Saying Goodbye

My grandfather passed away Wednesday morning, he was 91. I'm not going to write a whole lot about him here, partly because I'm trying to get ready to take off for Chicago and partly because this is a family thing, not a blog thing. But I did want to give him a little bit of a cyberspace tribute. The photo was not my first choice either but it was the best I could find in a pinch.

I lived with my grandparents starting at age 6 or so and he was the nearest thing I had to a father growing up so losing him is much more than losing a grandfather to me. At the heart of it he was a good man and towards the latter years of his life his family was the most important thing to him. He seemed most happy and relaxed when he was on vacation with the family. His work was important to him to and he carried on well into his 80's until the Alzheimer's made it impossible for him. He was also played racquetball well into his 80's and often beat guys in their 60's.

His loss will be devastating for my grandmother. I had to lobby very hard for the family to have some sort of gathering for him beyond dinner with the immediate family because they felt she couldn't handle it. But I think it’s important and necessary to the grieving process to have a day where people can come to the house and pay their respects and that if she doesn’t have it she’ll come to regret it. Doesn’t have to be at the temple since no one in the family is terribly religious and I can see not wanting to shell out a bunch of money to a funeral home but I felt they needed to do something and I’m not a fan of ceremonies in general (we barely had a wedding). I was talking to a friend who’s family also decided not to do anything when her grandmother died and she said it was terrible for her not having that sense of closure. So I’m glad I put up a fight about it and hopefully my grandmother will make it through the day and be thankful for it in the end.

NADAC Trial

No Q's for Strum on Sunday but he had some nice runs and once again was a very good boy at the trial site and in the ring. His only naughtiness was lungeing at the dog still running the Jumpers course while we were entering the ring. The judge wanted us in the ring while the other dog was only halfway through the course and this was tough for Strum. He didn't bark though and the other dog never noticed him but he was a bit rattled on the start line at first and I took an extra moment to let him settle before I left him for my lead out. I want to condition him to relax when I put my hand on his side for just this sort of situation. We're working on it but he's not quite there yet. In any case he was fine in the end, held his stay and had a beautiful run with the only fault being a knocked bar. Well, knocked jump standard actually. I'm not sure how he managed to take the whole thing down but that's my Strum. It's not clear from the video what went wrong but my thought is that I moved too quickly when I cued the turn and the harsh cue caused him to misjudge the turn. I thought about putting a front cross in at that turn then a rear at the 180 then another front when we came around the turn again. I only saw one person do this in Open (nearly identical course) and she had the fastest run with a BC who's fast like Strum. Most everybody else handled that turn as I did. The course was not terribly exciting which is my big beef with NADAC these days. I handled the whole thing without a single side change. I almost put those extra crosses in just to make it more interesting but in the end decided to handle it the way I thought was best and it did expose a weakness so it was just as well.

No Q in Tunnelers either but it was another nice run. I was almost through the course and I got too far ahead of him and he wasn't clear on which end of the next tunnel I wanted and just my luck he guessed the wrong end. Don't ask me how I managed to get ahead of him on a blazing fast Tunnelers course. At that moment someone yelled 'Go Elayne' (they were cheering everyone on at the end) and I was distracted and went forward too quickly when I should have hung back a bit. Normally I don't notice the crowd at all, not sure why I was distracted but I'll have to remember to stay focused on the task at hand next time. Still I was pleased with his run, a huge improvement over his first Tunnelers run back in December where he ran by half the tunnels. The big lessons of this run were that I need to be more patient and I'm woefully out of shape.

NADAC always seems to have some weird new thing going on and this time for me it was hoops on the Weavers course and 24" spaced weave poles. I wasn't overly worried about either mostly because we were there for practice. The first hoop was the first obstacle on course so I didn't want to lead out since I wasn't sure if Strum would try to run around it. He ran through it no problem but this put me further behind than I would have liked and lead to some less than desireable handling. The other hoop was in the flow of the course and I ran him in a path straight for it and he went through it no problem. The 24" poles were no problem either. He had a nice run, the only mistake being a run-by on a set of weaves. I called him back to me and reset him in the poles and still with all that wasted time he managed a Q and 3rd place out of 14 dogs.

His Jumpers run on Saturday was nice but with a wide turn and a refusal at the last jump. I was far behind on a straight run of jumps and he stopped right in front of the last jump. I caught up and sent him over and despite the wasted time he still managed a Q and his first 1st place out of 12 dogs. I was surprised by that because in NADAC you usually have to be tight to get a good placement especially in Novice because the courses are so easy and few people fault.

Of course I don't have his clean runs on video but oh well. There's some bonus footage at the very end of Teddy, one of my favorite dogs and our Trigility teammate from DOCNA Champs. The person filming me happened to catch some footage of him walking to the line. I hope his owner doesn't mind but Teddy is the coolest, I couldn't bear to cut him out.

Cheery thought for a Sunday morning

'Soon we won't have any music by people who are alive' said Jonny this a.m. as he played a J. Church record (singer died of some autoimmune disease or something). This made me feel old and sad.

