Phew. Deep breath. I think I’m sleeping in Monday. The past seven days have been a flurry of activity for me and I need to chill this week. Did the movies on Tuesday and watched The Golden Compass with some friends. I liked it, not Movie of the Year material yet still very entertaining and absorbing. It stayed quite close to the Philip Pullman books and I liked the theological aspects present in both formats. The bears were impressive and pulled no punches in the brutality of their hierarchy. Lyra was played by a girl who looked very much like the image I had in my mind of the main character when I was reading the books. Worth the movie ticket price. Cloverfield wasn’t. I left the cinema with a vague sense of being ripped off and a growing desire to write the film makers demanding my money back for what was obviously a fairly cheaply made movie with an underhanded marketing ploy. Last time I fall for that one. If you like hand held dodgy film work for an hour and a half combined with a few special effects of a monster, very little character development and no story apart from Monster destroys city then this is the flick for you. Just make sure you don’t suffer nausea with watching a screen constantly in motion with someone’s hand holding a mini-cam.
Wednesday and Thursday we (Tim, myself, Cypher and Spryte) took a trip to just outside of Dongara to stay on a rural property with family. 4 hours north of
There were a couple of other dogs there and Spryte learnt to deal with them whilst Cypher suffered in not so much silence but more with much vocalising of his displeasure with the arrangements. The boy really needs to realise that if I am within 10 feet of him he doesn’t have to do his manly macho posturing in order for me to feel safe and that everyone knows he’s full of the proverbial as when push comes to shove he’s the biggest piece of chicken faecal matter out there. So that was a very nice but short break from suburbia and one that we hope to repeat sometime soon! Photos posted below.
Cole - the most chilled out cat I've ever had the pleasure
of meeting. So does not give a stuff about dogs and can
intimidate them all with a single swipe of his paws.
that's 11 puppies in there born 4 days after we left!
Beans - 8 months old and probably a cross between
a bully something and a kangaroo. She has the most
gorgeous temperament and is probably quite ADD.
Spryte likes to use her pointy end in playing.
Got back in late Thursday night and then was up again early Friday morning to ensure that I was down in time for the start of the seminars by Greg and Laura Derrett. Greg and Laura came out from the
Back in the afternoon to get ready for a trial. Spryte was entered in NFC (Not For Competition) but I scratched her as she had run pretty hard at the beach and given herself a blister which broke causing her to limp. I trimmed the skin off and she was fine after a while. Cypher was feeling pretty wiped out I think. He’d swum quite hard at the beach the day before as the current was quite strong and spent a long time running up and down. I think he must have been feeling it because he dropped bars in a couple of courses, went clear in two classes but was feeling quite slow to run. Raven was very good. I pulled her out in her first run – Open Jumping as she dropped a bar. Then in Masters Agility she tried so hard and I was a completely crap handler and cost her a qually. In Open Agility she dropped a couple of bars and then in Masters Jumping crap handler came out again and opened mouth unnecessarily and pulled her off a jump. *Sigh* Of course she kept all her bars up. Grrrrr ARGH!! I seriously do not know when I am going to get it through my head that our silent runs are always our best runs. That was proven beautifully on Saturday night. Masters Agility was our first run and I was a wuss and released her before I got to the point I wanted to be and she dropped a bar so we withdrew. Then I had Open Jumping with her and said maybe three verbals at the most and she ran clear there. Open Agility she ran beautifully in a very fast time and I apparently kicked an upright as I ran past it knocking the bar off! Clutz! I didn’t even realise I’d done it till after the Judge and timekeeper told me. Then last run of the night was Masters Jumping again, kept mouth closed through most of it and she ran clear and came 2nd. I think my 2008 mantra for running Raven will be ‘Shut Up’. Or perhaps I should just invest in some gaffer tape.
The highlight for me on Saturday night was running young Spryte. I entered her in Novice Jumping in NFC and walked the course to see if I would actually run her. It was a very nice first course so I decided to go ahead. The SCT on it was 34 seconds I think. I was very pleased with her by the end of that run as not only had she run it clear she had also run it with the quickest time of the class in 19 seconds. That was a really nice way to start our trialling career. The judge wanted to know why I had her in NFC as she would have won but I explained the reasoning. To me this was like a show n go or a fun match just to see where she was at. Although she ran well I know she can run faster so I’m hoping with a few more NFC runs under our belt her confidence and speed will increase. A friend videoed it so it was good to watch it back. She took a couple of seconds to orient herself after the chute tunnel so I perhaps should have spoken to her there.
During the day on Saturday I audited Greg and Laura. The Advanced session with Greg in the morning and the Puppy session with Laura in the afternoon. Both workshops were good in that they gave me exercises, drills, little games to work on with all my dogs. We watched some footage of the nose touch seesaw application and some of the jump grid work they do plus flatwork and how they use tugging. Greg spoke about teaching a running a frame and the issues associated with it. His Detox and Susan Garrett’s Encore are currently the only two dogs who have been taught it. He’s still not sure if he will teach his next dog a running a frame till Detox is 4 and showing evidence of it’s benefit over the nose touch. Lots of interesting discussions took place and I will write up some of my notes soon.
Sunday I had booked private lessons with Laura and we had one first up in the morning. Sue and I had our young dogs there and Cathy had Snazzy. She set up the double box grid and tested our dogs initially just to see if they were up to doing some drills on there. To be honest I wasn’t sure that Spryte would be, unlike Raven and Cypher she is not a dog you can train over and over and she’s still giving everything she’s got. I take the less is more, quality over quantity approach with her. So I brought Cy with me just in case. However she was great, she had several runs on several different sequences and she coped very well, Even when I brought the Frisbee out after using food she was keen to get to it. Not Cypher level keenness (let’s face it….that level is more a manic kind of keenness) but keener than I thought she would be. An absolute bonus was that we broached the cutting behind tendencies that show up from time to time not just with Spryte but with the other youngsters. I wasn’t sure how to combat that however Laura broke it down and explained very specifically what to do in this situation. We need to avoid at all costs the cutting behind to the extent that if we see them doing it we whip around and grab them to make sure they don’t complete the cross behind. It’s an issue that can become a huge bane in your training and trialling and it’s something we need to work on everyday. I also covered Cy’s seesaw behaviour (different in trials compared to training), the cue we use combined with deceleration to indicate a turn, rear cross timing, front cross timing. So much stuff to do I’m glad I took notes. I really need to write up a training program for me as I can easily see that everyone misses out training something. I think the best way to avoid that is to write up a training program. Yes because I have so much time to write these sorts of things! Hmmm….perhaps I shall write up a book, a week by week break down of what to train, the duration of particular training and when to train it; it should give, in the long term, complete coverage over everything! Sounds very technical and methodical to me (and so not my modus operandi) but surely it has to be better than the haphazard approach I have now which is “Oh crap that went wrong, I now know what I’m training next session”.
I have been mucking around with photoshop and some images. There are some really nice backgrounds out there on stock image websites and learning how to manipulate them, render and lift off foregrounds has been interesting. Not that I'll ever use this name or prefix to breed but it's fun to play around with it.
The next big event on the calendar for us is Friday night. I finally get to see The Police live in concert for the first (and no doubt the last) time ever. All I've heard about them so far has been excellent and I cannot wait! Agility people will realise how much this means to me when they know I'm actually giving up a trial for this concert. It takes a lot for me to miss a night of agility! However there was no hesitation on my part. That said, Rave and Cy are still entered, I figured Robyn can have some fun with them and she can remember all over again the joys of running Masters courses. *Evil grin*
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