Resq TailsThe trials and triumphs of rescued dogs

So, the bright side of my husband being unemployed is that he finally has some time to finish projects he’s started around here. Last month we were supposed to finish off the office/laundry room. As usual, I didn’t get pictures before we really started the project, I only seem to remember about half way through. So, the room really bears no resemblance to what it did originally. In the 13 years we’ve been here, we’ve changed all kinds of things.

Originally, this room was a second bedroom. The problem was that even though my grandparents managed just fine without having a washer and dryer in the house, (they went to the laundromat once a week which I find incredible), I could not manage that way. I had to have my own washer and dryer. LOL So, since the house is so small, that second bedroom was the only real option for the hook-ups for the washer, dryer and water heater. Once we put that stuff in there, you couldn’t have fit a bed if you tried. LOL So, we decided that it would suffice as an office/laundry room for us. We’ve replaced the carpets with wood floors, replaced the windows and eventually found an elusive leak in the roof and repaired it. That brings us to the more recent remodeling last month.

I’m always looking for better ways to make use of the small space that we have in our house, and so my husband designed some wonderful cabinets to make this room more functional. Then we replaced the drywall on the ceiling and I got to texture and paint. He finally did the last of the finish work on the trim and handles this week. Here are a few of pictures that I did remember to take.

Mid-way through the project…

And now that it’s finished…

One of my favorite parts of this room now is the extra shelving now for the fleece for the toys I make for Sheltie Rescue of Utah. I love having it all organized and easy to access. This used to be a plain old closet (back when this was a bedroom).

The cabinets around the washer and dryer are awesome too! I can’t wait till we can finish the doors on these cabinets. They are still just the extra laminate doors, not the real wood doors like the rest of the room, but it’s still so nice to have everything behind doors now.

Now that my husband is finished with this project, my parents want him to come up and install some laminate flooring that my older brother bought for them last year. I’m really curious to see how it stands up over time with their dogs. I keep thinking that when we have to replace the floors here…waaay down the road, I’d like to go with a new sustainable floorslike bamboo. Of course, I think that we’ll probably be waiting a while before we do any more remodeling here. But in the meantime, I’m thrilled that my husband had the time to finish this room!

So, I keep hearing about how important a good warm-up routine can be for agility. I have to say that I’ve never really concentrated much on it with Zoe. But with Layla and Dare I don’t want to take anything for granted and I want to help them anyway I can. I especially worry about Layla. Ever since she came up lame for no reason that I could see, I’ve been worried about her injuring herself again. I was intrigued by Diana and Miley’s trip to see Debbie Gross Sanders and to attend her seminar. I would love to know more about what kind of warm-up routine she recommended, but I do know that one thing that Diana mentioned was having Miley weave through her legs. So…with a little help from Ricky we were able to find a video to help me figure out how to train that behavior.

Anyway, this is just a silly short video of different skills Dare has been working on, including weaving through my legs. I don’t know if any of them would work into a good warm-up routine or not, but I figure it can’t hurt to teach all these different things anyway, and if we don’t end up having a use for them, oh well!

I just hate cutting back on things. I’m not a big shopper in general, but I do splurge on my dogs. Right now though, I’m fluctuating between resigning myself to the fact that I need to change our plans for trialing the next little while…and then fighting to figure out a way to still do some of the trials, even though it’s not really very realistic. So, I’m looking for any other areas that I can cut back that don’t affect my dog stuff. LOL

Tuesday my husband went in and filed for unemployment, while I sat at home and went through the bills trying to figure out where we could cut back. It’s funny his gut reaction is to buy stuff when we don’t have extra money, and mine is the opposite…well, except for the dog stuff, I think I already mentioned that. LOL I’m ready to start looking at all the free online coupons out there to see if I can save money. Meanwhile, I keep watching to see if he’s going to get on Ebay or Amazon or something and buy some little electronic thing because it makes him feel better. I’m going to have to hide the Best Buys coupons from him.

