Mental Health Day

I woke up this morning and was just, "Meh." Even after walking the dogs I was still pretty, "Meh," and just didn't feel super awesome. I didn't have anything pressing going on at work today, so I decided to take a much needed "mental health" day and take it easy at home with the dogs. They were all crazy this morning, so I figured in order to get any peace and quiet I'd have to do something to wear them out a bit.

One thing I've always appreciated about Steve over at AgilityNerd.com is his amazing ability to see just about every possible way you could handle a course/drill/sequence. It has made me try to analyze things the same way to attempt to get out of a handling rut and away from always doing the "safe" thing.

Yesterday Steve posted the above course on his blog as part of a fun collaboration with another blogger. They were to each analyze the course and run it with their dog(s).

http://agilitynerd.com/blog/agility/courses/steve/agilitynerd-bad-dog-handling.html

After watching their videos I was inspired to set this course for myself, thinking it looked like loads of fun. I don't have any fancy video editing software, though, so I simply set up the camera and tried to run the course with several variations. Of course, now that I'm sitting in the house and have watched the video back I'm thinking, "Why didn't I do this?" or "Why didn't I do that?" There are obviously still many different handling options one could utilize on this course!

My backyard is deader than dead and the grass is very dry and slippery. Add to that the fact that the ground is like concrete at the moment, so I decided to give Secret a break and set all of the jumps at 20". It was fairly warm & humid out (I'm so done with the humidity for the year!), so she's not the zippiest she's ever been, but she tried hard. I included all of our attempts, so there are a couple of blunders in the video.  :o)

I did run Kaiser through the course as well, but I didn't include his attempts on the video. He was a sad little man today. I think the naughty little turd helped himself to the open bag of dog food in the garage (waiting to get dumped into the food bin...) and had a full belly when it was his turn to run. He went through the motions and made it through the course, but he just had no oomph to speak of and wasn't really excited about anything. His belly looked very full, so I'm pretty sure I guessed correctly about him helping himself to a snack. I'll let him chill for a bit and in the next couple of weeks I'll probably just start to focus on speed drills instead of handling exercises in prep for Champs.

Kizzy got to come out and play, too. We just did some jump/tunnel work using this setup -- nothing too fancy -- and I got bit a lot when doing collar grabs to release the toy. Another day, another bruise. lol  I joke, but I do think she's getting better about it. She can still be a naughty stinker, though! She gets away with a lot because she's so little and cute...