Spring Training!

Spring training has begun! As you can see by all of the lovely dead grass covering Secret, the yard is nice and dry at the moment. We've had a nice stretch of dry, windy weather that did a great job at getting rid of the mud. Yesterday was a record-breaking 67 degrees -- what a beautiful day!

Somehow the stars aligned and I found myself with a day off work and no agility trial to attend. I didn't ask off or anything, I just didn't get put on the schedule for whatever reason. Seeing as I didn't work at all last weekend because of the trial, this kind of stinks for the paycheck, but having an actual DAY OFF turned out to be such a blessing. We thoroughly enjoyed our day. Because it was so beautiful, we spent the majority of the day outside. The dogs loved it!

Of course I wasn't going to let the day pass by without taking advantage of having the opportunity to train the dogs! Ever since I got the broad jump built, I've been planning to pull out the Backyard Dogs drill that I remembered seeing that featured this piece of equipment. My memory surprises me at times, for when I looked up which issue it was that contained these exercises, it was from January of 2010!! Why on earth did that stick with me so long? At any rate, I pulled out the issue and the article was just was I was looking for. It gave us lots of fun things to work on!

My brain can successfully retain three drills at a time, which tends to work out quite well for the dogs so far as keeping them fresh & engaged. I memorized the first three and then ran all three dogs (Secret, then Kaiser, then Luke). Then I flipped the broad jump the other direction, took a break for a while (so that I could work on video footage for Missy's new video -- more later!) and then came out and did three more exercises a bit later in the day.

For Secret, all of the jumps were set at 22" and the broad jump was set at 48". She handled everything with ease and I'm very happy with how well she did. She did start to peter out on me by the 6th drill, but other than that she was doing great at keeping up her speed & enthusiasm. I threw a pretty bad blind cross at her, which she handled without a problem. I think the blended front cross I did with the last drill was something new for her as well (for both of us, really!), but we got it figured out and ended it very nicely.

Aside from offering such a wide variety of skills sets with which to work, I also appreciate Backyard Dogs for being set in an area which makes it quite handy to get on video. :o)



I did video Kaiser & Luke's sessions as well, but I haven't decided if I'll bother putting them online or not. I've been editing video all day and for now I'm done. The boys did well in their own ways. Kaiser was not really feeling it yesterday and was noticeably slower than usual for whatever reason (I was jumping him at 12", it is worth noting). He also has his issues with blowing me off and taking the wrong tunnel entrances, but that's Kaiser for you.... Luke did well but sent several 12" bars flying. He was a little frantic and excited, but much of the blame is on me because my timing is just off with him on the tight work. I'm not going to worry about it, because tight just isn't his thing.

So, back to Missy. Yes, she's STILL with me. It's been over five weeks now and the poor girl still hasn't found her forever home. She started losing her front teeth last week, which we figure puts her right at 16 weeks now. We went to the vet on Friday for her rabies shot and to get her microchip implanted. What a good girl she was at the clinic -- she's just not scared of anything. She desperately wanted to play with Olivia the clinic kitty, so I think she was happy that she got to go visit Bethany on Saturday to play with Asher (oh, and Rascal, too, I'm sure -- lol).

There was a very promising potential adopter that I spoke with last week. We were hoping to get together on Sunday since I had the day off, but something came up and she wasn't able to make it. Melissa sent me info for another interested party and I spoke with him Saturday night when I got home from work. It sounds promising -- I told him I'd been planning to do an updated video to show how much she's changed in the last month, so that's what prompted the whole video project on Sunday. I'm pretty pleased with how the video turned out. I made it a full scale adoption promo video in case for whatever reason he (or the first person) decides he's not interested after all. That way it can still be used on the BCRMN web site for other people to see.



I got a "share" on Facebook by a pretty "big name" person in the border collie & rescue world. I think a lot of hits have come my way from her post. So cross your fingers, hopefully something will happen soon for Missy! She deserves a loving family of her own.