I don’t think that we’ll be needing any restaurant coupons anytime soon. I did notice when I went over our expenses that one of the places we tend to waste money is on eating out. Not at fancy nice places, but just grabbing junk fast food on the run. We’ve been doing better since we’ve been trying to get back on track with eating better, but still it seems to really be a place I think we could cut back. Anyway, enough boring talk about cutting back, I promise to post something more interesting about training with the dogs later today!

So, I just want to let everyone know that you will probably start seeing occasional links in my posts that don’t really have anything to do with anything. Hopefully it won’t be too annoying and you can just keep reading without it bothering you!

The reason for the change is that a friend of mine has talked me into using the blog to generate some extra income. In light of my husband’s layoff from work, I’m game to try just about anything, (at least for a while), that will allow me to stay home with the dogs and the kennel. Anyway, I just wanted to let the few of you that do stop by on a fairly regular basis what in the world I’m doing. LOL

Just wanted to take a minute and say thank you to Lindsay and Ace over at That Mutt. They have a great blog for any of you that haven’t had a chance to check it out. They are always talking about something thought provoking, whether it’s related to dog training or companion pet rescue.

Back to my reason for this post. I went to the mail and had a nice package waiting for me…(sure beats finding bills)! LOL A company called Zobo Pets had given Lindsay and Ace a collar and leash for a fun giveaway.

So, I just wanted to say thank you to both That Mutt, and to Zobo Pets for a little bright spot in my day!

Today started off to be well….a typical Monday. Monday is always laundry day and at least a half hearted attempt to clean house. After that was started I decided to tackle the files from last year. Got all those organized and sorted and put away so that I’m ready to go to the accountant this month. Then I set to work on removing last years tags from the dog’s collars and replacing them with the new ones. That led to sorting through excess collars and leashes and training bags etc. Funny how one thing leads to another.

Anyway, before I knew it…it was 4:45 and the dogs started barking to let me know someone had just arrived. Strange thing was it was my husband. Odd, he said he wouldn’t be home till 6:00. Hmmmm….that’s where the typical Monday ended. Come to find out, he was laid off this afternoon.

I think I’m still a bit in shock. Even though it’s been in the back of my mind that it might happen, I don’t think I really thought it was possible. I guess you just never know…

We made it home from the agility trial. I just have to say…I don’t know how all of you out there can manage to go to a trial and come back that same night, upload all your videos and then write a blog post. It amazes me. LOL After being at the trial for 12 hours, I’m just beat. I tried to get my videos uploaded onto Youtube at least, but I didn’t have the energy to blog after that. Anyway…the girls did great.

On Friday, Raven finished her Open FAST title the first day. However, I wasn’t on top of things and I didn’t remember if it was her second or third leg, so I didn’t move her up. Bleh! Bad mom. She also Q’d in her Ex A Standard run that day, so she only needs one more leg for her AX. Here’s her Open FAST run.

Layla had her agility debut on Friday too. She started out really well in Nov FAST. Qualifying with a total of 75 out of 80 possible points. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw her score. Here is her video.

Next was Layla’s Standard run. It didn’t go quite as well. She decided that she needed to visit the jump setter really bad and then she didn’t want to weave. I think both things are just common green dog mistakes though and other than that, she did a good job. Here’s that run.

Last of all was Jumpers with Weaves. It was such a nice course, was really excited. Layla did the first two jumps and again the urge to say hi to someone was just too much for her, and she left me to go see the judge. The problem is that she took an offcourse jump to do it. Bleh. So, even though she then came back and finished the rest of the course under time, we couldn’t have the one wrong course and Q. She also seemed to get really sniffy at the end of the run. I didn’t know if she was stressed, but I don’t think so. She’s always been a real sniffer, it’s something we’ve tried to work on, but I think by the third run she finally decided that the arena dirt was just too interesting to pass up on anymore. LOL Anyway, here’s her last run of the day.

