Classes

I'm pretty far behind in my blogging. I've been to three classes and haven't written about any of them. My Monday morning class has been really fun. Two weeks ago we tried a FAST course for the first time - FAST is kind of the AKC equivalent to USDAA gambles. This was an excellent FAST course so the send part was way over our heads but interesting to try and to see. You had to send your dog into a straight tunnel and then hopefully the dog was going so fast that he would shoot straight out of that tunnel and into a second one that curved around and then you had to call your dog back into the first one - all without going over the line (so the handler was like 15 feet away?). Well, I was never moving fast enough to go straight into the second tunnel. Mom ran with me - ignoring the line - which of course would cause an NQ in the real world. But we just don't have those skills yet. I think only one dog in our class got it - so it was hard for dogs that are already running in excellent. Then this past Monday, we did more work on contacts and discriminations. I ran faster than I used to except my dogwalk and weaves were really slow.

Last Wednesday we had our third novice competition class. We are still really loving this class. But mom was apparently so tired from all her working that she couldn't remember the sequences by the second half of the class. There were only three dogs in our group, so you get to run a lot back to back to back. The instructor says stuff like - "Next sequence - right side of the tunnel to the blue (jump) to the teal to the teeter to the white to the red to the left side of the tunnel to the weaves to the table to the blue to the yellow....." - get the idea? So after hearing these different combinations all night long, mom's head started spinning. She never had this problem before - hopefully it was a one-time occurrence. It was embarrassing when she didn't know where to tell me to go! Besides that, mom needs to keep reminding herself to do front crosses and run to keep me moving. Also we found out that I can't follow her direction to one end of the tunnel or the other, so we are practicing sends to the tunnel at home more. We don't have class tonight because most of the instructors are going to the AKC Nationals! Wish them luck! So today we're going to the open agility practice - we haven't been there in nearly a month.

A couple days ago our friend Ludo gave us this awesome award! Thanks for thinking of us Ludo!!

Time for my morning walk - it's raining for the first time in days - so we're going to get wet!

Gotta zoom!

Ricky