Just Busy, Nothing Exciting

Enjoying my weekend off from dog agility, which is cool, because with dog agility usually I have to haul several cartloads of gear from my car alllll the way around to my set-up location, whereas when I'm on vacation... heyyyyyyy, waiiiiiiit a minute....

SUMMARY: Just busy, nothing exciting

I've just been trying to keep up with Work work. Went out of town for 3 days without the dogs, too. No training classes last week because Power Paws was hosting seminars.

Boost's 5-foot Aframe is getting danged fast. Have a week and a half to get it up to Performance height, which I think is 5'6", if I want to try some in competition. Her nearly-full-height teeter is pretty fast but I'm not sure I like how she's doing it--instead of propelling straight down the middle of the ramp, her front feet go off to the edges almost as if she's climbing the second half of the ramp as it starts to descend. I'll have to watch some of the really fast dogs doing teeters this weekend at the SMART USDAA trial to see whether any of them have adopted this interesting technique. I might want to back off on this height, too, to get her back to running straight through on the TOP of the plank.

Haven't been doing tons with Tika. It's amazing how competent she seems in comparison to Boost. All of a sudden the small things that make Tika and me mess up seem *really* small versus working on getting Boost to full height contacts or to do 12 weave poles in a row.

Jake is such a challenge to get to run and play that often I just don't make the effort. It's enough effort getting Tika to concentrate on me. Is it my imagination, or is she getting worse about dashing off after almost every move in the back yard to just CHECK to see whether there are squirrels? I've never let her get away with this that I know of. Why does it keep happening? Consequences aren't severe enough, I guess. I tried just chasing her down and tying her up for a while and playing with Boost every time she did it, but after a few days of doing only that and getting only one sequence in at a time with her, it was frustrating me more than it was curing her.

My ankle isn't much better. It's about the same. Stays the same. Jerked it badly again this weekend, once again walking across a lawn, but this time there was a major pothole hidden in the grass that other people also had trouble with. Hurts like heck for several minutes, subsides rapidly over the next 15 or 20 and then it's just back to its usual (lately) slightly puffy, sore only in certain situations, self. I've finally made an appointment with the doctor for tomorrow.

Also taking Jake to see his doctor tomorrow, again about the eyes. That foggy layer is spreading and I should've taken him back after 3 weeks when it was clear (foggy?) that it wasn't going away. I'm not only bad about me, but bad about my dogs unless it's obviously dire.

And now, back to work.