I thought this was too funny, agileborderterriers posted it to youtube --some people are so creative. I thought the contact discussion was too funny and how the dog talked about what happens when his handler goes to seminars, LOL:
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Monday, December 27, 2010
The Training Continues---
Breeze had a class Sunday afternoon. The GREAT news is Breeze was AWESOME. The course was rough for most of the class because it was based on European courses, but those are the ones that are our strong point...so Breeze and I had a blast. Breeze and I were totally in sync-love when it feels like that!
I stayed after class and worked with Cricket. We did some more weaves, the first weaves since the other day when she did her first set of straight 12 weaves-the ones that are on the end of the video below. WOW, it was so cool she was going from a couple of jumps to a tunnel to the weaves and doing a gorgeous little check stride to make sure she caught the entrances, that was exciting.
Working with Cricket right now is just so exciting-I can not believe she actually understands things.....and gosh, it has just been her and me....how did we get to this point? It is just so exciting to see we might actually be able to do this, how amazing is that??? Not to say it is all easy sailing....we have done tons and tons of work on recalls to heel, walking around the yard and clicking when she reads me stopping or reads collection cues, encouraging her to read my motion....WELL, last night she was really more then willing to do two jumps and run thirty or fifty feet to do a tunnel even though I was clearly STOPPING SHORT and standing still before a jump, LOL. We have also worked on sends, and I think she likes those a little more then reading collection cues or having to watch mom if given a choice....I love watching baby dogs learn!
THE PLAN:
1. Continue and work through the Susan Garrett set of weave challenges to really proof the weaves for Cricket.
2. Continue working through the Linda M Foundation jump training book.
3. Hopefully the weather will co operate so we can get working on putting the last of the teeter together so we can move onto really working on the dog walk.
4. Get back to working on the running Aframe exercises so we can get that onto the Aframe.
No more classes at the local club until the end of February-I am crossing my fingers Cricket and I can learn enough by that time to sign up for the upper level handling classes-otherwise we will have to wait for summer to be able to do any classes. The lower level classes are taught by a gal that uses a lot of methods I really prefer not to use.
SECOND HALF OF OUR WEAVE TRAINING VIDEO!
I stayed after class and worked with Cricket. We did some more weaves, the first weaves since the other day when she did her first set of straight 12 weaves-the ones that are on the end of the video below. WOW, it was so cool she was going from a couple of jumps to a tunnel to the weaves and doing a gorgeous little check stride to make sure she caught the entrances, that was exciting.
Working with Cricket right now is just so exciting-I can not believe she actually understands things.....and gosh, it has just been her and me....how did we get to this point? It is just so exciting to see we might actually be able to do this, how amazing is that??? Not to say it is all easy sailing....we have done tons and tons of work on recalls to heel, walking around the yard and clicking when she reads me stopping or reads collection cues, encouraging her to read my motion....WELL, last night she was really more then willing to do two jumps and run thirty or fifty feet to do a tunnel even though I was clearly STOPPING SHORT and standing still before a jump, LOL. We have also worked on sends, and I think she likes those a little more then reading collection cues or having to watch mom if given a choice....I love watching baby dogs learn!
THE PLAN:
1. Continue and work through the Susan Garrett set of weave challenges to really proof the weaves for Cricket.
2. Continue working through the Linda M Foundation jump training book.
3. Hopefully the weather will co operate so we can get working on putting the last of the teeter together so we can move onto really working on the dog walk.
4. Get back to working on the running Aframe exercises so we can get that onto the Aframe.
No more classes at the local club until the end of February-I am crossing my fingers Cricket and I can learn enough by that time to sign up for the upper level handling classes-otherwise we will have to wait for summer to be able to do any classes. The lower level classes are taught by a gal that uses a lot of methods I really prefer not to use.
SECOND HALF OF OUR WEAVE TRAINING VIDEO!
Thursday, December 23, 2010
First Steps of Weave Training!
Due to the rain, the holidays, computer viruses, and just plain life in general....I only got around to uploading Crickets weave work today.