On a lighter note, Strum redeemed himself at the NADAC trial yesterday. 2/2 for Q's in Novice Weavers and Jumpers with a 3rd and 1st place respectively. Best of all he was so well behaved and relaxed and excited (but not crazy foaming at the mouth excited). Totally focused for his runs and flying full tilt around the courses and feeling a little bit less like a baby dog. I'll post a full report later. We go back this afternoon for Tunnelers and another round of Jumpers. I'm so hoping he'll be as well behaved today.

Who was zee sexiest collie at zee agility trial?

Happy Tuesday

(click on the photo to start the animation)

If you can't get the animation to work by clicking try this link. Not sure how to get the one in my blog to work.

Anyway, this could equally apply to Strummer's run through last night. I'd tell you about it but wow I so don't want to relive that catastrophe. Let's just say I took my $7, scratched him from his second run, and he's lucky I drove him home and not up to Wyoming to return him to the rescue lady. And I'm such a sucker that 1/2 hour after I got home and cooled down the little bastard was snuggled up next to me on the couch acting all cute. Whatever happened to my quiet life with cats?

Fun Match and more running dogwalk

Fun Match
Took Strum and Lola up to Powerpups again for another fun match. This time the weather was cooperating so we were able to run a course and there was a fair bit of a crowd to provide the necessary distractions.

Strum did mostly well while waiting ringside. Had a few outbursts and ran off of the practice jump as the dog in the ring zipped past. Luckily the arena is fenced and once he figured out he wasn't going to get in he came back and worked nicely with me. Usually I won't let him off leash at the practice jump unless I know the distraction level is such that he won't leave me but since we were at a practice match and I knew he couldn't cause any trouble I wanted to push him a little. Both his runs were a bit crazy from a handling perspective, he was running wild, not collecting, knocking bars, running past obstacles and several times I had to stop and call him back to me to remind him uh, hey buddy, remember me? I had him repeat small sections of the course until he was focused on me and collecting and then we'd move on. I'm glad I chose to run him on the masters level course, I can't imagine the carnage we would have had on the novice course. I also stopped to reward dogwalk, weaves, teeter and table so that caused some break in the momentum of the runs as well. The good news is that he was something like 80-90% (8 or 9 hits out of 10 or so reps) with his dogwalk and I was thrilled about that. Teeter and table were nice too though he didn't get his elbows down right away on the table, he was so excited to get moving. That's the first time I've seen that so we'll have to go back to including more tables in sequences. The weaves were after a slight turn after the dogwalk and I stopped to reward all dogwalks so getting him back and lined up for the weaves was a bit awkward and he missed a few entries. Once I got him in they were beautiful though except the last set of the last run where he popped out about midway through because frankly I think by that point his poor brain was melting. 90 seconds is a long time to be running full tilt. Tonight I take him to Boulder County Fairgrounds for the last run through of the season and my plan is to work small sequences, maybe even put him in a sit in between sequences to settle him a bit and keep things from getting too crazy out of control. Also I'm going to go back to using more control type focus exercises to warm him up. I tried using a tug toy during his warm up at the fun match to see if he was ready for that and I'd say the answer to that is not. He sure had fun out there though and as I came out of the ring a friend who's never seen him run before said I'd better put my running shoes on, he's so darned fast.

I brought Lola along to work on her table issues. I've been working on this away from agility and even away from the table and on the one hand I wasn't quite ready to be putting her on a table during a course but on the other hand fun matches are so few and far between that I wanted to take advantage of being able to reward her on the table. Luckily the table was in a central location so I was able to redo it several times in a row then carry on with the course then come back to it again and redo it some more. The first run I rewarded her for the first time she got on the table then withheld reward the second time then rewarded the third time. She was hesitant to get on the third time but she did it. For the second run I didn't reward her the first time and she put up a bit of a fuss getting on the second time. I pulled her off the table because I didn't want to reward her for balking if she did eventually go down. Then I gave her another chance and she went down, got lots of treats and was fine for all other reps. I wish USDAA would do away with the table, what a stupid obstacle. Sucks all the fun and flow right out of the run.

She did a great job on everything else for both her runs-perfect contacts and weaves, followed my handling beautifully, lots of sassy barking. I'd say she was having some big fun as well. She's a dream to handle compared to crazy wild man Strummer, I'll tell you that. I didn't realize how good she was until I had to go back to novice with a crazy wild green dog.

Running Dogwalk
Strum had his first perfect practice (10/10, 100%) on the full height dogwalk out at the practice field on Saturday. Of course I'll need to see it a million more times before I'll believe it's for reals but I was so happy for that one good practice. Then his good showing at the fun match gives me even more confidence that we're going to pull this one off. I'm going to see how solid he is this week and if things go well I'll reintroduce the A-frame next week. I think (hope) my mistake was introducing it too soon before the dogwalk behavior was solid enough. My yard's a bit muddy right now but once it dries out I'll go back to working on turns on the plank/table set-up.

Running Dogwalk

I've got some video of one of Strummer's practice sessions on the full dogwalk. The heading on the video is wrong, it says 9/12 hits and that not all runs are shown. Those were the stats for an earlier practice session, this one was 5/7 hits and all runs are shown in the video. The quality is not great and the background is distracting but there was nothing I could do since the fence was too close to the other side of the dogwalk so I couldn't shoot facing the other way. This is more of a documentation for myself of where we're at in the training process but maybe it's helpful to someone who doesn't mind crappy video so I'll share it.

