Despite his hyper-vigilance, Chico is a pretty laid back guy without a lot of natural drive. The other day Julie had me working on getting Chico excited for the weaves. We played a game called “Do you see?”
Julie was recording us, this clip might have made it into her on-line course, I dunno, but this was the best “set” in our “reps” of the game, and she sent it to me and it is so darned cute, I’m sharing it with you.
Clean run in Gamblers. I got lost twice in Jumpers, Chico saved it once, but I was too far off the mark the second time and sent him off course.
This is starting to feel awfully familiar…snow is predicted to come sometime this afternoon and last until early morning (the most snowfall is predicted for 4 PM until 2 AM). We need to be an hour and a half away at 7:30 AM tomorrow to play USDAA games.
Pack for an overnight for me and the dog, drive this afternoon, arriving around dark at 6, move in to the room, spend the evening in a motel room, tempted by cable TV, get up at 6 and move back out of the room and drive to the trial…or spend the afternoon practicing tricks, sleep in my own bed tonight, and drive early tomorrow morning. Either way I am driving in snow, and there will be fewer folks on the road with me at 6 on Sunday morning than at 5 on Saturday evening.
And if I am late and miss my first class, there are still three classes for us after that. If it’s crappy at 6, and I’m going to miss Jumpers, there’s a big break between our Jumpers class and our next class, big enough that I can stay home until about 8 AM, driving the whole way in daylight.
At least, that’s what I am thinking at eight in the morning on Saturday.
In our neighborhood, this endless parade of snowstorms have only dropped about six or eight inches per storm. Six or eight inches of lovely, dry, powdery, department store Christmas window snow. The skiers are thrilled, and I’m enjoying it on snowshoe.
One of my neighbors and I have been working on breaking the path along one of the Conservation Commission trails by the Bearcamp River. Snowshoeing makes me use my newly-activated glutes rather more than I do when I walk (my coach will be pleased to hear that) and I admit to being a bit of a wimp, so I’m only breaking a quarter mile of new trail at a time.
The start of the trail is right along the river.
Looking back toward the start of the trail. To the right is a little bit of the bridge over the Bearcamp that is used to get to my house.
Something was going on at the base of that little tree.
“Hi, hi, hi! Guess what I found?”
The trail goes behind South Tamworth village.
You can just barely see the bell tower of the church behind the trees.
And we’ll go back out this afternoon and re-tramp the trail, and go a little further. My neighbor has a pair of ski poles for me to borrow, she assures me that they will help my stamina.
The wood-burning stove pictured here is the one I have selected for my house. It’s so simple as to be elegant.
I ought not be too surprised to find it in a design magazine, there’s only one dealer in eastern US, and a six month wait to get the stove.
Blizzard watch for tomorrow, but I have a plan. We got up this morning, drove through light snow, arrived at the trial at 10, rather earlier than I thought we needed to be, but I didn’t know but that people would cancel and things would be going faster than I had estimated. Things were not moving faster than I estimated, in fact, they might have been going a bit slower. Looked at the course map, only one set of weaves, so it complied with the master plan. The weather for Sunday afternoon/evening was looking dicey – no more snow, but lots of wind blowing the new snow around, so the plan evolved into, do the PSJ run and go home, tuck in, wait for the snow to end. After all, we’re sparing Chico’s sore muscle and eating entry fees doesn’t make me special.
So we waited, we walked, we went inside and looked around with cookies, did some paying stuff with the practice jump, walked again, sat in the car and made phone calls.
Finally, the Team Gamblers runs were over and the course builders took over the ring. And they started building for Snooker, the class that was supposed to be after ours. So I went and looked at the schedule, and they had changed our class to the last class of the day. That would mean running at about 3 or 4 PM, another three hours. AND driving home in the dark.
My read of the weather was that if I didn’t get home by dark tonight, I was going to be in a hotel until Monday morning. That plan didn’t really work for me.
So, I crossed us off the list and made a note that we were going home and wouldn’t be back tomorrow, called and canceled the hotel reservation, and we went home. There’s gonna be plenty of chances to try again. And we did some good work today, the kind of work we haven’t done for a while – just go to a trial without competing – and while this paid, it didn’t pay as well as when we run. I’d like to think we built desire for future competitions.
