We went to our first official Open Match. I didn't expect things to go as poorly as they did today. We did qualify though, but Brandy was a nervous wreck and that is not good. It felt as if it was our first time in the ring ever. If you do not see the signs of her being nervous you can go and see my "insurance leg" video and compare it to this one. Watch her tails, last time it was wagging this time it's vibrating. On top of everything when she gets stressed she starts pooping in the ring. She did it twice today and that is after I took her out to do everything she needs to - very embarrassing!
We have 4 more matches that we can use to clean up our act or we will not be allowed to go in the ring at the end of April:-(
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow ...
I always have a "Love hate" relationship with the snow in Maryland.
It's so pretty when big snowflakes fall off the sky and the trees are covered with snow. Dogs love it,well at least Brandy, Shamu just seems to like eating snow. Brandy had a few minutes of crazy zoommies - running around me in circle and barking from time to time. But tomorrow, the snow will become such a huge pain! Maybe I'll manage to take few nice pictures in the morning.
Well, I took Shamu out first and it was so pretty that suddenly I didn't want to go to bed anymore. So I took Brandy out and decided to do some work. First, we did go outs.
I thought it would be interesting to do go outs int he middle of the night in the snow. I have no idea how she was finding those targets, must be the nose, but she did really well with that part. However, she stopped sitting on the command. She was doing so well yesterday with sitting and suddenly she stopped. She would stand there instead, so I would have to go out and correct her. She did managed to give me a couple of sits anyway.
Next we worked on "drop on recall". This was going really bad. I think she was running so fast that she would just fly and would drop much later. I would correct her all the way back to the spot, and do it again - same outcome. Damn, I bet it's because I just set the date for upcoming obedience trials! Well, I reduced the distance drastically. Dropped - beautifully. I increased the distance to 15 feet - very nice drop. Back to full distance and I finally got a nice drop on the full distance. I decided not to push my luck anymore and quit right there.
Next we did gloves. Again, I thought it would be neat to do white gloves in the snow. She did pretty well with gloves too, except after each time she picked it up she was shaking it as trying to kill it, or maybe she was shaking the snow off.
Another not so good thing - she was blowing me off on stay commands. I'll leaver her on sit/stay and I find her standing when I look back, pretty frustrating. The snow must be messing up with her brain - she gets so excited about it.
It's so pretty when big snowflakes fall off the sky and the trees are covered with snow. Dogs love it,well at least Brandy, Shamu just seems to like eating snow. Brandy had a few minutes of crazy zoommies - running around me in circle and barking from time to time. But tomorrow, the snow will become such a huge pain! Maybe I'll manage to take few nice pictures in the morning.
Well, I took Shamu out first and it was so pretty that suddenly I didn't want to go to bed anymore. So I took Brandy out and decided to do some work. First, we did go outs.
I thought it would be interesting to do go outs int he middle of the night in the snow. I have no idea how she was finding those targets, must be the nose, but she did really well with that part. However, she stopped sitting on the command. She was doing so well yesterday with sitting and suddenly she stopped. She would stand there instead, so I would have to go out and correct her. She did managed to give me a couple of sits anyway.
Next we worked on "drop on recall". This was going really bad. I think she was running so fast that she would just fly and would drop much later. I would correct her all the way back to the spot, and do it again - same outcome. Damn, I bet it's because I just set the date for upcoming obedience trials! Well, I reduced the distance drastically. Dropped - beautifully. I increased the distance to 15 feet - very nice drop. Back to full distance and I finally got a nice drop on the full distance. I decided not to push my luck anymore and quit right there.
Next we did gloves. Again, I thought it would be neat to do white gloves in the snow. She did pretty well with gloves too, except after each time she picked it up she was shaking it as trying to kill it, or maybe she was shaking the snow off.
Another not so good thing - she was blowing me off on stay commands. I'll leaver her on sit/stay and I find her standing when I look back, pretty frustrating. The snow must be messing up with her brain - she gets so excited about it.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Playing with the camera
My husband had own a pretty nice camera and few nice lenses for about 5 years now. I never took time to figure out how to use it in any mode other than automatic.
Finally I've decided that enough is enough and spent few hours on Sunday reading a chapter in the book about exposure and reading a book about the camera to figure out what the buttons do.
Last night I was eager to try what I learned during our Thursday night class. Wow, what a surprise it was. I can't say I've become a professional photographer, but the pictures are so much better already! I would've never been able to take anything even close to this in the automatic mode indoors!
I really enjoyed taking pictures of Rugby, photographing is little white dog is so much easier and fun! Here are few examples, you can see few more here ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/97873218@N00/)
Finally I've decided that enough is enough and spent few hours on Sunday reading a chapter in the book about exposure and reading a book about the camera to figure out what the buttons do.
Last night I was eager to try what I learned during our Thursday night class. Wow, what a surprise it was. I can't say I've become a professional photographer, but the pictures are so much better already! I would've never been able to take anything even close to this in the automatic mode indoors!
I really enjoyed taking pictures of Rugby, photographing is little white dog is so much easier and fun! Here are few examples, you can see few more here ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/97873218@N00/)
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year everybody! The things had been so busy that I kind of abandoned my blog, I will try to do better this year.
Yesterday we got together at Applewoods for a holidays photo shoot, here are few pictures.
This is the new kid on the block, his name is Shamu. I will try to talk about him in a separate post.
We were all excited to go to the terrier specialty in October and finish our CD, but unfortunately Brandy decided that she'll get into season 2 or 3 months early this year and it happened just 3 days before the specialty. So to our HUGE disappointment we had to miss it. We did get our CD, however, a month later in Salisbury MD on November 13th with the first place and the score of 195.5. We also go our insurance leg the following day with the first place and the score of 196.5. I was very very proud of Brandy. I think she gave me that day all she had, this was by far our best run. We also got a lot of compliments from bunch of people including the judge. It was definitely a lot of fun!.
