day for him. Bess, I did a much better job with. She actually had her best run of the day. She kept it together and was nice and responsive to me. End result: Heffner NQ, Bess Q with 1st place.

This was the first time that we've trialed at this site. I'd been warned previously that the site most likely wasn't for me by my instructor since she knew what my preferences were with the dogs. For one, the crating space is incredibly limited. This barn has the least amount of crating space available that I have yet seen at a trial site. I have this rule of thumb that if I have to show up to a trial site an earlier than an hour before the trial starts in order to have a chance at having crating space, then it's ridiculous. I got there at 7am and all the crating spaces were fully taken.

Okay, so I end up keeping the dogs in the truck. Wouldn't be the first time that I've done that, though usually it's of my own volition and not because crating isn't a possibility. Unfortunately keeping both dogs in the truck didn't really work too well for either one. Heffner doesn't settle down as well in the truck unless I'm able to park in a secluded enough spot that he's away from the commotion of the trial. Parking was another bummer, but I'll get to that. In a nut shell, Heffner didn't really settle the whole time that we were there. Since Heffner couldn't settle down, that meant that Bess couldn't relax since they were stuck together in the same space. This was wearing on both dogs and I could tell it in their respective performances.

Parking was interesting. There was plenty of parking, but there was no way of getting a spot that was at all secluded away from things. And actually, the further out I parked, the more likely I was to have to deal with people exercising their dogs off leash around the truck. Which was not very cool. Even though it states on the premium in all caps that all dogs must stay on leash unless competing in the ring, there were a ton of people who had their dogs off leash running around in the field where I had parked. Not cool when I'm trying to exchange dogs out of the back of my truck and have one reactive dog who wants to control the activity that is going on outside of his truck. Or the awesome person who only put dogs on leash right before entering the building and then unleashed them as soon as they exited the building so that her dog could go zipping past my truck while I was again trying to exchange dogs for their runs. The loose dogs everywhere on site got really old. Most of the trials we go to are in Ridgefield at the fairgrounds there and the vast majority of people who let their dogs off leash to exercise, do it a good distance away from the rings where they won't interfere with anyone else's dogs. Apparently I've become too used to this and went into this trial with the misunderstanding that managing Heffner would be as simple as it is at the other trials.

Thankfully I only entered one day of the trial. As I said previously, I've avoided trialing at this site but it was suggested that I wouldn't like it. I thought I should at least give it a try since there are so many CPE trials held there. Lesson learned. I will not be entering any further trials at this site.

And that's how this post got much longer than intended. Sorry. I was a bit annoyed yesterday and my usual friends who I could talk this through with were not entered this weekend. Therefore you all get to hear it. Again, sorry. I hope everyone had a great weekend!!

Cool Story!

2011-09-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

This story ran in the Denver Post a few days ago and was circulated on an email list. I thought that I would pass it along! The before and after pictures of the dane's legs are pretty incredible!

Not much else to pass along here. It looks as though Larger Than Life is winning in the poll. I realized shortly after posting on Wednesday that not everyone necessarily is all too familiar with the Backstreet Boys, so here are the music videos of the three songs that I'm trying to decide between:

"Shape Of My Heart"

"Everybody"

"Larger Than Life" (couldn't find the actual music video, but at least this is the song)

Happy weekend everyone!! The danes and I are headed down to Salem tomorrow for a CPE agility trial!

Request For Help and Random Thoughts

2011-09-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

I swear that my mind has been all over the place today! Following in this vein will be today's post. I've got a couple of questions to put forth to those reading the blog (and hopefully able to comment!) and then a bunch of random thoughts. Most of these random thoughts surround the upcoming national specialty, which is only a MONTH AWAY!!!

Firstly, if you'll notice off to the right hand side of the posts, I've added a poll. I've got both dogs entered in the Parade of Performance Title Holders. I've got my outfit figured out (though only 50% completed), their collar maker figured out, what they're going to do figured out, and what song Heffner will be in the ring to. I'm stuck on Bess though. ARG! My theme is Backstreet Boys because I love them so! Heffner's song is going to be "I Want It That Way" for a multitude of reasons. But I'm having difficulty coming up with a song of theirs that's well known and suits Bess enough. I've got three options right now, but if you have another idea, PLEASE leave me a comment!

