It might seem like Pepper is dominating right now, but that's just because she is new and most of the annoying things Auggie is doing relate to her anyway. HOWEVER... we are entered in our very first herding trial soon - we're going to take a shot at herding at Sheltie Nationals 2011!
I took some photos while out at his breeder's house while she was working him, but they are not very good - the sun was setting by the time we got to work so I didn't have much light to take good action photos. The sheep are in focus more than Auggie.
And here is a link to a short video my mom took: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5e64IBavZc
Here is video of our runs! Apologies they are not that great, my mom was camerawoman again and until I can train her to record better, this is what we get!
Pretty happy with our runs overall even though we only Q'd 2/4. His times (YPS) were good each run including the NQ runs. Not where I really want them and definitely not as fast as he can be, but it's a definite improvement over a year ago.
His jumping was terrible in our first run but it started to improve through the next three runs. I can't say I'm surprised since we haven't been able to do hardly any practice. I got in a few days worth between finding out we were going to be in the trial and then getting just enough slick snow on the ground that he actually slipped and faceplanted - hard - Monday. Tuesday I took him to the chiropractor and he was out of alignment in his shoulder, elbow, and wrist, which he isn't usually... and she said even his jaw was a little out of alignment. So no more practice for us after that because there was just enough snow on the ground to make it slick and I wasn't going to risk him getting hurt. Also no more trials until Louisville in March so hopefully we'll get enough of a thaw I can work with him and improve his jumping plenty before then. Also, I don't own a triple, and I need one. The triple in the standard run Sunday I knew was going to be a problem for him based on the angle AND the fact that the a-frame was right there like "hellooo, come run up me!!" and it turned out to be a problem for both his brother AND his dad too, so I'm not really surprised by that one - but the triple on Saturday shouldn't really have happened, and if I owned one and we were able to practice with it, I would have had a Q that day. But oh well. I can't do anything about it now except to build myself a triple and get to work.
I was sort of surprised Sunday when he decided to off-course to the a-frame instead of taking the dog walk. He used to love the a-frame, but we had an issue one time where a judge, wearing clothing that AKC highly recommends they do not wear, was standing RIGHT in his way by the a-frame and he refused it... and then developed buggies with the a-frame and refused it for multiple trials after that. So I was actually kind of glad to see him off-course to it. I know that sounds weird, but it's the truth. I started laughing and telling him he was so bad, and when I brought him back and he tried to off-course it again I wanted to crack up hysterically. It was just so funny to me. And I know there are people out there who DIE when that stuff happens and get SOOOO mad at their dogs, and there I was going "You are SO bad, you bratface, bad bad bad," and laughing. I know a lot of people were laughing at me but I'm sure there were people who were horrified that I was so amused by it all.
But the truth of it is that every time he does something like that - or like he did in Glen Carbon where he blew his down contact on the dog walk - I can't do anything but laugh, because it symbolizes a return to the dog he used to be. As long as he is running with joy, I can't be angry. We've been through too much and worked too hard to get him to start returning to that joyful dog that every sign I get that he is developing into the dog I want him to be, even if it's "bad," even if it costs us Q's, is a reason for ME to be joyful too, ribbons be damned.
And even if it takes us five years to snag the QQ's we need for a PAX - or even if we never manage it - if I can't get us there with smiles on our faces and joy in our hearts, then it's just not worth it.
For Christmas, I ordered Auggie some new puzzle toys off Amazon. I racked up a few Amazon gift cards using Swagbucks so it was pretty cheap to order a handful for him. Tonight I gave Auggie his dinner in the Kyjen Paw Hide toy. Below is a video of how he did with it, sped up. I thought this might help since people are always asking about puzzle toys and treat dispensing toys and stuff. My main comments are in the video description. It took him ten minutes, including the times he stopped and stared at me like "helloooooo, I'm supposed to be getting DINNER here..." and his half a minute barking fit (Auggie temper tantrum - I'm surprised it only lasted 30 seconds, but I think he was hungry.)
