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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