Secondly, I need ideas for their collars!! Kennedy is going to be making their collars and I said that I would come up with some ideas for her and I'm struggling! She put out some questions to get my thinking going and I'm just dead in the water. I tried finding some iron on BSB paraphernalia and came up with zilch. I really need to get my order in with her soon so that she has enough time to make them. So if you've got ideas, by all means, fire away!!

I worked the dogs this morning on bits and pieces of things that we're working on for obedience and they were all across the board awesome!! I was a little paranoid because our Monday morning practice wasn't all that stellar, but that's probably what I should expect after they had almost a week of nothing with me being gone at the conference and then sporadic other activities that impinged on my training time. They were so on this morning though! I was really proud! Bess especially has made leaps and bounds and I hope that it continues.

Heffner had a chiropractor appointment today. Bess really laid him out a couple of times at the beach last week. That and I'm shooting for getting him in at least every six months to keep up on things. His right pelvis was a little out again, but she got things more aligned. I'll take him back to see her again in two weeks and possibly one more time right before we leave for the national specialty. I want him feeling his best!

We leave for the Litchfield Park, AZ on Oct. 26 and I'm starting to get all of the my check lists in order to make sure that I take care of everything I need to and make all the arrangements necessary. All of our entries are in. I've ordered all the souvenirs that I wanted. I've signed up for the agility workshop with both danes. I've bought tickets for the dinners that I plan on attending. I've ordered the catalogs that I wanted. I've signed both danes up for the echocardiogram clinic. I've already double checked my reservation with the host hotel!! And I think that covers the biggies. I'm getting really excited, but also a wee bit stressed because we're going to be away at a CPE agility trial the weekend before we leave. E-gads! Therefore all my advanced prepping needs to get done the week prior so that I can do the immediate stuff on Mon. and Tue. night. Oh yeah, I do still need to verify the route that I'm taking and who all are going to be in the caravan! That is definitely important!!

An email started circulating on one of the lists with more details about the Halloween dinner! I'm super stoked!! They're really putting a lot of effort into the dinner with a magician, DJ, costume contest, and now they're trying to get people to do a line dance to Thriller!! How cool is that?! Naturally, I'm totally game for it. Now I just need to learn the moves.;0)

And speaking yet more about the national specialty, towards the end of August I decided to create a page for the trip itself. Things are going to be busier this year since I'm bringing dogs and I don't know exactly how much time I'll have to update the blog or be on my computer much at all. I'm going to finally enter the world of smart phone users once the latest iPhone comes out, and I thought it would be entertaining to create a Facebook page to sort of document the trip itself and everything that goes on. I still plan on using my regular camera, but the iPhone will make it a ton easier to upload random shots and of course status updates.:0) I'm already a bit of a Facebook whore, and this will only further that. The side bonus is that you don't have to be an actual friend of mine in order to view the page! Sometimes the whole friending thing can get weird and not everyone wants to friend someone they don't know in person. Therefore, the page that will allow everyone who already has a Facebook account to keep up on what's going on if I sort of drop off the face of the planet.;0) I haven't done much on it, but just little random updates to keep me in the habit of at least periodically checking in. As the departure date approaches, more stuff will crop up. So if you're interested, just click here. I believe that my friend Chris may also be posting some of her trip on there as well!! She's got a really cute theme for their trip to the national since they're stopping at a few dog shows on the way. Any how, I'm hoping to have a lot of fun with it!

So yeah, most of my random thoughts surround the national. Probably because activity on various email lists regarding this has picked up as the date approaches. I'm really excited!! But it's going to be a lot of work to get there, a lot of work while we're there, and a lot of work getting back home. But definitely going to be worth it!!

Blogger Tuesday

2011-09-27T20:22:00.000-07:00

My pick for Blog of the Week is My Life With Flyball Dogs!! Also a Pacific Northwesterner, I just overall enjoy the blog and the pooches! I don't do flyball with my guys, but I enjoy hearing more about a sport that I know very little about. In this vein, there are a few posts that go more into the sport for those of us not involved in it. So head on over and check them out!

Movie Monday

2011-09-26T17:49:00.000-07:00

And as promised, I've got some agility videos for you! Here are the videos from Saturday:

And the videos from Sunday:

Happy Monday everyone!

