What is winter good for?

Cuddles. That is ALL winter is good for in my book. I hate snow, I hate cold, I hate ice, I hate having about 30 minutes of daylight in which to do anything productive, I hate shoveling, I hate scraping windows and I hate frozen fingers & toes. But I love puppy cuddles. :o)

Something about the cold weather makes all of my dogs more cuddly. Oh who am I kidding, they are just body heat leaches, that's all. I don't care, I'll still take it.

Look! I trained last night! Despite being completely wiped out from a head cold and having my brain leak from my nose like a faucet, I managed to actually set equipment in the yard in an actual pattern of sorts. The entire set-up was for Luke's benefit, so that we could work on more bonus line skills -- Namely, the things we -- strike that, I -- failed at on Saturday. Namely, driving away from me at both the weaves and the line of jumps coming out of a curve. He rocked, of course. It's always easier at home.

And Kaiser ran his dog walk beautifully with no tunnel! Wheee! Just thought that was worth mentioning. ;o) Now why won't the little turd do that at a trial...

Goals for Secret were basically just to run happy & fast and to work on driving forward without me. Because I more or less just didn't feel like setting bars, she got to run everything at 8" last night. The Woolie Tug was our reward toy for the night.

I really couldn't have been happier with our training session. I expected her to be a bit deflated since my own energy was so pathetic, but she decided to go on without me and have a grand old time.

High points included being able to send out to the jumps on the right while staying behind that first jump. I also stayed well behind the exit of the dog walk to send out to the hoops and recall into the weaves (only once being blown off on the turn to take the top jump, but only because she was flying, so who can be upset about that?). I really haven't done much, if any, call into the weaves work with her, so I was happy that she had no issues finding her entry that way.

And finally, she was SPEEDY in the weaves! I wish I could peg down what makes her speedy one night and slow the next. Perhaps she's still just feeling great from her chiro adjustment and she's just slow when something is out of alignment. Whatever the case, it was nice to see. I worked on proofing by wiggling and dragging her Woolie in front of her as she weaved. This really got her going and only made her pop once, so good baby dog.

I kept our session pretty short and brought out her frisbee as a final reward and to help to wear her out a bit more before going in the house for the night.

Still no snow in the forecast.... So I'm keeping the equipment out a bit longer. Looks like we are good through Thanksgiving at least. I'm hoping for a snowless December, personally. :o)