Miscellany Again

SUMMARY: Vibrating collar, newspaper fetching, face plants, Border Collies, excellent agility dogs.

My new vibrating collar arrived yesterday; I was so excited! Plugged it in for its 12-hour charge, tried to turn it on this morning, and it doesn't work per the instructions. Half an hour of trying to figure it out, then 20 minutes on the phone with support, and they're going to have to send me a replacement. Sigh. At least I'm getting a new one, but I so wanted to be able to play with it this weekend?

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Y'all probably know that Boost gets the paper from the driveway for me every morning. She loves it; so excited to charge out there, pounce on it (sometimes sliding and a little ripping, but I don't mind), grab it, and come running back in. Sometimes I get the Excited Bark before she goes out.

The other morning, as she was running back up the driveway, a squirrel ran right in front of her and off across the lawn! I saw those ears go up, the tail come up (the "wow, now THIS is REALLY INTERESTING" look) and she veered from her path about a meter or so (in this context, saying "about 2 feet" or "about a yard" both seemed to be ambiguous, hurray for metric), with me thinking, "uh oh", then she veered back in and continued running up the steps to deliver the paper! You go, Border Collie!

Tika was never that kind of dog.

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Speaking of Border Collies--Boost sometimes likes to sleep in her crate in the bedroom. I think when the nights are warmer, she goes there. She hasn't slept in it for a while, but the last two nights, she's gone right in there. Last night, as I climbed into bed, she stuck her head out, stepped out stretching, and I said, "Oh, look, a Border Collie!", trying to be funny, but she completely misunderstood: Went into alarm barking, looking around and at the door in particular. Took a while to convince her that SHE was the border collie I was talking about!

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Last night in class, I did a faceplant. Not doing actual agility, no, of course not. I had just snapped the leash back onto Boost to leave her at the sidelines, turned and stepped away, and somehow a loop of the leash caught my foot and slammed me face forward onto the ground. I've never had this happen before. Usually you *trip* over something--your foot catches and releases as you flail, trying to catch yourself. Nope, it was as if my foot had been suddenly nailed to the ground and the centripetal force slammed me down before I could even get my arms out. Hit my forehead, cheek, nose, glasses, chin, shoulders, hips. A little stunning but on the face of it (ha) almost undoubtedly less painful than landing on my knees or having my arms extended trying to catch myself. I'm quite proud of myself for being able to use centripetal in a sentence.

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Both dogs did great in class last night. Tika and I seemed to be communicating very well. Boost had one little sequence where she knocked 3 bars in a row and we stopped and regrouped. Mostly bars did not come down. And at the end, a tricky run with a couple of back-side-front-cross funny things we didn't get through, and I decided that was enough practicing failures and stopped that quickly. But mostly all really nice, including Boost sending to the weaves 10 feet on the far side of the dogwalk from me.

More false hope for actual Qs in the future.

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No agility again this weekend. I'm looking forward to it.