Outing and Practice

This morning we went on a nice walk at Willard's woods.  It started out a little bit stressful--they've put up new signs that the narrow path to the park (maybe 50m long) is a leash zone.  I think it's a good idea, as it keeps unleashed dogs out of the street, but it was a little hectic for us.  There was one dog who started barking at Jonah as soon as he saw us, and that dog's owner was trying to bag some poop and didn't have a good hold on her dog.  So, there wasn't much room to go around the dog and Jonah was jazzed up.  There was some barking but it wasn't terrible.  Then two more dogs came down the trail.  We sat Jonah off to the side but he was so brimming with energy that he still barked and had trouble focusing on me.  Oh well.  Then we got to the field, let him free, and he had a grand old time.  He met a nice flat-coated retriever and they instantly hit it off, running all around the field and getting so tired that they decided to go to the stream, which now has ice in it.  Then we had two wet and cold dogs.  Silly.  Luckily Jonah didn't go in very far.  Anyway, on our way out we passed a dog and Jonah was perfect.  Apparently he just had to get the jitters out.

Then, this afternoon we did another cheese worth of agility.  The setup currently looks like this:

I realize it looks like there's a whole lot of empty space out there, which there is, but remember we have lots of trees to work around, and now big piles of leaves, too :).  

Anyway, I worked a bunch with the two jumps in the middle, coming at them from all different angles and doing 180s and threadles.  I'm still not very smooth with my threadle handling sometimes, but the 180s were great.  He wasn't jumping wide, and we could do 1 sided, landing side FC and landing side BC with no trouble.  It was good practice for both of us, and I worked on really running both before and after, so he could get repetitions with collection and then extension.  

The other project of the day was the weaves.  I thought it was a different look than he'd ever seen, but it didn't cause him much trouble.  He did miss the entry on the second half once going 'up' on the map, but otherwise he was great.  After our session I moved the 2 sets to a 90 degree angle so we'll try that soon.  

His table and contacts were all great today.  He was actually close to flying off the teeter once he was running it so fast.  Hopefully that doesn't become a problem, but considering how at our last USDAA trial he was afraid to tip it at a walk, I'm hoping we'll have a happy medium.  His teeter looked good at class and run-thrus last week.

We have a private session tomorrow, group lesson Thursday and then a trial Saturday.  Fun week!

Also the great horned owls are hoo hoo-ing right now.  One is in our yard and the other must be down the street, but they're having a good conversation.  Awesome.