It’s been a while. I made the decision not to do any shows over winter:
1) Rum doesn’t cope with indoor venues, I don’t want the stress behaviour to return so it would be long journeys for just Ember to compete.
2) I have a wedding to pay for!
3) It’s cold and dark and miserable.
4) I only have a normal car so wet muddy, indoor school surface covered dogs aren’t really suited to it!
5) I want to get the dogs (and me) up to a better standard.
So we are training every other Sunday to see if we can better our standard as we were all over the shop this year, having too much fun and not concentrating enough! Next year I want the dogs back up to a competitive standard but still enjoying it and I still think we will stick to smaller shows as I just can’t ever see with Rum ever coping with the bigger shows. My fiancé has said I could use a caravan next year but the trouble is this would cause Rum even more stress and we would be back to square one so we will just be sticking to local shows as well.
Training is going well especially with Ember, I have always struggled with things like pulling off jumps, pull throughs when she’s ahead of me and allowing me to cross behind so these are the things we have been working on and she is picking it up well this time round, before I have never seemed to get her to really do it. Also she didn’t like the wider spaced weaves so we have been working on those along with entries and of course the usual contacts!
With Rum he is starting to push me a little in terms of contacts and waits, he is self releasing off contacts and pushing his waits a bit. So I think we might start with some UKA shows and take a toy in. His control, jumping etc is still fab and he listens every step of the way.
This weekend we hadn’t trained for long when the wind and rain set in so we had to call it a day which was a shame.
Cas will be 12 soon, she’s still fit as a fiddle and very healthy, to look at her you wouldn’t think she was that old! Her only problem is she can’t eat dry food without almost choking and the vet can’t see anything wrong so it’s a bit worrying but when we soak her food she is fine and she’s been like this almost a year now and it hasn’t worsened.
Dizzy is 13 next year and she has her good and bad days, her back legs can be very wobbly and her one front shoulder does cause her some pain however she recently had an MOT at the vets who said she was very good considering and she had a blood test which just showed her kidneys are slowing down a bit due to old age but other than that she is fine.
Mum and I have tickets to Olympia on the Saturday for the evening performance so am looking forward to seeing the agility. I was always a bit disappointed Rum never qualified for the Novice Olympia, we never seemed to get clears always 5f here and there, two runs stand out where he had the fastest time and I could have kicked myself for making silly mistakes. He would be fab powering round that course however looking back it is a good thing he didn’t as he just would not have coped with the atmosphere at all, it would have completely blown his brains! I am a great believer in that everything happens for a reason.
Wow that’s a long post! We’re in New York over Christmas so I probably won’t blog again, Happy Christmas to you all!
