IPO Break
OMG – I wrote a long blog post and went to publish it and it disappeared and is not saved in Drafts. UGH! Not sure I have the energy to write it all out again. It was put out there and is just gone.
Saturday I trained IPO with the group in Isanti. I laid a serpentine track for Letty since we had been having trouble with corners. I thought her articles were good so I only put one at the end. She really struggled with the track, as expected. She kept wanting to go forward in a straight line and not use her nose to follow the ever changing lines. When she got to the article she stood over it then turned around and walked back towards me about 6′ and then went back and hovered over it and finally laid down. I praised her but did not feed her on the article. So she got very little food on this track. So we need to keep working on serps and doing articles after a long period of tracking with no articles. Always so much to work on. Obedience went ok. She’s not very up in heeling these days. I think we are both bored. We need to work on her jumps and we can’t while we’re healing her hamstrings. She did perk up when we did moving stands and send outs since those are new exercises. Unfortunately, her left rear leg started acting up again during bitework. We had done 3 reps of sending her into the blind for barking and then a bite in the blind. Mikey noticed she was not using her leg correctly. She said it looked like the knee was locking up again. So Bryan gave her a bite and I took her off the field. I walked her out and she seemed fine. I was not expecting this to happen again and so was not video recording the session. I let Dr Julia know. She suggested I move her appointment up. I was only able to move it up a week but it’s earlier. It’s a good time for a break from IPO since we have agility every weekend in June and I’m getting burnt out on obedience. I’m not making progress with Vada’s Utility skills either. The sad thing is that our original plans were to trial for our IPO1 again in 3 weeks.
Saturday night we went to see the Avengers. It was good action.
Sunday we played agility at the CACM CPE trial at OTR. Normally this is an outdoor trial but the club lost their training/trialing grounds so they moved the trial to OTR. It lightly rained most of the day on Sunday so it was nice to be inside. Vada and Seven had a perfect day! Vada went 2/2. She Qd in Standard so now she only needs one more for her C-ATCH3. Seven went 4/4 and weaved in all 3 of his classes that had weave poles in them! Fringe was almost perfect too. She went 4/5. She had a bar down on the panel in Colors. Letty was 2/5. I disconnected from her a few times in bad spots as I was just pushing for speed on the open courses. And she is in Level C so she has to be perfect. She was perfect on her startlines, contacts and weaves though! And she stayed sound. I warmed her up really well and stretched and massaged her hamstrings and cooled her down. All of them really. I hardly sat. I spent most of the day walking. My legs were very sore by the end of the day!
I took a look at where the dogs were at for qualifying for the 2016 CPE Nationals in OH in case we wanted to go. The dogs need 40 Qs in the 2015 calendar year for the program they will show in. It’s kind of fun to keep it in mind in case I decide to go.
Vada has 9 Q in Veterans. She will need to start over once I move her to Enthusiast. Will be tough to get there at 2 runs a trial.
Seven has 23 Qs in Veterans. He’s more than half way there.
Narc has 8 Qs in Veterans. I might move him to Enthusiast once his back is healed. Might be tough to get him qualified too.
Fringe has 33 Qs in Regular. She is 7 Qs away from being qualified!
Letty, poor Letty, has only 14 Qs in Regular. I have not been a good handler for her lately. Plus we’ve been training startlines and contacts.
As I was looking through my records I realized that I was off by 1 leg on Vada’s UKC Rally Grand Champion journey. I had the minimum score wrong. So we are further along than I thought and she is actually 2/3 of the way there and just needs 5 more QQs with a combined score over 192. We might head to IA on a Friday in August to pick up 2 of them.
Monday I was able to sleep in! We went to see Insurgent. It was pretty good. Then I spent some time weeding. It doesn’t seem like I did anything since it is so bad but I pulled out a wheelbarrow full of weeds. And I dug out the stump of a viney weed plant. I think that is what killed the rose bush as it was growing right next to it. However, the rose bush is still trying to stay alive and had a little branch of leaves.
And to keep with my flower theme of late – here is a picture of some flowers that Karl brought home for me one night after work.
Now to go work on my Recallers 6 promo video. Not sure what story to tell or how to tell it.