Agility Trial Day 2

2011-09-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

Firstly, I have a few pictures from yesterday!! The above is one and below are the other two.:0)

I do in fact have video from yesterday (thanks Kennedy!!), but I decided that I'm going to save the agility videos for tomorrow. Kind of the perfect Movie Monday. I'll save the beach video for the following week (which saves me some time since I haven't put it together yet!!). I will, however, share the video that I bought from the professional videographers at the trial this weekend, when I get around to that course.
The first course of the day was Excellent Standard with Heffner. The course was nice and I felt like we had it pretty well, and we did. Until I botched it a bit in some spots. While I'm still happy with the run, I have to say that it's getting a little old that I'm still making these little mistakes that are costing us our runs. Frustrating! I'm more mentally there than I have been in the past. At least I feel like I am. I just keep doing these little things. ARG!! Anyhow, like I said, the course was a nice one. Unfortunately we dropped a bar on #6. After looking at the video, I did a quick movement with my left shoulder while Heffner was going over the jump and it looks like that's what caused him to drop the one bar. Blarg! And then I botched his weave pole entrance by basically not doing anything to signal it. Awesomeness!! At least my dog still loves me!

Otherwise a good run. And the run that had an unexpected event in it. Heffner has really been trying to pick up speed as he goes through the weave poles. In the process, the poles tend to take a beating. This time it was enough that he actually dislodged a pole and sent it flying! And that's why I bought the video. When I was viewing the video, the frame seemed to me to be bigger. But after viewing it at home, it doesn't seem as large and you don't really see much of the pole popping out. I'm hoping that if you're ready for it, it'll be easier to see. So watch for it! At the time I had no idea that it actually even happened.

After some waiting, both dogs were up in Open JWW.
When the course was all laid out it just felt so crammed together. While I was watching outside the ring I made this comment and a few other people agreed. There were huge gaps of unused space along both sides and the back of the ring. I was a bit bummed that things weren't spread out more so that there could be some real stretching out. Oh well. Heffner was first up and I have to admit that everything was kind of a blur. I know that we knocked a bar, but I don't entirely remember why or which one it was. I do know that he did NOT want to hold his start line stay, which was also evidenced in his Standard run. Otherwise it was a good run and we had fun!

Bess followed Heffner and she also had a good run except for one little blip on my part that caused us to go a fair bit over on time. She nailed her weaves and I celebrated too early. She got amped up, vaulted over #14, swung wide around #15, we incurred a jump refusal, and then it took extra time to get her around without back jumping, to take the jump correctly. Otherwise, good run.
Our final run of the day was Open Standard with Bess. It was a good run! Not clean, but an otherwise good run. Again, things are kind of blurring together at this point, but I believe we had a dropped bar somewhere? We did end up with a Q and 2nd place though! Yay Bessy!!

Ruthie also got to come along so that she could start getting used to chaos that surrounds agility trials. She's used to conformation shows which are generally quieter and more under control than everything that goes surrounding agility rings. She did good for the majority of the time and was actually mostly quiet, which was my biggest paranoia. I had visions of her doing her strangled hooker scream and other people around me shooting me dirty looks. Thankfully that didn't happen. Overall she was great and well behaved. The only problem she had was while I wasn't in our set up, but the people crating next to me and Kennedy confirmed it. Ruthie apparently doesn't like Vegas. As in rather violently doesn't like Vegas. When Kennedy would walk past our set up with Vegas, Ruthie would start barking and lunging from inside her crate. I was really surprised by this and I don't know why she would be bothered by Vegas. I'm sure that gradually she'll get used to seeing her, it's just weird! Aside from that, Ruthie enjoyed getting to walk around the grounds and meet lots of people.

We had a great time at the agility trial. My Cleveland Browns beat the Dolphins. And my fantasy football team won this week after our oh so hilarious league manager predicted that I wouldn't win a game all season!! It's been a pretty great day!!

I've got a bear of a work week coming up and I would really like to pretend that tomorrow isn't Monday! I hope everyone had a great weekend and that your Monday's treat you gently!

Agility Trial Day 1

2011-09-24T18:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, so technically this is day 2 of the trial since it started yesterday, but it's day 1 for us so I'm going to stick with that. I got to the fair grounds a little later than originally intended, but still managed to snag what looked to be the last available open crating space that was big enough for all my gear. The plan was to crate both dogs inside the arena, but still park the truck in my normal mostly shaded spot just in case I didn't feel that I was able to keep Heffner cool enough inside.