I'm not over the moon about it, but it only really cost me $5 out of pocket, so it's not a huge loss if it doesn't work out well. I might be able to sell it to some other agility people with border collies if I continue to be lukewarm about it. I also bought him the treat wheel and I'm thinking I will like that one more. I wish the cups weren't so darn flimsy though, they are the same in the treat wheel. There's no way I can give him this and then go cook dinner, because I know he'd start chewing on the cups and would break them, and he's not even a "chewer" the way some dogs are. The tug-a-jug and other puzzle toys I have, I feel confident in giving those to him and walking away... this one, nope. Kind of a bummer since I was hoping to get some more stuff to keep him occupied and leaving me alone. But at least it only cost me $5. I didn't buy the star spinner which is the one that doesn't have cups... I sort of wish I had to see if my opinion would improve without the flimsy cup aspect.
I decided a while back that I might teach Auggie to speak. Part of me thought this was a terrible idea, for once I taught the dog to bark on cue, he might NEVER STOP. Another part of me thought, because he barks when he's being bratty and playing, if I could get him to bark on command, I could also basically get him to be bratty on command. (I can hear you out there asking, but WHY would you want your dog to be bratty on command?? Well, the answer is because I'm crazy of course.)
Either way, I decided to just go ahead and do it. Tonight I sat down with the clicker, the dog, the big bucket of treats, and a plan... click any vocalization, no matter how quiet, that might be considered a bark. Whining, whimpering, grunting, wookie-noises, or various other attempts at talking were not to count... only what you might call a bark.
What happened next was so hilarious I had to actually stop and get out the video camera to record it and show people how absolutely ridiculous my dog is. So watch the video... and enjoy.
I haven't totally abandoned all thought of the Natural Jumping program, but I got both the beginning and advanced jumping DVD's by Susan Salo for Christmas. So right now I'm learning another method and exploring it. So far I can say that the Natural Jumping program is a very clear regiment of "do this on this day; do this on that day," and so on and so forth. Susan Salo gives you the tools for your toolbox and you are sort of left to decide which tool you should use when. The disadvantage of this is that somebody who doesn't know (like me) could easily end up using the screwdriver when they should still be drilling holes. Obviously there are probably people who would prefer just being given the tools and left to their own devices; personally I liked being able to look at the book and know exactly what to work on with my dog and which point. My plan is to actually try and write up a schedule for myself to try to keep us on track.
Today is the first day I have begun to put into practice training with Susan Salo's methods (not counting the set-point exercises I've been doing since last week and do not have video of.) Today I set up a straight line equal distance grid and worked Auggie through it a few times. It consists of five jumps, set 5' apart, with the bars at 8". It went... well... it went I guess. Here's video:
Watching these, I think I'm setting him up way too close to the jump. He's supposed to take one step and then jump... I'm setting him up so close that he's basically popping out of his sit and over the jump. Ouch. So that is my fault. I'm pretty sure his one-stride on the second and third runs there is a result of that. Not really sure what happened towards the end there where he strides on jump three.
I took a LOT of notes while watching the Beginning Jumping DVD and I need to go back to them to remind myself about troubleshooting and see what I might do here. I think the first thing to do is to drop the bars down to 4" and work him for a few days at that height... see how he reacts. Obviously Auggie has major jumping problems and it's going to take a ton of work to help him one way or another.
I will say that Auggie was REALLY EXCITED to see a jump chute set up again. He kept blowing his sit-stays because he was so super excited to get through these. I don't know. It's weird. His confidence isn't 100% even in the jump chutes but he seems to LOVE jumping. My mom would tell me about times last year when he would go to the back of the yard where I set up the jump chutes and he'd pace around crying and whining at her, because he wanted her to set up the chute so he could go work it.
I was poking around on YouTube and stumbled across this video again, and I thought I should share it.
This video makes me cry every time I watch it. Sort of ridiculously so, but I am a big baby who sometimes cries just watching commercials on TV, so it's okay. Funny enough, about an hour ago I was cleaning up the house because family was due to come over. I moved Auggie's ribbon displays into my bedroom while I cleaned the office (right now they are all framed but just sitting on the floor) and then wasn't sure if I should move them back into the office. In the office, they're sitting out in plain sight, and I thought about how some of my family might make remarks about competing with my dog. I sort of didn't want to deal with the snide comments about what kind of person I must be since we compete and get ribbons and toy prizes and Q's and titles. And I thought to myself, I could just tell them, "It doesn't really matter. Even if we had no ribbons, he would still be Auggie. And at the end of his life I will not think 'If only we had gotten a few more ribbons!'" I'm sure they would smirk and snidely say "oh of COURSE." And I could just smile knowingly, because they will never realize the real reward of competing with my dog is not the ribbons we come away with... it's just that feeling of working with him.
