Ups and Downs

I'll start with the downs.

Jane couldn't get her tooth surgery on Friday. Her blood work came back with a high white blood cell count - telling that there is an infection somewhere in her body. The panel indicated all her organs were functioning fine but the particular area on the panel shows it is either allergies (which we ruled out mostly), or parasites! So Jane is being treated on 2 different meds for WORMS and she got the 2 week injection of Antibiotics. She had chest xrays also and it shows no signs of cardiac disease - because of the heart murmur worry, her heart looks healthy and is not enlarged. So hopefully in two weeks she can have the surgery. We will get a full blood panel again, and see if her levels had evened out. She also had urine crystals which wasn't a big concern, at this time, as there are many reasons for it, but she will also get another urinalysis at that time too and we'll go from there.

The Ups.

We had our last Outreach of the year, I'm glad the things I've put focus on this year have really improved and I can put them to use now. I love the challenge of Outreach and you can take what you want from it, but I can really see it coming together after this last session. I'm excited for next year.

This years focus, and works still in progress for next year:

• Positional cues for serps, threadles, jump patterns etc (I am pretty confident with this now)

• Fine tuning my handling - what does it mean to my dog (we are still working on this)

• Directionals on verbal only (Gyp is great with this - still waffling about modifying it)

• Weaves - Gyp and K have great entry skills, I'm glad I've seen such good results, and I just let them do their job. (all that two/three/four pole work paid off)

• Driving to obstacles with confidence and no micromanaging, they know it or they don't.

For next year I want to see improvements in:

• Jumping tighter on wraps, post turns and push through F/Cs

• Better course analysis, less second guessing ARHHG - I don't second guess with J or K, but Gyp is still a work in progress, I need to be more confident

• Moving "wait" and re-directing with confidence and no melting (Kim gave us some great ideas for this)

• Keeping an eye out for where Gyp takes a jump in a Serp., she leaves a bit early, again, my arm cue is early, but she has adjusted for that. So we will fine tune this also.

• Be patient, don't be a rusher

• and for God's sake keep the STUPID ARM under control.

My list of things to improve on however, is really long which I am VERY happy about. And I'm glad on the first day we covered what has been one of my issues with Gyp. Responding to my decel cue on a push through front cross, or even just wrapping a jump. I want her tighter around a jump. And I now know what I was doing wrong - deceling late and compensating for it with an early arm - which was still causing her to jump long. We also covered rear crosses which was great, and my confidence with her on RCs was MUCH better by the end of the weekend. 

I hope the snow stays away so I can continue to work on these skills in my yard, its amazing how much you can do with a small yard, a couple jumps, three dogs, and twenty minutes!!!!