ResqTails

Everyone knows that if you’re looking for those appropriately tipped, beautifully groomed sheltie ears, you won’t find it here. Twist and Layla both have prick ears, Raven has these really heavy, almost Aussie looking ears and Zoe has one tipping and one not most of the time. The only thing I can say in my defense is that they are all brushed and you won’t find any mats in those ears. You can see what I mean in this picture from back in December. I can almost feel the real sheltie people out there cringing already. LOL

When Dare came along and her breeder showed me how to get her ears to tip nicely, I was happy to oblige, although I really don’t think having tipped ears or not is earth shattering in and of itself. I really kind of figured that if I got the ears to tip, (which we did) that would be the last of the ear discussion I’d hear. Well…I was wrong. As of late, the hair on her ears has gotten a bit out of control. Here’s what I mean…

Several people have recently brought it to my attention that I really need to trim up these out of control ears. I find the thought a little daunting. I have visions of how my own hair has looked after I’ve attempted to “trim” it myself. LOL I’m convinced that if I tackle this on my own, Dare is going to look like the moths have been chewing on her ears.

No more procrastinating though. Today is the day. Nope, we’re not in a quest for diets for quick weight loss today. Today Dare is having pictures done with her friend Jet and I decided to break down and get her groomed up and get those cute little tipping ears looking proper again. I will tell you that I’m not doing it myself though. I’m taking her to a groomer friend and hopefully she’ll give me a little hands on tutorial on what to do. Stay tuned for how the ear “make-over” turns out…

I have such good news! Twist earned his first CDX leg today! Not only that, but he also took High in Trial today! I am so proud of my boy. He has come so far from the dog that we first brought home from the shelter 6 1/2 years ago. I would have thought you were crazy at that point if you had told me that he would be doing Obedience, and that he would have TWO High in Trials. I’m just thrilled.

Raven also qualified in Rally today. So, that finished her Novice Rally title. She finished with a first place too! Best of all, she was comfortable and happy in the ring. It’s so nice to see her looking like she does at home when she’s working. She can do some really cute work, but I think her nerves were just getting the best of her for a while there. Maybe she’s grown out of that now.

So, one of the really fun things about the Specialty is all the special prizes. Our friend that organizes the Obedience portion of the specialty each year does a fantastic job! She makes sure that no one goes home empty handed, and usually you leave with so many things that you have trouble getting it all in the car! Makes for a nice relaxed, cheerful atmosphere at the show. No need for wrinkle creams to get rid of frown lines at this show! Everyone leaves with a smile on their face. This year, Twist got the special prizes, (but he’s sharing with his sisters). Here’s some pictures from today!

Twist getting his High in Trial ribbon!!!

Twist and Raven posing with all their goodies

So, it’s been a busy week so far. We had a friend come visit and she brought her adorable girl Maizey along with her. We spent the week taking walks, doing a little bit of training, taking pictures in the mountains, visiting my parents farm and just relaxing in the evenings! I think we talked about every topic pertaining to pets that you can possibly think of.

Maizey and Layla hit it off like they’d known each other forever. Here’s a picture of Layla, Dare and Maizey up the mountains.

Then we went to the lake. Maybe we could have packed some lifejackets for pets, but everyone seemed to do just fine without them. Penny didn’t seem to want to swim much, but I don’t think she needed a lifejacket. I just think she got sick of Zoe and Raven barking out instructions on how to swim out and retrieve the sticks, while they waited at the shore.

Then we went to my parents farm and visited all the spring babies and also all their dogs. Do you think we could find a few more professional beggers to join this motley crew?

After such a busy day, we came home exhausted. Well, I guess not all the dogs were exhausted, but I know the people were. LOL I spent a good portion of the rest of the evening searching for the best shampoos for pets, after all the sights and smells that the dogs had been busy investigating that day.

Anyway, we sure did enjoy being able to get out and enjoy the nice sunny day with good friends!

So, I have apparently picked the worst week of spring to start getting back into the routine of walking the dogs. LOL Today I had Zoe and Dare with me, and the weather actually looked pretty good…when we started out. I had my camera and I got some pictures of the views from pretty much all directions.

First the mountains to the Southeast of our house…

Now the view to the Southwest of our house…

and the girls at the start of the walk…

And then, I looked to the North and this is what we saw…

You might think that I would have turned around at that point, but NO!!! I just kept walking and we saw this really awesome pair of canadian geese that were about to land on the pond that we were walking past. I had to try to get pictures of that. Well, my camera battery lasted for one shot. LOL So you just have to take my word for it that they were beautiful.