We are learning the weaves with the 2x2 method---WHICH I LOVE! This is the first few days training and was taken a few weeks ago I think, then we had a break of a few weeks ....so I will post the second half of our weavies soon, but spoiler alert.....Cricket is doing twelve mighty awesome weaves. Love the 2x2 because it goes soooo fast, lightening fast and it has just been so much fun!
We are learning the weaves with the 2x2 method---WHICH I LOVE! This is the first few days training and was taken a few weeks ago I think, then we had a break of a few weeks ....so I will post the second half of our weavies soon, but spoiler alert.....Cricket is doing twelve mighty awesome weaves. Love the 2x2 because it goes soooo fast, lightening fast and it has just been so much fun!
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
YIKES-rainy Southern California!
Today is supposed to be the heaviest rain so far and the ground is really saturated. The water is getting close to the back door, so I got the sand bags ready...but so far so good... we lost power several times yesterday and it was COLD. The streets around town have rivers running through them-the desert is really not set up to handle rain.
Cricket has a LOT of unspent energy! We are doing some contact work in the living room, it is going fantastic and I think I will pull in a jump and do some one jump work today.
Here is a snip of video of the backyard where the dogs go potty and the big yard beyond.
Cricket has a LOT of unspent energy! We are doing some contact work in the living room, it is going fantastic and I think I will pull in a jump and do some one jump work today.
Here is a snip of video of the backyard where the dogs go potty and the big yard beyond.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Viruses, Trees and Weaves!
YIKES! I got on of those computer viruses, which was a bummer because I thought I had lots of virus protection and it is all up to date. I got this big warning on the desk top that a program had detected spyware on my computer and I should pay $69 for a program to get rid of it. Of course I did not pay but called the computer person instead!!! The only thing I could do on the computer was scan with Norton who assured me all looked good on my computer! THANKS Norton! It all looked great on m computer, except....I couldn't use it, hahahahhaha. It has been a hard computer weekend, so I am behind on blogs and making my videos....and I have cool video I really want to share, so hopefully soon!!!
It has been raining cats and dogs so we missed the fun match I had been looking forward to, and our agiity training has ground to a halt over the weekend, looks like we will have a wet Christmas. This weekend we got our Christmas tree up, my husband was dubious about putting up a tree and kept saying the dogs would knock it down or do something to it, which they might, but I am pretty good putting up xpen protection for things like that....but he really wanted a smaller tree we could put on top of a table in the living room, so WHAT EVER-that is what we did. Of course within an hour or two of putting up the tree KIMMIE THE CAT knocked the whole tree down-good job Kimmie! Luckily we sort of scooped the tree up and put it back and it has stayed safe the rest of the weekend-life with a bunch of pets is always exciting!
THE BEST HOLIDAY NEWS IS I can tell Breeze feels really good and she looks FANTASTIC! The vet confirmed my feeling that Breeze was doing GREAT, when the vet did her chiro she said Breeze feels so much better then she has in a LONG TIME,she thinks she has really turned the corner and is really healing well. So now we can reintroduce the weaves but only adding in one element at a time, harder entries, putting them in course, having the poles totally closed.
A video, nothing too exciting unless you are me or Breeze and have had to see her struggle and not able to do weaves in such a long time, these look like a dog that feels good, and nothing could be more exciting to me!!!
It has been raining cats and dogs so we missed the fun match I had been looking forward to, and our agiity training has ground to a halt over the weekend, looks like we will have a wet Christmas. This weekend we got our Christmas tree up, my husband was dubious about putting up a tree and kept saying the dogs would knock it down or do something to it, which they might, but I am pretty good putting up xpen protection for things like that....but he really wanted a smaller tree we could put on top of a table in the living room, so WHAT EVER-that is what we did. Of course within an hour or two of putting up the tree KIMMIE THE CAT knocked the whole tree down-good job Kimmie! Luckily we sort of scooped the tree up and put it back and it has stayed safe the rest of the weekend-life with a bunch of pets is always exciting!