We returned to agility practice this week, doing some indoor work on Tuesday. I do need to get him conditioned to get back into it, since our first trial is March 17th, but I mostly just took the opportunity to play with my dog. And we played and played and played. I did work on a few things, like calling him into or pushing him into a tunnel opening that was "wrong" - that is, not directly facing him - but mostly, the idea was to just have some fun. And boy was it fun. Even more fun was how FAST Auggie was, and how much delight I felt because of how much fun HE was having. It's not fun at all when he's not having fun, after all. I loved it. And I love the game. Not because of the ribbons... but because we get to play the game together.
Week 10 is the beginning of the Problem Solving stage of the jumping program. This stage introduces one stride lengths, bounce distances, long and short strides, and higher verticals and bigger oxers throughout the different weeks. This is where a dog really starts to learn to look ahead and THINK about what is ahead of him rather than just rely on muscle memory to jump the same way every time. During the problem solving weeks, the setup changes each lesson whereas previously all three lessons in a week were the same. However, Clothier doesn't want you to move on until a dog has basically mastered each lesson. Some dogs might need additional practice rather than just one day/series of six jumps to master a lesson. Auggie needed more practice on lesson 3 in this series... unfortunately, I forgot and moved on to week 11 without really allowing him to master that lesson.
This video shows lesson one, lesson two, and lesson three of week 10. The patterns are different every day and can be found in the book. Week 10 is about teaching one stride lengths, which for Auggie is 45 inches. You'll see there are still oxers and verticals mixed in, and that jump distances change between two stride lengths and one stride lengths.
As you can see, day three (I should have changed my terminology to lesson three - sorry) is a hot mess more than once. The good news is that Auggie seems to be getting a real kick out of the jumping program anyway, even though the distances between jumps keep changing! And having fun is what it's all about.
So week 9 is five oxers. No more single bar jumps... every jump in the chute is an oxer.
He does really well navigating smoothly over all five oxers, getting a nice arc over them. Unfortunately he also keeps up with that pattern of stutter-stepping the last jump a majority of the time. Still not sure why he does that. I experimented some with putting a target after the last jump, hoping it might drive him over the jump and remove that stutter-step... didn't work. So I'm still not sure on the "why" of how he reacts with that final jump.
Well, I'm cheating it. I know, I know - I have the book, I have read it, I KNOW it says not to cheat and move any faster than she recommends. And I'm cheating it anyway.
As part of our effort to start over in Preferred, I have made a return to the Clothier Natural Jumping Method. Now that I know Auggie's height (in preferred, for now, anyway) is 12, and I know that we really need to stick with that, I made a plan of how to continue. And that is to just move the bars up to 12 for the rest of the method.
I DID back up some. I went to the final week of the rhythm lessons, where you have five regular jumps, evenly spaced, and did that for two days.
So here are your videos!
He was going VERY fast, so on Jump 2 I thought I'd speed up some myself and see how much I could push his speed. Well, he got over eager and tried to beat me over that last jump, which resulted in him taking the bar down. Later on you see me pick him up and tickle him a little before carrying on. Usually I edit that stuff out but I left it in. We're training, but this is also me playing with my dog... it's a game. And he loves all of it. Just keep things fun and it will BE fun, no matter what you are training!
Day 2:
Jumps 4 and 5 are call throughs rather than run bys. On Jump 6, I cut out the less than spectacular shot of my butt running away from the camera, but I ran him through the chute going away from the camera, then turned him around at the end and ran him back up. He was nice and smooth, both ways!
For week 8, we move up to four oxers. The pattern is vertical, oxer, oxer, oxer, oxer. Jump heights are still set at 10 inches and distances are still 90 inches for Auggie's two-stride length per the calculations in the book.
He learns a lot faster in this video than he has in previous weeks. By the last jump in day 1 he's running smooth and fast - save the last jump, which he still stuttersteps up to. On day 2 he drops a few bars, but notably, during jump 5 he actually doesn't stutterstep up to the last jump! I have no idea what the difference is, because he goes back to doing it in the next jump and during all of day 3. WEIRD DOG. Hopefully time will even out the issue here. I'm the kind of person who likes to know the "why" behind stuff though so I'd really like to know WHY he is still stutterstepping the final jump and only the final jump. I may never know, but I would LIKE to know, haha.
