How to tell . . .

. . . you might not be having the best agility weekend of your life:

You get up at 3 a.m. to go potty, look out the window and it’s snowing so hard you can’t see past the fence.

You scramble frantically to leave earlier than you had planned because the state patrol road report is saying Interstate 80 is “100% snow covered.” When you get there, it is totally clear. (This tends to skew my confidence in the state patrol’s powers of observation.)

When you pull into the paved parking lot at the trial site, it is full. You have to park in “the field.”

There are 3-4 inches of heavy wet snow in “the field.”

The van ahead of you gets stuck.

The car behind you gets stuck.

You get safely into a parking spot and immediately start worrying how in the world you're going to get out.

While tugging with your dog before your first run, he snap-rolls the leash and smashes your right hand into your left hand.

You look down at your right hand and realize a finger is bleeding. Because it smashed into your wedding ring and split the skin at the base of the fingernail. The timer says “GO!”

You release your dog and he immediately takes an off-course tunnel.

While standing in line for lunch, your friend gets the last bowl of potato soup. And the last Diet Coke. (Okay, Tammy, maybe we should eat lunch BEFORE 2 p.m. next time to prevent this from happening again.)

You have your dog totally psyched and focused, ready to go, and the dog who runs ahead of you demolishes half the course.

The dog crated next to you barks constantly. While his owner sits there and ignores it.

Your dog takes 27 off-course tunnels in one run.

You experiment with creative combinations of four-letter words aimed at the barking dog next to you when its owner walks away.

You get out of the parking lot without getting stuck but there were several yeeee-haaaaaw moments and now your vehicle is coated with mud from the roof down.

Halfway through Day Two of listening to your neighbor’s dog barking non-stop, you start entertaining fantasies about borrowing your husband’s cattle prod.

You can’t decide whether to use it on the dog first or the owner.

You finally get a great handling strategy to keep your dog out of off-course tunnels and he forgets how to stick his contacts, rendering your strategy useless as he blasts past you into the 58th off-course tunnel of the weekend.

This is why . . .

. . . I'm late for things sometimes.

I ran into a little road block on the way home from work yesterday. (Apologies for pic quality. They were shot through the windshield. Which thankfully is much cleaner than the rest of R2.)

Bad news: the cows are out.
Good news: they aren't our cows.
So I called the Farmer.
His brother-in-law is a herdsman for Amana Farms.
For once, loose cows were someone else's problem.

Option A: back up 1 mile, turn around and drive 7 miles out of the way to get home via the highway.
Option B: drive through 100+ head of cows and calves to get to home 2 miles away.

I chose Option B.
I'd drive really slow and the cows would get out of my way, right?

I wondered what my insurance agent would say if I filed a claim for having my van head-butted by a mama cow? Can't be worse than filing a claim for having an outside mirror knocked off by a raccoon falling out of the rafters.

Good news: I got through the herd w/o a scratch.
Bad news: They all started following me down the road. I was the Pied Piper of Homestead.

Cows like following motorized vehicles. Food often flies out of them. Holy crap. If I showed up at home with 100 cows that weren't ours, I was pretty sure that would be a problem.

I cleared the herd and floored R2. Poor cows. They got left in the dust. So sad.

I took a different route to work this morning.

A funny horoscope

I'm getting caught up on reading the stack of daily Des Moines Registers that accumulate on my desk. Here's my horoscope from last Friday, the day Phoenix was being such a wonderful boy at the obedience trial:

Virgo (Aug. 23 - Sept. 22): Your poetic sign mate said it best, "Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There is a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen

Really, really like that.

So how'd you do it?

A couple of people asked me that after Phoenix had a very happy return to the obedience rings last weekend after the previous year was marked by repeated crash and burns.

I wish I could tell you! First of all, I’m not under any illusion that all our issues are resolved and we’ll have nothing but blue skies from here on. We still have a lot of things that need work and a lot of ways we can improve. Plus I know how easily things “break” even though you’d swear your dog knew a particular skill inside and out.