THE BEST HOLIDAY NEWS IS I can tell Breeze feels really good and she looks FANTASTIC! The vet confirmed my feeling that Breeze was doing GREAT, when the vet did her chiro she said Breeze feels so much better then she has in a LONG TIME,she thinks she has really turned the corner and is really healing well. So now we can reintroduce the weaves but only adding in one element at a time, harder entries, putting them in course, having the poles totally closed.
A video, nothing too exciting unless you are me or Breeze and have had to see her struggle and not able to do weaves in such a long time, these look like a dog that feels good, and nothing could be more exciting to me!!!
Monday, December 13, 2010
Creepy Christmas Evergreen Reindeer gives birth to a new trick!
I know this video is long....
and it is dark, but if you put it to full screen it is easier to see....
Cricket and I were at a food court and found this WEIRD EVERGREEN REINDEER, that was SCARY! Cricket started barking at it and actually pulled out of her collar-yikes! Cricket is usually not afraid of anything but seems to be going through a fear period right now.
I used some training where if Cricket walked forward I would reward her with a relief of pressure...I would run off from the scary reindeer, it all seemed to make her feel safe enough to explore the reindeer. I tried to make it a fun game of course.
A few minutes later,.....Cricket was jumping on the reindeer and a new trick was born!
If you just want to see the trick you can go to about 1:50 sec. or so into the video ;-). I thought it was cool how the reindeer is not that stable, and it jingled, and it was CREEPY (after all how many larger then life reindeer's do you see sitting in the food courts you go to?) but after a few minutes it was a cool prop for our reindeer games!
ISN'T CRICKET JUST TOO CUTE? At least I think so.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
my EARLY Christmas present to myself!!!
The really FANTASTIC part of yesterday is I got to do a private lesson with Elicia Calhoun, and I had a BLAST. The bad part is that made me want to have a working spot in the seminar she is putting on here....and it made me want to be able to do things like the private a lot more.....unfortunately... my pocket book is not up to that longing. I am sorry for such a LONG entry, but if you read the first two paragraphs it gives all the info that I really wanted to say, and the rest is so that I remember, and in case others are interested in the contact work we did, so feel free to read the first two paragraphs and stop-I promise I won't be offended ;-).
I had been signed up for a working spot for the Elicia Calhoun seminar that is going to be held today and tomorrow at our local agility yard. When Breeze was hurt I had to give up my working spot and was just going to audit ;-(. I was really disappointed but after talking to my instructor on Thursday after class I decided that maybe I could take a private lesson-address the issues I wanted to work on and still not have Breeze working all day which might be a lot for her-esp. if it was really cold.
I wanted to work on being able to get where we need to on course when the course calls for me to travel a good amount of distance and then still cue the next sequence correctly. I do great in tight sequences when we are working in one area. We had a fantastic private and just really worked on one sequence for a good part of the lesson. Elicia kept asking if I would like to work on that sequence or get a new sequence but this sequence had several elements that I had trouble with, so it was sort of neat to be able to just really work on the timing and getting those challenges so I could feel how it felt to do it really well. It made me feel so good when Elicia kept saying that she thought Breeze has such a terrific foundation, and she says you have so much to work with, and she kept saying that she really liked Breeze. Breeze is so amazing and I hope one day I can do the handling that will let me really show how good she really is.
It really is a pretty short easy sequence, and I do not have the course to true scale, but it had an area I had to send Breeze from jump 2-3 while traveling the opposite way to the end of the tunnel to get there in time, and then a wicked turn and send over that double, then a serp followed by a treadle and a forward send to the #9 jump, while backing up and keeping her with me so I did not send her out over the #8 jump and sending her over #10 from behind and keeping her from taking that double. Well, of course I sent her over the double several times. The last time we ran it Elicia said it was VERY smooth and I could have held a Marguerita running through and I would not have spilled, LOL. The other big thing that she said I need to work on is that she says because I have boobs I tend to physically feel more comfortable when I lean forward and that will be a big challenge for me to try to work on.....that has always been a thing that has always gotten in my way.