Forgive my baby talk. We were having a really good time outside today, just hangin' out, bonding... enjoying my day off together. (And DANGIT I'm sunburned. X_X)
This is the sheep. It was $5. It's about the same size as Auggie.
Hmmm...
Auggie isn't really impressed by it now. When I first brought it home I set it outside his crate and he just sat there, staring at it until I finally gave in and opened the crate to let him out.
Okay now he's laughing at me.
And the rest of the pics from today (not all that exciting): BLEEEARGH
Week 7 is a series of five jumps with three oxers. The pattern is vertical, oxer, oxer, vertical, oxer.
LOTS of stutter-stepping as he tries to navigate this series. About halfway through day 2 he starts to even out as he figures out how to adjust, though during his fifth run he ends up stutterstepping WAY too close up to the bar and has to pop up over it... and if you pause it at just the right moment he's making a hilarious face as a result. Day 3 goes pretty well, but I notice that he's consistently stutterstepping up the last bar. I'm not really sure why that is - if it's a matter of him not seeing another obstacle beyond the final jump, so he makes some kind of weird adjustment for some reason? I honestly can't figure out why he would do this. It's interesting, anyway.
In week 6, you add another oxer. The pattern is jump, jump, oxer, jump, oxer. Since I had the pattern as jump, jump, oxer, jump, jump during week 5, I simple added my second oxer to the end of the chute. Hopefully that means my pattern during week 5 was correct!
Hey, check it out! My new fencing is up! Let me explain exactly what is occurring during day one - the jumps are secondary to the other lesson that is going on here. Earlier that day, I learned some bad news and ended up having an anxiety attack (in the middle of work, to boot!) I came home that evening practically in pieces, stressed out, not sure how to deal with the situation I'd been handed. I didn't think about this when we went out to do our jumps. Auggie completely and totally picked up on me being an emotional mess, and did not want to disconnect and go jump out away from me. I had to make a change in my emotional state to get him to go ahead (it helped that it was pretty funny that he pulled off the jumps like that to come back to me...) Clothier has you do two sets of three jumps with a fifteen minute break in the middle, so after the first three jumps and out break, I basically had to pull myself together and knock it off, or it was going to affect my dog and his performance. This video really shows something about the relationship we have with our dogs, and how they can pick up on things and it changes their demeanor, their performance. Imagine if this were at an agility trial and we were working on a full course instead of just through a jump chute... he would NOT have been a happy Auggie if I were trying to put any kind of distance between us!
I ran out of SD card space on day 3 again so another clip is missing. During day 2 and 3, we have what looks like a serious setback here, because Auggie's back to stutterstepping - a LOT. But at this point in my working relationship with Auggie, I know what's going on here: the rules have changed so he has to figure it out again, and when the rules change, Auggie decides it's better to resort to stutterstepping. That's how we got to this problem in the first place. I'm running with him or constantly moving in just about all of these runs because I'm watching his footing really closely. If you watch the day 2 video, you can see how his jumping changes even within the one video, within six runs. It's kind of impressive, but again, I'm really hoping this is just a part of the learning process rather than being something where he's not going to actually have confidence when it actually comes to an agility course where all you have is one shot to get it right. This is only week 6, we still have lots to learn, so no sense worrying about it yet.
(Oh yeah, and check out all my newly striped jumps in the day 3 video! I spent all Saturday afternoon with several rolls of multi-coloured tape, striping my standards and jump bars.)
Week 5 is the first week with oxers. An oxer is as wide as it is tall - in Auggie's case, since we are still using 10 inch jump heights, this means I have two 10 inch jumps that span 10 inches. The book doesn't tell you where to put the first oxer, so I guessed and put it as the third jump. All of the jumps are still spaced 90 inches apart; in this instance, jump 2 is 90 inches to the first bar for jump 3, there's the 10 inch spacing between jump 3's bars, and then from the second bar of jump 3 to jump 4 it's another 90 inches. For the oxer stage of the program, that 90 inch spacing will stay constant.