We were about 1 1/2 miles into the walk, when the wind picked up and it got dark, fast. We turned around to head for home, but it was too late. We walked, and ran the 1 1/2 miles back in hail, which then turned to snow and freezing wind. The most irritating part was that I forgot that Zoe thinks that if I start running, she should accompany that game with barking. Ugh! That seemed to encourage Dare that this was some grand game and that maybe she should try to trip me by grabbing my pant legs and shoelaces. I finally decided that we weren’t going to get home without being cold and wet anyway, no sense running to get there. I really didn’t have this in mind when I was hoping for fast weight loss.

Anyway, we made it home and the snow let up enough that I grabbed my other camera, just to show you that I’m not making this ridiculous story up. Do you think I’ve convinced the neighbors that I’m crazy yet?

Well, things didn’t go exactly like I had planned. Instead of getting up early when my husband went to work, I tossed and turned all night listening to the wind blowing in yet another storm. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did get up, for a few minutes, and then I went back to my nice warm bed for a while. LOL In the end, I did get up earlier than normal, but it took me a while to convince myself that the wind wasn’t going to stop and that if we were going for a walk we’d better go.

I’m sure that any neighbors who might have seen us, have now confirmed in their minds that I am really the crazy dog lady. The wind blew so hard at points during the walk that Layla couldn’t walk very straight. LOL Course, that’s not saying much, since she’s such a tiny thing. The funny thing was that even though the weather was aweful, we all had a great time. I don’t think any of us will need any hgh releasers to make us feel good. Amazing how good you feel naturally after a long walk with two of your best friends.

The wind is still blowing tonight, and we’re supposed to get snow again. If it’s not too bad, I’ll try to remember how much fun we had today and get back out there tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even get the camera out and take some pictures of where we’re walking.

I was reading one of my favorite blogs Team Small Dog, well, actually I think it was a FaceBook post, (either way I guess it doesn’t matter). Anyway, she said…”would like to update you about all the agility we’ve been doing lately. Insert moment of silence here.” She totally cracks me up! That pretty much sums up my training with the dogs here this week.

I really don’t even know where the week has gone. The only thing I can think of that I’ve done that counts as training would be taking Layla and Dare down to Parowan with me last Sunday for agility. Dare didn’t do anything but go along for the ride, so I guess really only Layla got in some training. Oh well, I really can’t say that I was sitting around just wasting my time shopping for new door mats or anything, I was just really busy. Just seems like every day this last week had me running in one direction or another and overall I didn’t accomplish much.

Hopefully we’ll get back on track starting today. This afternoon I’m going to take a couple of the dogs to my friend’s place to train a bit, while she has her beginning obedience class going on, for distractions. Then since the schedule around here is going to be different with my husband getting up early for work starting Monday…Woohoo!…I think it is a good idea to sit down and figure out a better schedule for myself with the medical coding course and training the dogs, and everything else that has to fit into the week. I’ll let you know what I come up with.

So, I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure out how to edit video to play in slow motion. I downloaded a couple programs, couldn’t figure out what I was doing and finally looked again at the program I had, and noticed that it was an option on there, but I’d just overlooked it before. What a dork! Seemed to be a theme yesterday. I was absolutely oblivious. I got the funniest video of Dare training that shows just what I mean.

I did get around to editing Layla’s video from the last couple days into slow motion though too. I think that I really like her striding better with just 2 stride regulators than 3. The slow motion really does help so that you can see things better. Here is that video.

In other news, my husband decided he’d better try to finish up the project for his mom that he was working on. So, he called her to see if he could come down today and install the cabinets. She said no. She hasn’t painted the wall behind where the cabinets go yet. It drives me crazy. She’s been asking him to do this job for a while now, and he didn’t have the time when he was working full time. Now that he has the time, she just keeps coming up with things to stall the progress. I don’t think she’s even thinking that if he does get the part time job at Home Depot it’s going to make it harder for him to come down to install the cabinets and cut out the countertop for her Franke sinks. Oh well, once again, I’m worrying about something that no one else seems to even give a second thought about. You’d think I’d learn, but apparently not. LOL

It’s so nice to have the equipment back outside again! It is raining on it this morning, but at least we’ve been able to use it for the past two days. My goal is to get a consistent running A-frame with both Layla and Raven. Of course, the retraining with Layla is going much better than it is with Raven. Raven just struggles to run the A-frame with speed and confidence. She wants to pause at the top and then that makes her stutter step, well, it’s just not pretty. The problem has been that when I’ve tried to go ahead and work with that pause and just ask for either a 2o/2o or a 4 on the floor, she pauses, and then runs down a ways and bails. Doesn’t seem to matter what kind of hoop or target or mat I use, I still get this silly bailing off too high with her. So, she’s going back to the running A-frame too now. Layla on the other hand, is doing well. She loves to do anything full speed, so my only challenge right now is figuring out where I want the stride regulators to get the most out of the speed to get her the furthest into the contact zone. I have tried watching her as we’re running, but it’s hard to see while I’m moving. I also asked my husband to help me watch last night, but he wasn’t that much help either. LOL I think I am going to set up the camera and see where her stride is taking her right now, and see if it looks comfortable or not, and then adjust things accordingly. One thing I can say is that with all this running I shouldn’t be needing any quick trim burn and cleanse products in the near future.