Elicia has done a lot of work with the four on the floor method of contacts so we worked quite a bit on Breeze's Aframe to figure out what has been going on with that. She feels that the channels I am using are not teaching Breeze where to look, and she gave me some good ideas of how to reward her most effectively, and she felt I should help Breeze to learn to target where she needs to go. She felt that right now her striding over the Aframe looks good, so she gave me some really good strategies to work on with Breeze. All in all she felt Breeze was doing pretty good on her aframe and did not think her performance was hurting her physically because she has never slowed down or avoided it in any way.
Next we moved on to Cricket, I did not bring Cricket out, but we talked about teaching her the running contact. Elicia said she felt it was important to realize there is no one way to teach anything that is good for all dogs. She said she teaches her dogs to target to a mat, to foot target to a hit it board, a contact board that is just the size of her dog from hip to shoulder and to target to the pvc box and she even teaches her dogs to target to something like an alley-oop, so that there are always a lot of options to use if at any time the method you are using is not making sense to your dog. She encouraged me not to really get too stuck in any one way to do things and said I shouldn't be afraid to watch my dog and really listen to what they are telling you about what makes sense for them and what feels good for their body. Always a good thing to be reminded how important it is to listen to YOUR dog so that what you are training is something that is going to work for them. Elicia said to not be afraid you will ruin your dog if you play around with things....you can try a lot of things until your dog has the big light bulbs and really understands a behavior. So it was GREAT to get some pointers for our running Aframe and she did say she could do email/video consults if I felt like I was running into any trouble.
I am doing my 2020 based on her ON THE BOARD method that I saw her talk about in another seminar and read about in her Clean Run article, so she gave me some good tips about how to put that behavior onto the dog walk with Cricket and how to negotiate with her on the end behavior that will be the most comfortable for her so she will like it and how to proof it as we are putting it on the obstacle, so that was really helpful. Yippie. I really loved her approach.
Now I am all excited about agility and I want to go to the yard and PLAY. Of course the yard is closed for practice for two days now because of the seminar, and I soooo wish I could be at the seminar....guess I will have to set up something in the back yard
I had been signed up for a working spot for the Elicia Calhoun seminar that is going to be held today and tomorrow at our local agility yard. When Breeze was hurt I had to give up my working spot and was just going to audit ;-(. I was really disappointed but after talking to my instructor on Thursday after class I decided that maybe I could take a private lesson-address the issues I wanted to work on and still not have Breeze working all day which might be a lot for her-esp. if it was really cold.
I wanted to work on being able to get where we need to on course when the course calls for me to travel a good amount of distance and then still cue the next sequence correctly. I do great in tight sequences when we are working in one area. We had a fantastic private and just really worked on one sequence for a good part of the lesson. Elicia kept asking if I would like to work on that sequence or get a new sequence but this sequence had several elements that I had trouble with, so it was sort of neat to be able to just really work on the timing and getting those challenges so I could feel how it felt to do it really well. It made me feel so good when Elicia kept saying that she thought Breeze has such a terrific foundation, and she says you have so much to work with, and she kept saying that she really liked Breeze. Breeze is so amazing and I hope one day I can do the handling that will let me really show how good she really is.
It really is a pretty short easy sequence, and I do not have the course to true scale, but it had an area I had to send Breeze from jump 2-3 while traveling the opposite way to the end of the tunnel to get there in time, and then a wicked turn and send over that double, then a serp followed by a treadle and a forward send to the #9 jump, while backing up and keeping her with me so I did not send her out over the #8 jump and sending her over #10 from behind and keeping her from taking that double. Well, of course I sent her over the double several times. The last time we ran it Elicia said it was VERY smooth and I could have held a Marguerita running through and I would not have spilled, LOL. The other big thing that she said I need to work on is that she says because I have boobs I tend to physically feel more comfortable when I lean forward and that will be a big challenge for me to try to work on.....that has always been a thing that has always gotten in my way.