It's a bit hard for him to nagivate that oxer at first. I started putting our broad jump/spread jump word to it ("big jump") after the first crash into it and he did better after that. This might be cheating because it requires me to be there cueing him to adjust for a larger jump, so he's not really learning to look at the jump and just adjust on his own. But it makes sense for agility to me - competitors I know all use a word like "big jump" or "go big" for spread jumps, doubles, and triples to cue the dog "There's a longer than usual jump coming up - adjust!" During the second day, he crashes into the oxer the first time, but on jumps 2-6 he doesn't make the same mistake again.
I don't have day 3 videos because I screwed up with the camera. As the video says, the day went pretty much the same as the other two videos here, though.
Week 4 went pretty good! Moving the jump heights up to 10 inches didn't seem to throw Auggie off much at all, so I'm glad. All of the jumps are still set at 90 inches apart.
During day 1, I ran with him on all of the jumps. Every now and then he does knock a bar... but Clothier says not to worry about dropped bars. She says it is a natural part of the process of re-learning how to jump and that every time they knock a bar it helps them think stuff over. I'm not sure why I don't have all 6 jumps recorded - I must have had another issue with my memory card. Day 2 was REALLY windy - apologies for my camera wrist strap blowing into the shot during one jump! I was worried the wind might throw Auggie off a little, but he did fine. For day three... there is a reason I only have five jumps shown here and it's not a memory card problem. But I'll talk about the video itself first! My mom was operating the camera and she made a few observations. Auggie still stutter-steps up to the very first jump before he gets into the rhythm of the last four jumps. The first jump is the bar he usually knocks, as well - probably because of the inefficient jumping.
I tried a few other things with these jumps, including sending him ahead (wasn't sure if he'd do that, but he did!) and standing right at the end to call him through. Usually when I call him through I'm standing back several feet and sometimes even run backwards as he approaches to build up his drive, so that was a little different for him - but he's pretty much unphased by it, which is great! Another thing I've been noticing is that he hugs the standard pretty tight. Clothier wants the dogs to run and jump in the middle of the jump, but because Auggie has done agility training for so long he has learned how to hug the standards and try to make things a little more efficient when it comes to turning, crossing, and so on. When I run with him or am behind him, he always takes the last jump right over the middle because he's in the process of turning to me - if I'm right ahead of him, he doesn't make that change and stays to the side, hugging the standard. I'm not exactly sure if I should be concerned with this or not. My instinct is to not be worried about it...
NOW... why there are only five jumps shown in the third day. My mom was working the camera for me that day because it was raining - just a light drizzle, but still raining, so I asked her if she would come out and stand over the camera with an umbrella so my camera wouldn't get wet. Right before we did our sixth jump, it started POURING down rain. I'm standing there going "Oh holy crap - hurry Auggie, hurry, go through the jumps!" I'm flailing around with training treats in my hand, trying to get him back into the channel to run through the chute, and for a split second Auggie stands there, tries to blink the rain out of his eyes... gives me a Look, and proceeds to run back to the house - leaving me standing out in the pouring (did I mention it was COLD RAIN?!) rain, yelling "YOU GET BACK HERE YOU LITTLE BRAT AND DO THOSE JUMPS!!!" Thus, there are only five jumps in the video... because Auggie was standing up on the deck wanting to go inside and refused to come out and jump one last time.
Here, have a picture of my dog, after I came in and toweled off my hair and had to change my clothes because I was soaked through. Look how proud he is of himself. Brat brat brat BRAT! He later asked to go outside, and when I opened the door and informed him it was still raining, he proceeded to go out in the still pouring rain and prance around going "La la la, I'm playing in the rain, la la la~" BRAAAAAAT!
Oh yeah - I bought a ton of PVC and spent a good portion of Saturday afternoon in the garage, listening to it thunderstorm outside and cutting pipes down. The two jumps at the beginning are my "Junior AKC" jumps from Toys R Us, and are now four feet wide, so they match the rest of my jumps (finally!) and I am now all set to add additional bar jumps to create an oxer for the coming weeks of the jumping series. I need to break out my coloured tape and start striping stuff again! Sadly, it is quite cold again today. The beautiful spring weather has been replaced by... well, icky spring weather.
We're into week 3 now, which leaves the jump heights the same, so we're still at 8 inch jump heights.