The day started off coolish and overcast so I was very hopeful that the predicted 80 degree temps would either not really happen or they would hold off until after I was already done for the day. No such luck, but I was able to keep both dogs happy and cool throughout the day with LOTS of complete hose downs! Two thumbs up there!!
First up for both dogs was Open Jumpers With Weaves. Thankfully there were enough 24" dogs entered that I didn't have to stress about how many dogs were in between my guys. Bess was up first. I did a lead out beyond jump #2 and did a little hand switch cue that I've worked on a little bit to help signal the dogs that there's a change of direction coming up. I just forgot about the part where I do need to actually move. Preferably before she takes off for the second jump so that she knows where to go. D'oh! I started moving late, we almost collided and there was a knocked bar. I believe that the rest of the run was fairly decent. She did pop out of the weaves towards the end and I had to fight the urge to just push on through the course so that we didn't take forever. We redid them and I just chilled out and let her take however long it was going to take her and I think that paid off for us in Standard. So not too shabby of a run for Bess, but no Q.

Heffner followed and I did the same initial move, but I think I still botched it for him because I'm pretty sure that's the bar that he dropped on the course. His weaves were awesome! We haven't practiced them at all since I believe June, he just loves them! He really started to open up on the course and thoroughly enjoyed himself. It felt so good to be running him again! The big grey dog is back and ready for action!! He did have the one dropped bar, so no Q.
After a few hours of hanging out, Heffner was up again in Excellent Standard. It was a pretty nice course. I'm not usually a fan of tunnel or chute starts, but between the two, I'd much rather have a chute. Everything was going well until the teeter. Heffner shook himself off after coming out of the tunnel and I didn't support his entrance onto the teeter. He went on at an angle, lost his footing and bailed off. I chose not to repeat it for two reasons 1) he doesn't get weird about contact obstacles. 2) I wanted to finish the course. If I had chosen to take him over the teeter again, I would have forfeited the ability to finish the course. The rest of the run went pretty well until jump #13 where I think I cut him off and we got a refusal. Otherwise, he did great and I was really proud of him!!
We ended the day with Bess in Open Standard. The course was still nice and I was definitely going to pay more attention to the teeter entrance. Everything went really well and she was more lively for this run! She was actually pretty fun to run! Her weaves were slow, but she didn't pop out and she nailed the entrance with basically no help from me. The only minor blip on the radar that didn't seem to get caught by the judge was the ending. We ended on a tire jump. Instead of jumping through the tire, Bess jumped through the side area within the frame. I turned her around and had her go through the actual tire. Otherwise it was a nice clean run! Which means a Q!!!:0)

It was a great day. And now I'm sitting here typing this, sitting in multiple layers of dried sweat and trying to figure out what exactly I'm going to eat for dinner before I crash for the night so that I can do it all over again tomorrow!

Double Specialty

2011-09-23T21:38:00.000-07:00

Well, it was a lovely day for a dog show today. The weather was a bit on the warm and humid side, but for the past few years that I've gone to this show, it seems to always turn out that way. There was a sizable entry and lots of gorgeous dogs!! I was able to see a lot of my dog show "family" today and that's always awesome!! The down side to such a busy and packed day is that I don't get quite as much time to chat as I would like and since I only had Bess entered today, I sadly won't have the rest of the weekend to catch up at a more relaxed pace. On the up side, I do get to play agility with the danes this weekend!

But first the dog show results. For the morning specialty Bess won her class. I'm not entirely convinced that the judge really liked her a ton over the other bitch in the class. I think it was more the fact that the bitch wouldn't hold still for examination that put her in second. Either way, Bess showed really well and I was very pleased with how she did in her class and in the winners bitch ring.

For the afternoon specialty Bess took second in her class. The other bitch was less skittish than the morning, but still far from solid. Oh well.

I'm pretty stinkin' beat and I still have to finish getting things ready for tomorrow. We've got an early morning so that I can go set up the dogs' crates at the agility site. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn't get too warm and crating inside the arena won't be too much for Heffner. I'm going to park in a back up spot just in case.

So yeah, agility tomorrow and then coming home to pass out! Happy Friday everyone!

Beach Day!!

2011-09-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

Just a heads up that this post is going to be quite picture heavy! I also took a ton of video today, but I'll put that together hopefully in time for Monday. It was a GORGEOUS day on the coast!! Unbelievable! I very rarely get out there when it's actually warm and today was one of those rare times. The temperatures started out in the low sixties in the morning with a slight breeze and then warmed up into the seventies with a stronger wind. It was actually quite warm and a bit humid once you got off the beach.

