Last tRicky T-Day of 2009!

I decided I wanted to have one last tRicky T-Day this year so mom and I made a quick video of one of my new tricks - hide! It is still a bit of a work in progress as I need to learn to wait in the bag a little longer or possibly lie down with my head in there. But still we thought it was worth sharing.

We are having a terrible time with editing video. We used to have a way to get the Flip video into Windows Movie Maker (we would just make a basic movie in the Flip software and then import that into WMM). BUT we downloaded an update for the Flip and those darn software updater people took away that option. Flip makes MP4 videos and microsoft doesn't seem to recognize that format. And the Flip comes with really crappy editing software. Stupid! So then we tried converting the Flip file (with something called RAD video tools) and that worked a couple times and now is not working. We wanted to avoid buying expensive video editing software. If anyone out there reading this has any ideas for us, please let us know!

Yesterday's practice at the club went really well! We set up a course with all the contact obstacles and the chute and some sort of difficult jumps. I ran faster than last week (of course because we didn't video it). It was a great warm up for this weekend. We looked at the numbers of dogs running in the trial and tried to guess-timate when we will run. Mom thinks it will be at least 2:00 before my STD run and maybe 4:30 for my JWW. It will probably be later than that. At least we don't have to get up early although since we are early birds, we'd rather go and get on with it! This is our only trial for awhile - we're not doing another one until March and then there are trials every weekend. We'll have to decide soon which ones we are doing. We have another class starting Jan.4 and a fun match and maybe some run-throughs coming up, so we won't be bored.

Tonight we are going to grandpa and grandma's and cousin Wilson and his family are coming too! We will all ring in the New Year together! 2010! How did that happen? We hope you all have a wonderful New Year!

Gotta zoom!

Ricky

Weave practice and some other stuff

We finally got the video to upload to YouTube. We ended up changing our browser to Google chrome on dad's advice. It worked but now our font is all different! And mom can't figure out how to change it! Any way, we put all 12 of our weave poles back in the ground and did a little practicing yesterday. The view of the poles isn't that great but hopefully you can see that I'm getting a little faster.

We have been pretty busy this week - we're doing lots of yard work and gardening since the weather has been so nice! I helped mom weed every where and then put out bag after bag of mulch. Last year we didn't mulch at all so it really needed to be done this year. I think it looks really good! Not to mention it all smells so good! I never get tired of going over and over the same areas just smelling and smelling.

The other day mom came home with a new toy - a Flip video camera! It is really cool and small and easy to use. She got the Utra HD and put a couple of test videos on YouTube to try out the Flip software. The only thing is their software is very basic and limited. So to get nicer editing, she wants to keep using Windows Movie Maker. But the Flip people made it difficult to use other people's editing software and mom thinks she'll have to convert the file type the Flip uses to something else. (Are your eyes glazing over yet? Mine are!). We are going to take it to our agility class tonight and hope someone will video us! (The weaving video was made with our old camera).

About agility class, I never wrote about our class last week. It was the 2nd novice competition class but our 1st since I missed one when I had that pain in my neck/shoulder. Class was very fun - this time there are four shelties in it! I am the only one who jumps 12" though. Mom and I had a lot of fun. We got more advice on how to teach obstacle discrimination - specifically tunnel and dogwalk. I am inclined to take whatever obstacle is in front of me and I don't really listen to what mom says. So we need to work a lot on that. 

Ok, more problems with this blog format. I wanted to put the video at the top of the post and write all my stuff underneath it, but I haven't been able to. Oh well.  

Gotta zoom!

Ricky