He does VERY well the first day! Jump 5 is gorgeous! I'm starting to see real improvement. During day 2, I realized I forgot to put my memory card in, so I didn't catch every jump we did. I also decided to try running with him to see what that did... I'm running funny because I'm in my snow boots and they aren't exactly the best thing to run in, so it seemed to throw him off just slightly at the beginning. Then he kind of decided to ignore me and focus on the jump, and he did a lot better! During day 3, I started just running with him to watch his strides more than really running to run with him, so I'm getting a really good look at just how his strides are. Runs 5 and 6 are really great!
During Week 4, we will move the jump heights up. My jump cups for the two jumps I built (the final two you see in the chute) only go every two inches, so I'm going to have to move up to 10 inches instead of gradually moving to 9, then 10... I hope it's not going to throw things off too much. Next week is also the final week in our 8-week long agility classes, and I think I will stop for just a bit... give Auggie a few weeks to work on his jumping and nothing else. Once he starts to improve and the weather warms up, we'll pick up again, probably going to private lessons back out at his breeder's place! Gotta work on those contacts, too.
I meant to start last week but things kept coming up. So as of yesterday we are in week 2. Week 1 is getting dogs used to jumps/jumping multiple jumps; Clothier gives people who have dogs used to that sort of thing, IE flyball, permission to go straight to week 2. We don't do flyball but Auggie IS used to jumping a ton of jumps in a row, so I went ahead and skipped to week 2.
Please forgive my very ghetto jump chute... I am in the process of trying to decide on some kind of fencing to build the other side, and until then I'm using my two ex-pens and the plastic playpen I've had since Auggie was a wee puppy. Also please forgive some of the camera angles... I know it's hard to see a lot of the jumps. I was still trying to figure out the best way to shoot the videos.
Some details: per the measurements and formula in the book, our distance between jumps is 90 inches. I had a lot of trouble deciding on what height to start working at, and ultimately I decided to start at 10 inches (Auggie normally jumps 12), and if it seemed that was too high to move down to 8. The jump heights were all set at 10 inches during day 1. During day 2, I went ahead and moved the jump heights down to 8 inches after the third jump. They will remain at 8 inches for a while.
During day one, he basically stutter-steps the ENTIRE length of the chute. I apologize for not having all six jumps filmed, but my mom was helping me and by "helping" I mean she was putting her terrible camerawork to use. Only four of the videos she shot were any good, so those are the four jumps I show. By the sixth jump on day 2, he actually appears to run the length between the jumps (it's supposed to be two stride lengths) instead of stutter-stepping the entire length between jumps. He's still not taking normal stride-lengths; he still stutter-stepped just about the whole length of the chute. But he is smoothing out a little. Day 3 gives us some better results and he really begins to smooth out more. There were multiple times that I could count the two strides between jumps. Day three was encouraging to start seeing progress already!
Wait a second!! Are you SURE you saw that right?? Maybe you should look closer.
I am now the proud owner of Sentinel's The Flash NAJ CGC. That's right... we got our novice jumpers title this weekend!! And all three of his qualifying scores - we got running 16! Snazzy!
Today's runs:
Standard run! He got buggy on the table and that's what screwed us, but J is almost positive he just didn't "see" the table as a table. She thinks he saw it like a jump, since it's so thin and the walls around it are plain white, not to mention the top is pale purple. So we got 1 table fault (two points) and a refusal for that, but it was the time more than anything else that really put us over. I then failed to pull him in enough to get him a straight shot into the tunnel, so he didn't go into that right away - another refusal! Also, notice that he doesn't come OUT of the tunnel. I notice he's not coming, I can't see the tunnel moving - where is Auggie? I lean over and look into the tunnel... and he's standing there at the bend, nose to the ground, sniffing something interesting! He sees me, goes "Oh - HI!" and comes running out. What a goofball! Regardless of the NQ, I watched this a billion times because of how wonderful his weaves are!
JWW - the run that got us our title!
