ok, so apparently you dont get an update from last week. i DID find out that berlin, ironically, has to jump 26!!!! not 24 in obedience!

berlins in heat, so after attempting agility this week (and her trying to rub the sexy pants off on the weave poles) and us barely making it through the masters level-based jumpers course, im about ready to rip her uterus out on the kitchen table, so i just put rah in her obedience class on thursday and i will put her back in when she's NOT BLEEDING FROM THE V-PIPE.
anyway, berlin could barely weave. she was more interested in rubbing herself on the poles. it was gross. rah was ... rah. fast, about half accuracy and half blazing speed, occasionally overlapping like a venn diagram.

the jumpers course was fun. rah rocked it. like, rocked it - of course, to get him to collect himself i just stand there and wait while he scrambles like scooby doo (i hear the scramble feet sound from the cartoon in my head when he does this) , but he does it and we are super... berlin was jumping in sexy pants (all i hear is ray j's song "sexy can i?") and did most of the jumpers course til the LAST JUMP???? booooooo

obedience - open, worked broad jump and we're going to change both my footwork for the turn - pivoting on the left foot BACK instead of forward on the right foot. and also going to throw the left shoulder out more powerfully on the turn to try to push him out and pull him in with the right - it was pretty drastic the sort of change it had on him immediately, and he's really working those fronts.

broad jump worked distraction work with his fronts with lydia swinging the rules around, running at him, around him, etc and he was good. on the flat worked me turning on his fronts while terry threw things (including bowls!!!!) and he had to find front. drops i worked on keeping his speed (im toying with having him back up on his drops somehow in practice with some special signal...)heeling (did we do heeling???)i cant remember.

utility -
go outs were first, out towards the other dogs working articles behind the ring gates. nice and straight, but the pressure of kathy out with her dog on leash 5 feet from me made him unwilling to go to a nice front. perfect go out second time but the jumps were set at his jump height to start at, and then the high was even lower than the bar. he wasnt paying attention and threw himself INTO the jump and broke the boards... came to front (whut?)... sent him out again quickly and back over the jump and he had no problem, came to front and we called it quits on that because he had none of his past issues of when the jumps come down or break that he wont go back over them.

articles - full of fail. lets move past that. signals werent bad - nice and crisp, still need to work on not moving his feet!!! moving stand was pretty good too - he wants to book it the minute the judge stops touching him, so we worked that.

gloves were last and i realized ive been doing poor pivots for him (well, ive known this, but didnt know what to change) so i found better footwork for them and i changed it up and it made a HUGE difference for rah!!! he did however back off a glove because a dog he hated was 1 foot behind the glove, so he refused to retrieve it, even though he marked it just fine. kathy body blocked the dog and he went out just fine.

open last night - we played some informal retrieve and broad jump games for attention then worked stations. terry thinks i should just leave rah's foot movement on my "wait" at the retrieve stations and such alone because its driving us insane more to try to fix it than to just leave it, and im inclined to agree with her. while i want a perfect score out of him, i think i may need to pick my battles. i know allowing him to continue doing it will not be good for us, but im not sure the way im trying to address it is the right way, and i cant think of any others... anyway he had some nice work on all his individual stations. heeling we had another epiphany - i was sore because some big blue dobe hurt my leg that morning, and i heeled slower - and HE CAN DO IT. so what if... I SET THE PACE FOR HEELING instead of trying to go fast because hes got super giraffe legs and i dont?

so im going to try it out. it certainly feels less frantic.