As for the dogwalk…I am happy to report that Layla seems to be understanding the 2o/2o position nicely. She was 100% on it yesterday. I let Dare run the dogwalk as well, to see if the work we’ve done over the winter on the board in the barn was still in her head, and it is! She is also doing a good job translating it to the full dogwalk. I’ve been setting a pretty slow pace on the dogwalk, but yesterday I did start to add a bit of speed to increase the criteria. I’m also trying to remember to send them ahead of me, to run alongside them and stop at the contact zone and to run clear past the end of the contact zone without slowing down to give them a clear picture of what I expect of them, regardless of what I’m doing. So far, so good. Let’s just hope this rain doesn’t make things too muddy out there today, and that we’ll be able to train later on today.

So, this weekend is Twist’s obedience trial. He’s entered on Friday and Saturday. We’ll be back up in Farmington again. Seems like we’ve spent more time in the Salt Lake area than we have at home the last little while. Fortunately, the dogs don’t mind traveling and for the most part neither do I. One of the only things that I don’t like about traveling is trying to eat well.

Last year a friend of mine convinced me to try a diet with her and basically it involved just eating fresh whole foods rather than all the processed refined junk that it so easy and convenient. I felt so much better and I lost about 25 lbs. The problem is that ever since we went to AZ for DOCNA Championships last Oct. though I’ve had a hard time eating right consistently. In the last 6 months I’ve gained back around 5-7 lbs. Sometimes it’s just so tempting to try to find some fad diets that work, but I just don’t think anything but eating right and exercising more works for me. Since this is the last trial for this month until May, I think I’ll be able to get back on track starting next week.

Back to the obedience trial. Twist will be giving Open a try again. He’s such a funny boy. I know that he knows all the exercises, but he’s just so distractable. Hopefully with this being an indoor trial the distractions will be at a minimum and he’ll do great. He can do such nice work when he’s on. I should be able to update everybody tomorrow on how it goes.

So, the DOCNA trial on Saturday was great. Zoe started off the day with Jumpers, her favorite. She had a beautiful run. Unfortunately, our video camera wasn’t cooperating and so a friend has the runs on her camera, so I can’t post anything yet. Her Beginner’s Gambler course was next. Again, beautiful. Then Standard, or regular or whatever they call it. LOL It was a train wreck. I ticked Zoe off at the start of the course, giving her a really hard “here” to get her to come in to the dogwalk, rather than the tunnel on the outside. Well, she came in and told me off about the cue. Bleh. That’s never a good sign. So when I did get her on the dogwalk, she just flew across and bailed the contact. I wasn’t going to let that pass, since you can train in the ring in DOCNA. I took her back and we did the dogwalk again. I think that just made her even more ticked off. We did get around the course, but not without several other bobbles and arguing from Zoe. She’s such a brat! I just love her. I’m sure it would really make me angry if it happened all the time, but here and there it just makes me happy that she’s still feeling that sassy at her age.

Anyway, the class to qualify for DOCNA Championships is the North American Challenge. It would have been a really pretty run, except that again on the dogwalk, (maybe a little sass was still left over), she wouldn’t turn off it into the tunnel, instead she jumped back onto the dogwalk first. So that’s a 10 point fault. Fortunately…DOCNA allows up to 12 faults in this class. So, despite our bobble, Zoe will be going to Championships again this year.

The drive up and back both had parts I could have done without. On the way up we saw lots of deer because it was so darn early in the morning. We almost hit one coming into a town. Fortunately, Zoe was in a crate, so she was fine. My friend’s dog was riding loose in the back seat, and she got thrown off the seat, but was still ok. On the way home, we hit snow, and rain and slush and mess. It made for a very tense ride home. I’m definitely going to be grateful for warmer weather and decent road conditions again in the next few months.

My husband is out putting in more resumes today. One is a janitorial position. Not his ideal line of work, but it’s with the school district, so that part is good. He probably won’t be using any Anilox roll brushes for cleaning printing presses, just regular old cleaning. LOL For the rest of the week, a friend of ours has asked him to refinish her cabinets, so that’s a small job to keep him busy.

I’m headed out later today for an obedience lesson with Dare. Should be fun. Hopefully we’ll come away with lots of interesting stuff to share.