Jonny's sick which means of course that I will not be far behind. Monday was a scratchy throat that gave way to sneezing on Tuesday and today my nose is leaking worse than Scooter Libby at a Vegas press corp junket. I skipped swimming yesterday and tomorrow practice is cancelled for a high school swim meet. Damn kids, get out of my pool! Hopefully if I take it easy I can fight off the bugs and be ready for skiing in the mountains by the weekend. They've been getting slammed with snow so conditions should be mahvelous.
Monday night I took Cody to course run throughs at Boulder County Fairgrounds and he was pretty darned excited about it. That place drives him batshit for some reason but in a good way. He was flying around the jumpers course, happy, focused and full of himself. I botched a wrap causing a back jump and forgot to call him when he was in a tunnel so he came flying out, 'where are you, where are you?!!' and I was behind him. Other than that a lovely run, some good distance handling where it made sense and fantabulous weaves. Made me feel better about our lack of practice. I put in a couple of blind crosses at tunnels, something I don't normally like to do esp. w/ Cody but he was in the curve of the tunnel & couldn't see me when I did the cross so I figured I'd save some time and some wear and tear on my knees. If you do a blind cross in the middle of the woods while your dog is in a tunnel and noone can see you is it still a blind cross?
Banish Jonny to the couch or another bedroom. That's what I do when Tom gets germs.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was first learning to do crosses, I often did blind ones without realizing it. I'm so spatially challenged that I honestly didn't see how what I was doing was different from a regular front cross. It was pretty funny really.
Then, again, our original agility instructor who scarred me as a handler and who Lilly did not like one iota, scolded me and told me that only hot-shot type handlers did blind crosses. (FYI -- she said the same thing about 2 on/ 2 off contacts.) *sigh*
Personally, I don't think it's a sin. It happens, and for some dogs it works. ;o)
Feel better.
Nothing wrong with blind crosses in general, they're just not a great choice for Cody about 95% of the time. And that teacher, ugh. One of her former students was at the NADAC trial kicking butt with her little mini poodle who had
ReplyDelete'no potential' according to the teacher. Luckily the student found some good teachers elsewhere because that little poodle was smokin' and came off the course all happy and waggy. She's a rescue too, wandered in off the streets as a stray.
Yeah, it's really a shame so many new agility people start there. I honestly think if we'd started with someone who used modern training methods I wouldn't be in as bad a pickle as I am now.
ReplyDeleteOh, well, live and learn.
Hope you're feeling better. It's snowing hard again here (Fri am), so we're just staying home and finishing a tiny bit of work.
Then ... the plan is to essentially take the rest of the year off. I have to archive some files and such. But, otherwise, I have NO deadlines. Whoohooo!