Would have been clean, but he changed my plan on me! I was going to front cross before that blue tunnel, but when he spotted the tunnel he suddenly sped up so I couldn't get in front. I KNEW he would hate me trying to rear cross him into the tunnel, and sure enough, when he got to the tunnel entrance and I started to try and cross, he suddenly hit the brakes. Refusal! The time it took for me to back him up and put him into the tunnel put us over time. You can't see them as well here, but he did flawless weaves again here... so beautiful. Anyway, I came around that last jump and everybody was clapping and going "THAT WAS GREAT!" and the VMO says to me "That was a Q!!" and my mom goes "YOU DID IT" and J goes "YOU DID IT!" And I say, because I saw the time on the clock as I picked Auggie up at the exit, "But we went over time." "It's okay," J says. "You're allowed time faults in Novice." I stare at her. "You get a point off for every second over time, but you weren't over by that much, even with the refusal. You did it." I stare. "YOU DID IT." "Wh...??"
Seriously... it didn't sink in. It didn't sink in until I looked at the scores posted and saw, yes, he really did Q. And then I stammered out to the trial secretary that we get a new title ribbon. And even now... we're in Open. My dog can run in Open.
His prize, a "Q" cookie for qualifying, and his 1st place & qualifying score ribbons. These are for JWW - no Q in standard (again!) Not really his fault, though!
I couldn't get him to relax enough to measure under 14 inches - he was 14 3/8ths (an improvement from 15.5 like he measured last trial!) So we ran 16 instead of 12 again. He didn't make it all the way over the broad jump, I'm not sure if he misjudged the length of the jump or if I just didn't give him enough "push" to get him over it. But still... no dropped bars, not a single one, and I JUST managed to call him off an off-course up the a-frame (holy crap did I just!!) Besides his landing on the final section of the broad jump, it was a great run. Not his fastest - we are going to have to retrain contact obstacles, I think - but accuracy > speed, my friends.
JWW was beautiful, even though he missed his first attempt at entry on the weave poles (allowed in novice.) 100 points, and the time was... 39.76 or something? I wrote it down, I do not remember it off the top of my head.
Here's the video of our Standard run - apologies for my annoying yapping of "AUGGIE AUGGIE HERE HERE AUGGIE HERE!"
Couldn't be happier, particularly because after they measured him over 14 I honestly was ready to just write the entire day off as a wash. I figured we would totally blow it, because it was indoors and he was in the "wrong" height class... and he had to go and prove me wrong.
When I left the standard ring, the first thing I heard was "That dog is going to be AWESOME."
Everything was going dandy. I gave Auggie to my mom to have him measured by the judge while I walked the standard course. Then I walked JWW. After that, Mom came out looking kind of sour. "I guess I don't know the 'trick' to make him shorter," she says. "He's 15." Auggie's breeder, J, and I stare at each other blankly for a minute. My dog is not fifteen inches at the withers. He is 13 and a half! "Wait... what?" I said. There was much flabbergasting back and forth, and finally the judge appears and confirms that yes, my dog has to run at the 16 inch jump height. Again, J and I stare at each other. I go to the practice jump to make sure he can handle it, and he does okay. J helps me out and tells me what to change up now that he's running at a much higher jump height than we've EVER done before.
Okay. No big deal. It's fine. It's fine. I'm not freaking out. I just think I'm going to puke. Everywhere.
So we run standard. It's going REALLY really well. He gets on the table, I put him in a down, and he holds there. Then I call him off and to the teeter - and suddenly I'm still standing by the table and he's already on the teeter! I remember thinking I was going to throw up all over that teeter, panicking, thinking he was going to take off that teeter and start creating his own course. I caught up with him, but not in time - he hopped off the end of the teeter before it even hit the ground. Automatically eliminated from qualifying at that point. I fumbled a bit after that and missed getting him into the tunnel, which would have been -5 points but would still have had us qualify. It was just my bad, letting him get away from me on that teeter, that screwed us out of a Q.
REGARDLESS... it was beautiful. It was awesome. It was wonderful. I came out of the ring and wanted to cry, I was so proud and so happy. My Auggie did it. I couldn't stop telling him what a good boy he was, I was just SO DAMN PROUD.
For Jumpers with Weaves... it was great for a first run! It was a clean run, no off courses, no touched bars, he did the weaves wonderfully!
I don't have video for my standard run, but I do have it for JWW. (No sound because the wind was awful!)
Our JWW time was 37.79 seconds, and...
First place & qualifying score ribbon, and the toy he won as a prize!
It was amazing. Afterwards, everybody kept congratulating me and going "Did I hear right that this is your first run?? You did SO WELL!!" I didn't do anything. Auggie did it all. That's my Awesome Auggie.
....and now we have to do it all over again tomorrow!