On Nov 1st we also started working in Utility class. This proved to be pretty challenging as now we have to work on our Open and Utility exercises. We put the drop on recall on hold until CD is done, to prevent interfering with the novice recall so we really had to start working on it. Plus all other Open exercises we had a pretty good handle on fell through the cracks starting the end of the July as we were preparing to show in Novice so we had to put it all back together. Not to mention that days had become very short and cold, I need to get up no later that 5:30 am so I have a chance to work the dogs, making things very difficult for me. Getting up at 5:30 and dragging myself out in the cold and total darkness is quite depressing and challenging, it;s so much nicer to stay in my cosy bed until the daylight comes.
Lukily for us, I had some time off I could take between Christmas and New Year so we had chance to work during daylight and finally get to some jumping. We can't really do any jumping in the dark as I worried that Brandy will hurt herself, so, usually, we have to save jumping for the weekend.
On Utility front Brandy turned out to be some kind of genious of scent discrimination, or so I was told. After about two weeks of working with two metal articles and what seems being totally stuck without any progress, something suddenly clicked in her head and she just got it! Starting that moment she was prgressing pretty quickly. We gradually increased number of metal articles to the 4, then moved on to the leather ones. When Brandy was able comfortably work 3 leather articles we finally mixed leather and metal together but still keeping number of articles at 3. She seems to have no problem what so ever with this setup so hopefully we will add two more articles on Monday. On the not so good side, it requires almost no effort on my part and no pressure on me to practice more, so we only do one scent discrimination session on most days, except the week when we worked metal and leather articles separately. Today I managed to squeeze two sessions in - morning and evening, I sure hope this will not come back and bite us in the butt.
I think the biggest problem with scent discrimination I have is keeping my hands free of other smells. In the morning I smell like lotions, soaps and perfumes as I am getting ready for work. I cant do articles before my shower as there nobody who could scent them for me as everyone else is asleep. In the evening I smell like food and dish wash soap. For Christmas my kids got me a very nice lotion, but as promised on the tube the smell stays for 24 hours, no kidding!! I find myself constantly struggling with keeping my hands "naturally scented". Few times it happened that as I was ready to do articles one of the kids would come to me asking to peel the orange, of course I would help and then realize with horror that now my hands smell like an orange and that smell will not go away anytime before bedtime:-)
Ok, I think this is it for now.
Yesterday we got together at Applewoods for a holidays photo shoot, here are few pictures.
This is the new kid on the block, his name is Shamu. I will try to talk about him in a separate post.
The quick summary of events from where we left off.
We were all excited to go to the terrier specialty in October and finish our CD, but unfortunately Brandy decided that she'll get into season 2 or 3 months early this year and it happened just 3 days before the specialty. So to our HUGE disappointment we had to miss it. We did get our CD, however, a month later in Salisbury MD on November 13th with the first place and the score of 195.5. We also go our insurance leg the following day with the first place and the score of 196.5. I was very very proud of Brandy. I think she gave me that day all she had, this was by far our best run. We also got a lot of compliments from bunch of people including the judge. It was definitely a lot of fun!.
On Nov 1st we also started working in Utility class. This proved to be pretty challenging as now we have to work on our Open and Utility exercises. We put the drop on recall on hold until CD is done, to prevent interfering with the novice recall so we really had to start working on it. Plus all other Open exercises we had a pretty good handle on fell through the cracks starting the end of the July as we were preparing to show in Novice so we had to put it all back together. Not to mention that days had become very short and cold, I need to get up no later that 5:30 am so I have a chance to work the dogs, making things very difficult for me. Getting up at 5:30 and dragging myself out in the cold and total darkness is quite depressing and challenging, it;s so much nicer to stay in my cosy bed until the daylight comes.
Lukily for us, I had some time off I could take between Christmas and New Year so we had chance to work during daylight and finally get to some jumping. We can't really do any jumping in the dark as I worried that Brandy will hurt herself, so, usually, we have to save jumping for the weekend.
On Utility front Brandy turned out to be some kind of genious of scent discrimination, or so I was told. After about two weeks of working with two metal articles and what seems being totally stuck without any progress, something suddenly clicked in her head and she just got it! Starting that moment she was prgressing pretty quickly. We gradually increased number of metal articles to the 4, then moved on to the leather ones. When Brandy was able comfortably work 3 leather articles we finally mixed leather and metal together but still keeping number of articles at 3. She seems to have no problem what so ever with this setup so hopefully we will add two more articles on Monday. On the not so good side, it requires almost no effort on my part and no pressure on me to practice more, so we only do one scent discrimination session on most days, except the week when we worked metal and leather articles separately. Today I managed to squeeze two sessions in - morning and evening, I sure hope this will not come back and bite us in the butt.
I think the biggest problem with scent discrimination I have is keeping my hands free of other smells. In the morning I smell like lotions, soaps and perfumes as I am getting ready for work. I cant do articles before my shower as there nobody who could scent them for me as everyone else is asleep. In the evening I smell like food and dish wash soap. For Christmas my kids got me a very nice lotion, but as promised on the tube the smell stays for 24 hours, no kidding!! I find myself constantly struggling with keeping my hands "naturally scented". Few times it happened that as I was ready to do articles one of the kids would come to me asking to peel the orange, of course I would help and then realize with horror that now my hands smell like an orange and that smell will not go away anytime before bedtime:-)
Ok, I think this is it for now.
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