Had another practice session yesterday after a little break for the weekend trial and recovery thereof. Results were 7/11, not so great. The pattern seems to be that he misses the early reps then realizes, huh, that's not working for me and he goes back to doing it right which to me means he's still very much in the learning process. He did have one of the worst leaps ever though from the top 3rd of the downside plank. Usually when he misses he still gets a back leg in or he just misses the top of the yellow with his front feet, he doesn't usually deliberately launch from the top of the plank (that's Cody's specialty). My guess is that something distracted him though hard to say. So far it's an anomoly so I'm not going to worry about it too much unless I see it cropping up again.

We're going to a fun match up at Power Pups again this weekend and since he was 100% on the dogwalk up there last time we went I'm going to try doing it in a sequence. I'll also take Lola up there to work on her table. Should be fun, it's supposed to be 60 degrees, hopefully I can get some biking in too. Crazy weather for February.

DOCNA Trial

A great weekend all around-fun trial, great judge (Ann McQuillen, same as we had at DOCNA Champs), nice fast fun courses with some good challenges, all the dogs did great and had fun as well.

Strum did awesome for his second trial. He was well behaved, no lunging or barking fits, was good in his crate except for barking when I'd leave him behind, especially when I left to run another dog. He only ran in Traditional Gamblers, 2 rounds of Jumpers and the Strategic Time Gamble which I'm still getting the hang of. His jumpers runs are on the video, both were nice but with little glitches that cost us a Q but wow, I thought he did a nice job for his second trial. The first run fell victim to some poor handling on my part and the second run shoulda been but he got distracted by something outside the ring, maybe the next dog stepping in the ring to the line, and pulled off a jump for just long enough to cause a run-by then a back jump. His jumping at the end of that second run was awful, jumping WAY too early and I'm sure it's because he spotted the next dog stepping to the line. You can see his ears and tail go up for the last 2-3 jumps. We'll have to work on those distractions for sure and some jumping exercises. I've been focusing so much on contacts and weaves that I've been neglecting the jumping.

I knew his Traditional Gamblers run would be a no Q since the A-frame was in the gamble so I didn't worry about timing it to hit the gamble and picked a course to work on weaves, teeter and some handling. Again, he did a nice job, only got 2/4 of his weaves (popped out once and missed an entry I think), had a nice teeter, was listening for the most part but seemed a little distracted at some points. It went by so quickly, I can barely remember what happened. He did a send to the tunnel for the gamble then I called him to me and we bypassed the frame on our way out of the ring.

He saved the best run for last with the Strategic Time Gamble. I picked a course with a million tunnels and I'm not sure why I thought sending him through all those particle accelerators was a good plan but somehow I managed to keep up without having to break out the defibrillator. He hit all his weaves, beautiful teeters, so fast, 9 zillion points, at one point I said to the judge 'will the whistle ever blow?' because he finished all the stuff I had planned and I had to keep adding more so I wouldn't finish too early. You have a 30 second opening then a 15 second closing and you have to leave the ring in a certain window of time, 2.5 seconds I think? We got out in time so he got his first DOCNA Q. Even though we had the most points we finished quite low in the rankings (6th or 7th I think) because what's most important is how close you finish to 45 seconds, then points count next. Or something, I don't quite understand the scoring. The winners were all 44:xx and we were 43:xx because I ran out of obstacles too soon. I didn't care though, what a gorgeous run and lots of people telling us how amazing afterward, even people I didn't know.

This was a welcome change from all the zillions of people, including the judge, telling me how much fun Cody was having during his Traditional Gamblers run. Uh, yeah, not so much fun for me. Probably the less said the better. He redeemed himself with 2 nice standard runs though, both Q's. I've got the second one on the video, could end up being his last run in a trial. Yeah, I know, lots of big loopy turns but I was pleased with him anyway. I thought he looked good for 10 1/2 years old but still I think maybe it's time. He looked so slow compared to how he used to run and I worry about him.

Lola had a blast in her runs on Sunday. The courses were perfect for her and she had a chance to stretch out those long legs and RUN. She ended up with Q's in Strategic Time Gamble and one of her Standard runs and missed a Q in the second Standard run with a missed A-frame contact but otherwise such a nice run and she looked so happy. Love it when my girl is kicking up her heels and barking at me with joy, couldn't ask for anything more.

Fun match photos and best biking video ever

I was surprised to see there was a photographer at the fun match last weekend. The best was one of me doing some kinda crazy Rocka Hula dance aka really really late front cross while poor Strum tries to negotiate a double jump while figuring what the heck I want him to do: Strummer Jumping

Lola cracks me up: Lola Jumping

Here are the rest:

Lola Tire

Strummer Tire

Strummer Jumping

Strummer Jumping

Also, thanks to Kathy for posting this biking video on my facebook. I'm putting it here so I don't lose the link and so you can have some Friday fun. Hell-arious!