Elicia has done a lot of work with the four on the floor method of contacts so we worked quite a bit on Breeze's Aframe to figure out what has been going on with that. She feels that the channels I am using are not teaching Breeze where to look, and she gave me some good ideas of how to reward her most effectively, and she felt I should help Breeze to learn to target where she needs to go. She felt that right now her striding over the Aframe looks good, so she gave me some really good strategies to work on with Breeze. All in all she felt Breeze was doing pretty good on her aframe and did not think her performance was hurting her physically because she has never slowed down or avoided it in any way.
Next we moved on to Cricket, I did not bring Cricket out, but we talked about teaching her the running contact. Elicia said she felt it was important to realize there is no one way to teach anything that is good for all dogs. She said she teaches her dogs to target to a mat, to foot target to a hit it board, a contact board that is just the size of her dog from hip to shoulder and to target to the pvc box and she even teaches her dogs to target to something like an alley-oop, so that there are always a lot of options to use if at any time the method you are using is not making sense to your dog. She encouraged me not to really get too stuck in any one way to do things and said I shouldn't be afraid to watch my dog and really listen to what they are telling you about what makes sense for them and what feels good for their body. Always a good thing to be reminded how important it is to listen to YOUR dog so that what you are training is something that is going to work for them. Elicia said to not be afraid you will ruin your dog if you play around with things....you can try a lot of things until your dog has the big light bulbs and really understands a behavior. So it was GREAT to get some pointers for our running Aframe and she did say she could do email/video consults if I felt like I was running into any trouble.
I am doing my 2020 based on her ON THE BOARD method that I saw her talk about in another seminar and read about in her Clean Run article, so she gave me some good tips about how to put that behavior onto the dog walk with Cricket and how to negotiate with her on the end behavior that will be the most comfortable for her so she will like it and how to proof it as we are putting it on the obstacle, so that was really helpful. Yippie. I really loved her approach.
Now I am all excited about agility and I want to go to the yard and PLAY. Of course the yard is closed for practice for two days now because of the seminar, and I soooo wish I could be at the seminar....guess I will have to set up something in the back yard
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Whooo hooo a pretty great day!
Ever have one of those days??? You know....THE GOOD ONES! I have nothing earth shattering to share but we did have Breeze's agility class tonight, it was super cold so I almost did not go...but I decided to go and not do Aframe, or weaves and just work on handling. Breeze was SOOOOOOO happy-it was so neat to see. Our first run I was bumbling around and sloppy and Breeze started jumping up yelling and nipping, I had trouble running at one point because I was laughing so hard she was just being so silly. I got my act together and we just felt like we were dancing together on a pretty hard course. When Breeze is feeling good and gets good info she is soooooo amazing. Just seeing her so happy and reading everything so well, just made my day!
The other great thing in class was there has been some tension between my instructor and I because I was having to modify courses.....but today it was so much better and the instructor set up alternate courses for Breeze, I had not even mentioned that we were going to have to modify but she planned out some really nice alternatives so we could make nice transitions around the obstacles that Breeze could not do-I really appreciated that so much.
I brought Cricket and worked after class on just walking around clicking for going over jumps when we walked by,stopping before jumps and C/T for stopping with me, C/T for RC and FC, and we did some AWESOME short sequences. Our teeter is almost there, I have to get some video because she is so cute.
Tomorrow Breeze goes to get another treatment, and we have class tomorrow night too, so hopefully that will all go as well as today went!
The other great thing in class was there has been some tension between my instructor and I because I was having to modify courses.....but today it was so much better and the instructor set up alternate courses for Breeze, I had not even mentioned that we were going to have to modify but she planned out some really nice alternatives so we could make nice transitions around the obstacles that Breeze could not do-I really appreciated that so much.
I brought Cricket and worked after class on just walking around clicking for going over jumps when we walked by,stopping before jumps and C/T for stopping with me, C/T for RC and FC, and we did some AWESOME short sequences. Our teeter is almost there, I have to get some video because she is so cute.
Tomorrow Breeze goes to get another treatment, and we have class tomorrow night too, so hopefully that will all go as well as today went!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)