Lucy is learning the weave poles. So I wanted to set them up or we could use them a lot. Notice where she has decided to settle. And I can’t help but be reminded of the fact that when as a small girl I was given a doll house for Christmas, I turned it into a horse barn for my play horses within about 20 minutes.
… but Chico changed the plan.
Lucy gets bored, so I made her a treat-dispensing toy out of a seltzer bottle. She didn’t really get it, but Chico was all over it.
To give Miss Lu a chance at it, I put Chico in the crate. When she started to work the toy, Chico got all snarky (as I expected he would), but even though he couldn’t get to her, she decided that he had said it was his. My idea of Chico demonstrating the thing kind of backfired, now he owns it and she’s afraid to touch it. We can change that, I know we can.
I’m working on the boxes that didn’t get unpacked during the big push to make the house livable and this turned up. This sheet of paper came with Chico, but it took me many months to find it the first time, tucked in with all the supplies that came with him. I was so busy in those early days figuring out how to manage him that I never made it to the bottom of the Chico basket.
We still use okay as a release word, and crate, but after that, we’ve evolved our one practices.
This paper can go in the recycling. I don’t need it.
I actually imagined that it would be Chico looking out this window. So far, Lucy is much more interested in the view than Chico is.
Here’s a little vid of Miss Lu learning delayed gratification by leaving the cookies and coming with me.
She’s a genius.
I’ve been so quiet because Chico and I moved to the new house on December 21 (Lucy went to Kathryn’s to play with other collies for the holidays, but she’s back now). It took all my attention to pack, move, and unpack (which is still far from unfinished). Lucy was just too helpful to be of any help to the unpacking process.
Lucy continues to learn agility equipment. She is a natural, curious and fast and happy to run and to try new things. I turned my back on her for a minute at Julie’s arena and she was up the see-saw and I had to grab the far end to keep it from slamming to the ground and making noise that might scare her. She will learn that it makes noise, and starts going down with her weight, but I want to teach her, not have her be surprised and possibly frightened.
Chico is running better and happier than ever before. He’s down a couple pounds (which is a lot on a 40 pound dog), from almost 46 to just under 43. He had his eleventh birthday on Sunday (well, it’s his Got Ya Day and pretty close to his actual, but unknown, birth date) and celebrated by having a perfect run in Jumpers and an almost perfect run in Standard (slid off the table, other than that, we were pretty awesome). It seems there is something about having Lucy around that makes him work harder at everything.
At the trial we went down to the dog park and found a sweet little Pug named Walter who adored running after balls with Lucy. Chico stayed in the corner of the enclosure, tied to a post, and yelled at the other dogs for having fun while I threw the ball and Walter’s person stayed over by Chico, keeping the playing dogs from getting too close to him. It worked well. She was a good pet owner, savvy to the situation and proactive.
Today we’ll go meet Maggie and her person Ellen at the fairgrounds and let Maggie and Lucy run. And Chico doesn’t have to.
And there’s Chico excavating one.
But we made it to the only slightly buried weaves and I galumphed up and back on snow shoes.
Second set was clean, but the first time through I don’t think he believed we were really doing this. We could take our time and he didn’t slip. And neither did I.
The river is doing wonderful things as it gets colder.
And s/he thought this picture of Chico was one of the best taken all weekend, it made the photog’s “picks” collection.
http://www.mcaoe.com/112015%20Big%20E%20Fri%20Premiere%20STD/48/med/BIG_9422.htm
I actually like a number of them better, including the first in the series for Premier Standard:
http://www.mcaoe.com/112015%20Big%20E%20Fri%20Premiere%20STD/53/lg/BIG_9412.htm
There’s also a great sequence of a tight wrap, images 914, 915, and 916.
Might have to get prints of those.
The weekend before Thanksgiving Chico and were at the Thanksgiving Cluster, the biggest dog show in the East. Agility, conformation, obedience – four days of canine communing. We had two runs each day, I didn’t want to push it. Our runs were always pretty close together in the day, so we had time to take some walks and do some exploring.
On Friday, we had a crazy run in Time 2 Beat, but settled down and had a clean run in Standard. Saturday, we also had a clean run in Standard, and what luck, Karen Kay was ringside with her iPad when we ran, so I have video.
It was a bit slow and careful, but it got us our Excellent Standard title. That moves us to the highest level in AKC. We don’t meet different courses, but we finished the introductory requirements, all the baby levels and now we run with “the big dogs.” Getting to Masters is accomplished by some experienced handlers, with well adjusted dogs, in six months. Sometimes a year or eighteen months. It took us almost six years (we started agility in February of 2010). We didn’t trail every weekend, and we’re not about to start that habit now, but this is a hard won accomplishment for me and my dog.
We had no more clean runs that weekend, but there was one that should have been but I pulled him out of the correct end of the tunnel that was last obstacle and by not stopping instantly, pushed him into the wrong end. It was a clean run in my book, at least by the dog.
AND, as this picture shows,
we did have the funnest, fasted, f*#%ed up run of any of the dogs in our Premier Jumpers class. Premier is more like USDAA, with trickier handling and some back sides of jumps and is kinds new to AKC. Well, we did all the obstacles (including the fastest, most balls to the walls set of weaves Chico has done in competition maybe ever), in the order the judge requested, but not always from the side the course map suggested. And it looks like we took down some bars too. BUT, I achieved goal behavior, Chico had NO IDEA that he was ever off course – I made sure that he knew he was doing everything right because he only did exactly what I told him to, and he just went faster and faster, and worked at greater and greater distance from me. Standard course time was 45 seconds, no one in our class qualified, but we were the fastest (at forty-seven seconds) of the group. No do-overs for us, we messed up obstacle three and after that it was just run, run, run.
It was a terrific weekend. I got to have a nice meal with friends from agility class; I ate yummy Turkish food with a long-time-friend who lives near by; the dogs and I got to take a long walk on private land owned by our friend and vet; and we sent Lucy home for a couple weeks to play with other Collies. She deserves a break from grumpy Chico who won’t play with her.
Tonight we start a class in delayed gratification with Lucy, and on Thursday, she comes back home with us. Lucy has an appointment with the groomer on Wednesday, and since all I can seem to do is keep her from being too muddy and filled with sticker-burrs, it’s probably a good idea that she see a professional.
Can I Bring the Dog? 