Chico seems to be doing well. He can run in the deep snow on an hour walk and come home sound. I have a stretching plan for him from Dr Amanda, for before and after running agility. We have one class on Saturday, Performance Speed Jumping. Courses in PSJ have weaves (something we’re avoiding because it puts more torque on the sore area than do running and jumping) and A-frame and jumps and tunnels. You can encounter the weaves twice or the A-frame twice. I promised the doc that if there are two sets of weaves in our course (which I can’t know until we drive two and a half hours to the trial site and get the course map), I would pull Chico from that class.
In that case, we will retire to the motel, a convenient ten minutes away, sit out an overnight snow storm,
Weather forecast for Westborough, MA, our destination for the weekend.
and go back the next day to see if we can make it through Standard, Gamblers (where I can avoid the weaves), and Pairs (where I can ask my partner to take the half of the course with the weaves).
I figure that by the time we are ready to head home on Sunday, the worst of the weather will be past us, pounding the coast from Boston to Bangor, and we’ll be inland of that.
My pal Chico knows that we’re going somewhere, he doesn’t know yet exactly what is going to happen, but he is chillin’ near me:
“Toys? No thanks, don’t want to be distracted from keeping my attention on your actions”
I explained it once, I’ll do it again, but he’ll still be super attentive to me all day.
Today Chico and I went to see how the guys were doing on the granary.
It is pretty snowy.
Who’s been here?
“Make this dumpster my own.”
The house is about as ripped apart as it is going to get.
Some leveling has been done, and some new piers will get made and placed. For now, they are doing what my dad says is the only useful thing he learned in the service – “if it wobbles, shim it.”
And those are (temporary) shims holding my floor level. Or as level as it is going to get.
Digging around under the floor boards, they found an old receipt book from the granary. I’ll get a picture of it one day and post it. The receipts contained are from the summer of 1914, so I know the building is at least that old.
After making Jake late for his lunch break, we took a snow shoe.
The snow is deeper than Chico’s chest in many places, so for going any distance, he wants to follow as I break trail.
I did get him out in “the rough” once or twice.
Dog out front on the way home.
We didn’t go nearly as far as I wanted to, I ran into drifts that I couldn’t lift my foot high enough to get through, and wimped out. But we were gone long enough that just as I was ready to leave, a truck showed up, backing into the driveway, beeping.
It was the first load of materials to be delivered. That means the demolition is ending and the construction is starting. Exciting!
“C’mon back, c’mon back…”
If the universe agrees, we’re going to try USDAA agility in Westborough, Mass this coming weekend. I’m signed up for two classes Saturday and four on Sunday…I doubt that we’ll do all of that, and we might not even go at all if Chico backslides, but today he was darned active and didn’t seem sore.
Julie is having a Winter Agility Camp this weekend and I offered to help with the food in exchange for a chance to run the courses. It’s a good deal for both of us – notice I am presuming Julie will be happy with my work – I love to cook and don’t often have a chance to cook big batches of chili and pans of lasagne and have them eaten immediately by a group of hungry people, and Julie loves to plan courses and work with human/dog teams, but, I sense, shopping for food and cooking, not as much, and she doesn’t have to do that part of making this weekend work.
Poor Chico is going to have to sit this one out. He can come with me, and we can take nice walks at Julie’s, but he’s not supposed to jump or weave for at least another week, maybe longer. He’s not going to think this is a very good idea, but he’ll have to trust me.
And Julie is so nice, she’ll find another dog for me to run this weekend. Maybe one of hers, or maybe someone is bringing several dogs to camp and will share. I don’t know, and I don’t care. One of the holes on my agility experience cloth is running any dog besides Chico, so I welcome the experience. I don’t especially like how I got here – my guy laid up – but that injury is also gift if I look at it right.
On Saturday morning I woke up all happy and proud for Chico and excited to go back and do more ‘gilities the next day. It was not to be. Chico could hardly stand up, he couldn’t manage the stairs, he was very, very ouchie. An email to our agility-classmate-who-is-also-a-vet Amanda Rizner confirmed that rest, ice, and arnica would all help. That evening Chico told me his shoulder didn’t hurt at all and it was his foot that hurt. The next morning he woke up feeling sore, but suddenly rose from his bed to run outside and bark at nothing in the woods and then wanted a walk, but then was sore, but then wanted to play tug. And he asked me if I was crazy for asking if his foot still hurt.
Doctor Amanda was in her office on Sunday afternoon, so we went in. It’s a bad muscle pull in what would be his armpit if his front leg was an arm. So, try to limit his activity as much as possible and wait for it to heal. We’ll have to find other outlets for his energy. Time to learn a new trick or two, gotta keep that boy busy.
Can I Bring the Dog? 