But here are the big changes I made, starting last September. Most of the changes had more to do with improving our relationship and less to do with training technical skills. This came after a summer spent trying to do just the opposite, which clearly got us nowhere good.

• I quit being the obedience Nazi. I quit getting on my dog’s case for every little imperfection and nagging him about every error. My quest for a brilliant obedience partner was creating one who saw no point in trying because he was never good enough.

• This didn’t mean letting him “get away” with things. If he made a mistake in training, yippee! We repeated the part of the exercise that was giving him trouble and I helped him be right by making it easier in some way. Once he could do it with just a little help, then I gave him a little less help and eventually, he was doing it right without any help.

• I also had to decide if the mistake was the result of A) being distracted/lazy/lack of effort/boredom B) confusion or C) fear/worry/anxiety. Just following an error with a "correction" wasn't the solution many trainers believe it is.

• Sometimes there is a cookie and sometimes there isn’t. Food is still part of our training. So are toys. But it’s not all about the food or the toys. It’s about me. And the work. And having fun with me and the work. And the work being fun. How’s that for a perfectly foggy explanation?

• Cleaned up my criteria for what gets cookies and what doesn’t. Cut back on my Pez-dispenser habits. Worked harder on play and interaction that didn’t depend on cookies.

• I accepted Phoenix for who he is. This might sound weird but I wanted so badly for him to love obedience the way Connor and Jamie loved it that I was constantly comparing him to them. He’ll never work like them. He’s already much better at several skills than either of them ever were. He’s also much worse at several skills than either of them ever were (but getting better!). Bottom line, he’ll never be exactly like them and I don’t want him to be.

• Changed my warm up to reflect what he needs to relax in a show environment vs. “polishing” him up for a perfect ring performance. If he isn’t in a good place mentally, all the last minute heeling and fronts drilling aren’t going to do a damn bit of good. At Des Moines, we did tricks and a little heeling and some tugging. Went in the ring with a happy dog. Happy things happened.

• If I don’t feel like training, we don’t train. Okay, this doesn’t happen very often but it DOES happen and before, I would have “pushed through it” and trained anyway because I felt like I had to. Any time I work with Phoenix, I have to be there for him 110 percent. Since that’s what I want back from him, it’s not fair for me to drag my tired, cranky, distracted self to the training building and expect him to be brilliant. Sometimes it’s okay to take a night off and eat popcorn in front of the TV.

• I made sure we had multiple days off during the week with no training. He doesn't need to be worked very single day.

• We play a lot when we train. Sometimes it’s as a reward for good effort (at least I think it is, I don’t really know if Phoenix sees it that way or not) and sometimes it’s just because I like to play with my dog.

• Relaxed about stuff instead of trying to “fix” everything by the next weekend or the next trial or whatever. It will take as long as it takes and that's that.

Weekend video

Here are our runs from the Cyclone Country Kennel Club trial Feb. 17. Phoenix is a work in progress but this is a 180 degree improvement from last fall.

If you turn up the volume, you can hear it was a noisy trial site (plus a funny ringside conversation at the start of our Open run). They were judging specialties in the rings nearby and the bursts of applause occasionally sync with Phoenix completing an exercise, which was kinda cool. Plus I was super happy the ones that occurred in the middle of an exercise didn't derail his brain - another indicator he was in a good place mentally and thinking about his job and not looking for excuses to shut down.

Things I really liked about these runs: happy bounces/willingness to bounce, hard nose touches, play between exercises, wagging tail and good focus on heeling, brisk responses, confident signals, NO BLOODY WALK-INS (gee, that’s a biggie, can ya tell?) and a fair level of technical accuracy.