I got to the beach about two and a half hours before everyone else because I wanted to bring the dogs and let them run around for a bit. I almost left Ruthie at home because I knew that we were going to be out there for a while and even though her stamina and endurance have so far impressed me, it was definitely going to be a long day. I am definitely glad that I didn't! Once I got her onto the sand, it was like Ruthie crack! She was having the best time! She was running every where and trying to keep up with the big dogs as they ran around. Super cute! But any how, now on to the pictures, with a few bits of commentary sprinkled throughout.:0)

For starters, I brought along my rubber boots to wear on the beach and it was the best idea ever!
Once on the beach and after a bit of crazy happy running around, Ruthie did some of her signature back scratching that cracks me up!

Ruthie had a great time just being one of the "big" kids.

Throughout the day, the wind would send the sea foam skittering across the sand. Bess was particularly enamored with pouncing on them.
And just some random shots.

Ruthie taking her turn at attacking the sea foam.

Being brave walking through some of the streams on the beach.
And the crazy one...
More random shots.

Sorry that some of the pictures came out so dark. I find myself really wishing that I had Photo Shop to better process my pictures. Then I think about the number of pictures that I have a tendency to take and the large amount of time that I would spend processing those pictures and I realize that maybe it's for the best.;0)

And with that, I'm off to take care of some doggy toe nails and prep Bess for a double specialty up in Shelton, WA tomorrow. I know, I know. I said that we were basically done with conformation, but it's a specialty and I already her entries in. And I'm really looking forward to seeing a lot of the people who'll be there. So basically this is a for fun dog show. Though I'm not telling Adam that!

I'm Back, Phew!

2011-09-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

I'm back from a great conference in Austin, TX! I have to tell you, while I understand that theoretically if you live there you get used to the heat, but in actuality, I don't know how people do it! And it wasn't even as hot while we were there as it was the week before! Thank goodness for air conditioning!

The dogs were VERY happy to have their mommy home. Heffner kept nose bumping me and followed me every where around the house that I went. Bess was licking me constantly like I was a lollipop. Her favorite spot was my chin. If I hadn't stopped her, I'm not sure how long she would have gone on for! Ruthie was leaping around me and happy to race around the back yard with me. Definitely good to be home! And both hubby and the dogs survived my absence!;0)

Not a whole lot to report otherwise. It was an academic conference, so LOTS of talks with a couple of poster sessions thrown in. I picked up some great ideas for a project that I'm going to pitch to my boss next week. I learned all sorts of seemingly random things. At first I was disappointed that the talks were scheduled in 15 min. increments, but with the number of people presenting and the fact that these talks were scheduled from roughly 7:30am until 5:00pm or 6:00pm, 15 min. is about the maximum length of time that I could pay attention to any one topic. All good stuff though!!

This afternoon Adam and I headed out with the dogs to get a professional family portrait taken! I picked a really pretty area that's fairly close to our house and the photographer met us out there. She got lots of shots of us together as well as individual shots of each dog. I'm really excited to see how they turn out!

There were a couple of down sides to the outdoor shoot. For one, today was hot. I was not planning on this and I was less than pleased given the fact that two out of my three dogs are usually quite panty in relatively warm weather and this was enough to make all three pant and be generally hot. I brought a spray bottle along with me and kept misting them, but it didn't help. The other problem we had involved Miss Bess' prey drive. We did the shoot near some ponds that have ducks in them who are used to being fed by people. Bess fixated on the ducks any time they were even close to us. Her focus is complete. There is no food and no toy that can distract her. So that made things interesting. And of course, trying to get three dogs to look at the camera, hold a position, and have good expressions and ears is a feat in and of itself!

Ahhhhhh.....so happy Wednesday everyone! Tomorrow the dogs and I are off to the beach for a little work related "retreat" of sorts. I'm heading down really early so that the danes at least can run off some steam on the beach before we meet up with everyone else.