All in all, I was pleased with both the girls. Ricky you mentioned when you saw one of Layla’s videos that it’s nice to see a friendly Sheltie, and I have to agree. I definitely love that Layla thinks everyone is a potential friend. I just need to make sure that she understands that we visit our friends after we’re done running. LOL

We got to see Dare’s half sister Tennille again, and her “brother” Captain this weekend too. I couldn’t believe how much Tennille had grown. She is almost the same size as Dare already and she’s 7 weeks younger. Anyway, here’s a picture of them all together. Dare on the left, Captain in the middle and Tennille on the right.

Ok, so I really have a hard time saying the word pivot without thinking of an old episode of the tv show “Friends”. They were trying to move a couch to Ross’ apartment and they were going up some stairs and he just kept saying, “pivot, pivot, pivot”. Just makes me laugh everytime I think about it.

Anyway, to get back to the subject at hand. Dawn and Ricky wanted to know how I taught Dare to pivot. So I went out and attempted to get a video showing what we did. The problem is that since she already knows the game, she kept offering it with or without me asking. LOL So, this was our best attempt. I will forewarn you that it’s not great. You have to keep in mind that I’m not a teacher by any stretch of the imagination, and Dare kept wanting to just give me the finished skill. I still think that the video on youtube of Kikopups was probably better.

A couple things to keep in mind if you do want to use a dowel instead of the perch box. Some dogs don’t like the dowel at all initially. If that’s the case and they are worried about it, I would do some work with them to get them comfortable with the dowel separately before you could even start using it in combination with teaching the pivot. The other thing is that if you are as uncoordinated as I can be, you may want to practice using the dowel without the dog there at first too. Just see if you can keep your hand with the treats were you want the eyes to focus and still move the other hand in the direction you’ll need it to direct the rear end. It might sound silly, but I know that I find that sometimes my hands don’t follow the plan that I had in my head. LOL Anyway…here is the video.

So, my friend that I train with calls it doodling when you work on the little bits and pieces of heeling position and obedience exercises. I find doodling to be a really useful tool in not only teaching and reinforcing heel position, but also in giving you something that you can use for a quick little warm-up routine for obedience before you go in the ring. I use it for keeping my dogs connected before we go in the agility ring too.

Anyway, today I took Dare out and we worked on the “finish” part of the recall in obedience. I want her to be able to “finish” from both sides. Right now, I’m still using both a verbal and a hand signal. I will have to fade out one or the other before the skill is ready for the obedience ring. We also are working on an “in” which means that she needs to be aware of her rear end and move it as much as needed to keep her body in heel position. We are also working on reinforcing heel position by just taking one or two steps forward with her in position. For agility we are working on directionals, though I have serious doubts that I’ll be quick enough to use them when I really running a course. LOL So today we worked on “right”, “left”, and “back”

I think it was Diana that mentioned that it was recommended that she have Miley weave around her legs for a part of an agility warm-up routine. It sounds like a great idea, so I think I’ll be searching for videos to help me figure out a plan on how to teach Dare to do that next. Anyway, here’s a short clip from our training today.

So, here are another set of pictures from last month that I never posted. We took a walk up on one of the mountains nearby and these were the pictures.

They all were excited to get started….

As we went further, no one had walked on the trails yet, so we had to make our own.

Eventually most of us decided that we’d let my husband make the trail and we’d just follow.

You’ll notice that the exception to that statement is Lucy. She just can’t stand to not be in front of everyone blazing her own trail. Then Layla soon decided that she was too big to waiting for someone to make a trail for her either and broke out of the formation. Here she is making the leap….

And then sinking into the deep snow. What a silly girl!

Here’s my favorite bridge on this walk….

and Dare coming back over to check on why I’m not coming…

And a little sheltie “family” picture….

And then the races as we went back to the truck. Penny was the judge, and obviously Twist got distracted at the startline. What a shocker!

Looks like Zoe is the winner, and…..Twist is still distracted. LOL

And finally the best place to be when you get home from a cold winter’s walk…