Things that need work: MY heeling skills, speed transitions (esp. normal-slow-normal), about turns, speed on finishes (he’s gone from slow and crooked to slow and straight, at least we're moving in the right direction), accuracy of his get-in (left) finish, confidence about go-out spot (first go is a little wobbly, second one is much better), more play between exercises and speed on any and all returns/retrieves. Plus probably a dozen other things but ya can’t fix everything at once.

And there are still some obvious stress signals: yawns, lip licking and ears back. But they weren’t a constant, permanent condition like last fall and he was willing to keep working. I'm hoping they will fade as both of us gain more confidence together. I am so proud of my Skinny Little Dog.

A day of firsts

Yesterday was the first time Phoenix and I had been back in the AKC obedience rings since last September. I was cautiously optimistic that our teamwork was in better order and that Phoenix had finally beaten some new concepts into my brain.

Our first class was Open. He was a rock star. He bounced. He pranced. He bit my sleeve between exercises. He worked his fronts. He worked his finishes. He looked at me like, "Seriously, Mom? Why did we ever get so uptight about this? It's kinda fun." I rode a wave of euphoria through the whole class.

While I'm no longer worried about Phoenix breaking his group stays, they still make me uncomfortable and I'd be doing a major happy dance if the AKC ever got rid of them. I wasn't too excited that the dog on one side of us was a dog from my club that Phoenix has an unfortunate "history" with — it was one of those surprise, dog-in-your-face incidents that didn't end well. We've done group stays next to this dog since then with no ill effects so I figured it was no big deal. The dog isn't aggressive, just makes some bad social decisions.

So I nearly had a stroke when we were leaving the ring and that dog stood up and started walking toward Phoenix. The judge was totally on the ball and quickly snagged the offender's collar while Phoenix held his sit, displaying one gleaming canine tooth. No harm, no foul and of all the incredible things that happened yesterday, I think I'm proudest of Phoenix for that simple decision to do his job. I don't think that dog had any evil intentions but when a dog breaks and starts wandering around the lineup, anything can happen.

There were several run-offs and when we went back into the ring for ribbons, winning Open was the last thing on my mind. I'd already achieved one of my goals for the day - not being an uptight stressball who telegraphed tension and worry to her dog. When the judge called our number for first, you could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather. Phoenix liked all the clapping and tried eating his ribbons.

By the time we went into Utility five hours later (yeah, it was a loooong day), all I wanted was to do keep the same "having fun with my dog" mindset that carried us through Open. Our warm up was a little heeling and a lot of silly tricks. We went into the ring with our brains in the right place.

It was tremendously rewarding to see Phoenix working and trying in Utility - something that was clearly missing from our ring skills last fall. Back then, if he ran into a problem, he just quit. Although he had a few bobbles (good lord, the handler needs to brush up on HER heeling skills), he did a nice, steady job. Not quite as confident as Open but a total 180 degree improvement over last fall.

The last exercise was articles, one of his favorite things. It was fun to see him light up when I sent him after his "sniffers." OMG, my dog was having fun! I was waiting for choirs of angels to break into the Hallelujah Chorus.

Again, when the class ended there were run-offs. This time we got called! It was a three-way run-off for first place. We came in second and I was ecstatic. (Note to self: work driving into ring gates with the public sitting on the other side. Hey training buddies, you guys get to mimic the "public." I'd better be careful what I ask for.)

When it was all said and done, Phoenix got an Open first, his first OTCh. points, his first UDX leg, had tied for first in Utility and to put the icing on the cake, got his first High Combined.

But best of all, for the first time in a long time, we had fun in the obedience ring together.

Video soon. Promise. Spent the day with my mom and my aunt. Spent the evening with the Farmer, birthday supper and losing money at a local casino. Now am going to spend time with my pillow.

A day in the life

I stole this idea from stuff I'm seeing on Facebook, which is pretty darn funny. Welcome to my world.

What I went to college for

What my mother thinks I do

What my mother is worried I will do

What my husband thinks I do

What I'd really like to do

What I try really hard not to do

What customers think I do

What deadlines make me do

What I think I do

What I really do