Conference Time

2011-09-14T21:00:00.001-07:00

Things have been busy lately and especially so today. I'm leaving in the morning for a work related conference in Austin, TX. I'll be gone until Tue. While I've got posts that I would like to write, my time is short and I still need to finish packing. So "see" you all next week and keep your fingers crossed that the dogs don't drive Adam insane while I'm gone!;0)

Movie Monday

2011-09-12T17:40:00.000-07:00

Sorry for my extended absence! It's not that I don't have anything to post about, but it got really hot here all last week and it pretty much zapped me of what little brain power I had left. Any exercising with the dogs was done around the lake because it was too hot to do anything else. I didn't even go outside to go running by myself, but stayed inside on the treadmill instead. So here we go, picking things back up.

This weeks video is a few different clips of the cuteness that is Ruthie! I tried capturing some of the funny stuff that she does around the house. I was successful in most cases, but am still trying to capture others that I missed. I hope you enjoy!

Blogger Tuesday

2011-09-06T17:50:00.000-07:00

My pick for Blog of the Week is Identity: V!! The blog is about the adventures and training of Elli, a dalmatian/pit bull mix. And they just happen to live pretty close by in Portland! How cool is that!

Yesterday, Elli's mom did a little post about keeping dogs' toe nails short. This is something that I also feel is incredibly important regardless of what kind of activities your dog does. I dremel all three of mine once a week and am religious about it. Neurotically so! Her post also got me thinking about doing a few different posts on nail trimming. I've been toying with the idea, but this definitely makes for the perfect segue way into it.:0)

So head on over and check them out!

Movie Monday - Conditioning

2011-09-05T12:41:00.001-07:00

This week's Movie Monday also doubles as a conditioning video and little Ruthie makes her "training" video debut!:0)

This video is just a basic approach to some variety that you can throw into a routine involving an aerobic step. With a larger dog and a smaller step, even simple movements such as sitting take more concentration and muscle control, as evidenced by Heffner and Bess. The aerobic step is also something that's a little different than the various core balancing balls that we use. The possibilities are really endless as far as what types of equipment you can work into a strength training routine for your dogs! It's one of the many reasons why I get so much enjoyment out of doing these various routines with my guys.

Before putting a string of movements together I first introduce the dogs to the individual pieces of equipment and get them offering the positions/movements that I want. Once they're comfortable with the equipment, I start putting it all together!

The aerobic step was bought off of Amazon, and is one of the more basic steps. Right now, I didn't feel like spending a lot of money on the step and this fit my purposes perfectly. It's a small enough step that just moving around on it requires concentration and muscle control from the danes. Eventually I would like to get one of the longer steps, but this one is great for right now. The only down side to this particular step is that the top surface is VERY slick and poses the threat of injury if I were to try to use it as is. To solve the problem, I cut off a chunk of my yoga mat to fit the step. Adam then recommended I secure it to the step with a spray adhesive, which has worked woooooonderfully. And now we have a fully functioning aerobic step that the dogs can use with pulling or straining something!

Just having the dogs sit and stand on the step got boring after a bit, so I decided to play around with some of the other equipment that I have to spice things up a bit. I don't use my Paw Pods for very much right now, so I thought I would throw them in there and see what happened. Prior to ever having the dogs step on them I tried them out with my own bare feet because I was a little concerned that the spikes were too poky and they were. To alleviate this problem I took an electric sander to the tips and sanded them all down so that they were nice and rounded. Much better! After that, I got the dogs to start standing with just their front feet on them to get them used to the positioning that I wanted. Then I combined it with the step and we have an exercise that's a little more interesting.

I hope everyone is having a great Labor Day!!

Weekend Wrap Up

2011-09-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

We've had a pretty low key weekend here. I had Bess entered in an all breed dog show this weekend. She went Reserve Winners Bitch both days. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride. It helped me to cement my decision that she is now retired from all breed dog shows. There's a specialty at the end of the month that I've got her entered in and I think I'll probably enter her in another specialty in January. After that we're going to start planning on when to spay and gastropexy her. We gave it three years, over 100 entries, and over $2,500 spent in JUST entry fees to be at only 9 points. I got the message and her retirement is imminent.

On the up side, my friend Elizabeth is going to let me show her new dane puppy!! I got to meet Ruby this weekend at the dog show and she is an absolute doll! Elizabeth has already done such a great job with her. I did some hand stacking with her and she was such a good girl! At four months old I expected a lot more squiggling and antsiness when I got to stacking her rear. She was great though! And a pretty girl to boot! So even though Bess will be retiring, I'll still have a dane to show!:0)

I hope everyone is having a great weekend!