Almost there with Mercy's weaves. She's been a little more challenging than my others, because we did so much cone work that when I started her on the weaves, she wanted to run out, wrap one, and return. But we're almost there now. Next step will the the straight line, then we'll try them at the barn.

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(videoed in poor light, and I let YouTube ( Read more... )

Started Mercy on the formal retrieve tonight. Which, there's a story behind this. Somebody shared a truly awful video of a "dog trainer" showing off the training of a young Lab that he's been working for 6 weeks. I won't share that video here, it's heartbreaking. He's using an ecollar, and doing some "retrieve" work, and the dog is so shut down ( Read more... )

I decided a couple days ago to try taking the pups to the UKI trial held today at the Cash arena. I thought it would be a nice practice option for Mercy, since the Cash arena is great for baby dogs. I ended up running all the dogs, because if she was playing, might as well bring Pirate. I entered him in the Masters series. I was not going to ( Read more... )

Spent Friday & Saturday up in Snohomish for a regional specialty show. Of course, the reason I wanted to show is that it had been fun lately to show Tess, which I can only do at specialties. And then she was really not into it, got thoroughly dumped by the judges, and wanted to be elsewhere. I most likely won't show her again, though there's ( Read more... )

I've been working 16 hours a week at the realty office where I interned when working on my degree. It's not what I trained for, but I figured that a little income was better than no income. My bosses took me to lunch today, and we talked, and the plan now is for me to go to 35 hours there ( Read more... )

With Pirate finishing, Tully, who could never get a point herself, is now behind 3 generations of champions (I only included AKC titles in the graphic). I'm quite pleased with all these dogs. They aren't perfect, and there are some differences in style, but all 4 of these dogs are sound, all are typey (if you know what a Staffordshire Bull ( Read more... )

This is a thing I've been thinking about, and it's a tough decision. I know she measures into 16", and while I'm not 100% on her height (USDAA judge got 15 1/4, but I don't know if that was accurate), I'm sure she's over 15. So that fits into my criteria of a dog who can jump 16. But she just didn't look that comfortable with it when we tried. ( Read more... )

Randy Roberts is a superior dog show photographer. Also, the HRKC backdrop makes me happy.


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Drove up to Sequim to show in conformation this weekend. I know some of my friends think I should have quit on that long ago, but it was just frustrating to be close, and not be able to finish Pirate. I made the decision to enter the show at Sequim, because Pi's son, Tucker, got 2 majors there based on being the only class dog, and getting the ( Read more... )

I took the dogs to participate in a rather entertaining play study down at OSU this week. We had to go 2 days; one day they were fasted, one day they were fed. So a lot of driving, all the way down to Corvallis two days in a row, but it was For Science. I'm not actually 100% sure what they were studying, though the friend that was helping me the ( Read more... )