Jumbo Mailbox (before our last name was added)

Never Ending Winter

Last week I was able to put jumps out 1 day and work some box jumping with Vada and serpentines.  Then it snowed.  Wednesday we finally had another good day.  Much of the snow was gone and the ground wasn’t too sloppy.  I setup Nancy Gyes’ Number 3 pattern.  I had to find stakes and rope to kind of secure the tunnels.  We need to get our tunnel bags put together so we can use them.  Course, we have a chute to build too.  We have all th stuff we just need to put it together.  And replace the wood on Karl’s aframe.  Lots of spring projects!  Anyways, I worked Vada on the first 2 exercises.  It was the same sequence but once doing it with rear crosses and the other doing it with front crosses.  It was hard.  I realized later in the evening that I should have curved the tunnel a bit more and that would have made it a bit easier.  It was good to work on timing and position and Vada to work on keeping bars up no matter what stupid handling I did.  Copper did great.  His committment point for the jumps when I was rear crossing was really close to the jump.  He does not trust me at all!  We got better though.  He did excellent with the front crosses.  He’s done very few in his life so I was very pleased.  Then I put them in their crates and let everyone else in from the backyard and put them in their crates.  I took Seven out and worked him.  They have not done agility in a long time!  So it was back to foundations for alot of them.  I was able to get him to do the jump, then the jump to the tunnel.  Then the jump to the tunnel to the jump.  Then I realized that we needed to work on rear crosses so we did that on that jump.  Once he did a few good ones and got rewarded then I did the rear cross and then sent him into the tunnel and then rewarded.

I started the above almost 2 weeks ago.  Now I’m finally getting back to it.  Sigh.  We worked the dogs the next night too and they all made huge improvements.  Probably because they had settled in and weren’t to high to work.  We have since worked them a few times.  The yard light allows us some light but the dogs don’t want to go into the dark tunnel.  I think it’s harder for them to jump with the shadows too.  And now we have more snow.  Sigh.  We were about 70 on Saturday and then last night it snowed.

Vada’s jumping is so terrible and I was reading Shaping Success and Susan Garrett had similar problems with her 6 year old Border Collie.  She got alot of improvement from doing Susan Salo’s jumping grids.  So I am doing that.  Also, one of my instructors has been noticing that she is not judging distance and adding a second stride when needed.  She is bounce jumping everything and crashing the bar if it does not work for her.  I worked her on the set point exercise and 5 jump bounce grid on Thursday and it was terrible.  I worked her again on Friday with food instead of a toy and she was much calmer and did thoughtful jumping.  I’m changing her next agility trial entry to just Sunday also.  I want to do more trialing but that will just give her more opportunity to practice bad behavior (like breaking start line stays) and this will give me Saturday for Schutzhund training to get ready for the HOT Championship.  So, I’ll just keep working these daily to get her jumping with compression instead of flat jumping.  I’d like to start the others on it too.  Narc need jump work big time too.  I was just starting to see it in agility and it showed big time at Schutzhund on Saturday.  They all need start line stay work too.  This can also help with that.  I’m also thinking of doing the exercises in the newest Contact training DVD.  That’ll help start lines too.  Along with tracking and working on obedience.  🙂

Training on Saturday went very well.   We had beautiful weather.  Vada had ripped her toenail so she did a down stay and worked on finishes in obedience.  In bitework Dave worked her and gave Donna his opinion on how to work on her reattacks so she can get better grips.  We have abandoned the silent out.  I think he said to just do alot more attacks and outs and attacks and outs.  Narc did well in obedience for his first time on the field.  We had to backup a bit to get more focus on heeling but by the end of our session he was doing as well as he had been in the barn.  He did wonderfully on the wall.  The high jump was another story.  He jumps too flat.  We went to food and me standing in his way so he had to jump short and we were successful.  He’s not at full height.  There are 3 boards out.  But I can work jumping skills at home and the automatic halts.  Dave worked him in bitework too.  He got ful hard initial grips.  With pressure he would start losing his grip but he’ll get the confidence as we go on.  he’s already been making alot of progress.  I ordered obedience proofing books so I can clean up Vada’s obedience for the HOT Championship in 2 months. 

It’s been like a week now with no pop.  I’m still dragging.  I just never have energy.  Sigh.  I’m hoping it’ll kick in soon.  I’m ont losing any weight either so not much incentive to stay off the evil stuff.

We finally bought a new jumbo mailbox and replaced the old one.  My Clean Run magazine is no longer getting bent since it fits in the mailbox just fine now.  That was the main reason for the new mailbox.  Karl installed his iron border collie house number thing on top of it.  And Friday I added letters for our last name on each side.  So it s totally complete.

Sunday we worked on the Blaine house for 5+ hours.  Mom joined us.  We got alot done.  I put new tile in the kitchen.  Josh had installed a new blind that he was given for the patio doors that looks great.  Karl worked on the bathroom some more and is close to putting the tub surround in.  Mom got the first coat of trim paint on the window frames and door frames in the 2 bedrooms.  It’s really starting to shape up in there.  We have 2 more Sundays to work on it this month so we should be able to rent it out very soon.