Dog Vegas-Part 2

Well there is no Dog Vegas part 2 as I didn't go. When I got up at 6.30 this morning it was raining and even Brian went and curled up on the sofa and went back to sleep so I decided not to go, after all we had two good days there, so we went back to bed!

When we got up a couple of hours later the sun was shinning, typical! So as not to waste a nice sunny bank holiday me and Conor took the dogs to the beach at Theddlethorpe again. It was a little busier than the last time I went with them but there was still loads of room for them to run free without bumping into anyone.

The dogs enjoyed a good walk and a splash in the sea for a good hour before we headed home all covered in sand. They are all now fast asleep, well and truly tired!


There are a few more beach pictures from today at the bottom of the blog.

Dog Vegas-Part 1

Yesterday and today we have been at Dog Vegas. Heidi hasn't done any agility, where it has been a while since we have been at a show she hasn't coped very well with the environment and has been getting herself worked up just walking round so Conor decided not to compete with her until she is a bit calmer.
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Brian had a really good jumping round yesterday going clear, unfortunately outside the placings though. Today he wasn't running til last thing so we didn't go until lunch time and Stella and Ambrose came to watch us. Well we didn't perform well under pressure as I got us eliminated with poor handling, Naughty mummy!
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Megan has been a little star this weekend, she is getting more and more confident and seems to enjoy watching the agility around the rings. Yesterday we met up with Reno and the two of them had a play and a good run around and they did the same today. We also saw Speedy today and she was much nicer to him than the last time she saw him and didn't try to nip him although to be honest she wasn't all that interested in him. She is coming along nicely and although she is wary of people she doesn't know I definatly think her confidence is growing.
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Tomorrow we are back at Dog Vegas for the final day but we should be back reasonably early as Brian is running first in his class which is first in his ring. I am going on my own so I am just taking Brian and Megan so that she can have another good walk aound the rings and maybe see her brothers again.

Heidi Camp

Conor has decided he wants our new training venue to be called Heidi Camp! We have spent a good few hours there today setting up the jumps and then doing training with all of the dogs. As usual Heidi was a little bit mental and very excitable but that nothing new. She did do some nice runs though, a video of her is below.

I did some training with Brian and he seemed to get worn out quickly, I then realised we have done no agility training at all since we went to EMDAC in July. Conor watched us and gave us some pointers and I realised that when I run Brian if he is being slow I tend to wait for him which makes him slower and I now know I need to run on ahead so he speeds up to catch me. As he is a slow dog anyway it's not likely that he is ever ahead of me. Anyway here is a clip of his best run although naughty boy does miss the last weave pole!

Some good news is that I have a job, it's only part time, 17.5 hours a week so I am going to look for another part time job to go with it but at least it's better than nothing! I have to go over on Tuesday to fill in paperwork and then wait for my clearence to come through so it will probably be a couple of weeks before I can start.

We are off to Dog Vegas tomorrow, yipee!! It is only about 45 mins from here so at least we wont have to be up really early. Brian only has a jumping run but Heidi has 4 although I doubt Conor will run her in them all.

Midweek Update

I have finally got Megan and Brian into an agility club and they start next Thursday which is great news. It is called Agility Buds and it is in Skellingthorpe which is about 50 mins from here. It seems a bit far but as their classess will be back to back it will be worth the drive. Megan will be first in the puppy/new starters class and Brian is in the Grades 1+ 2 class. Brian seems a lot more sprightly lately and much less like an old man so I intend to do some training for full height jumps with him to see how he gets on and if he is ok with it we may enter some grade 1 classes over the winter.

Some more good news is by tonight we should have 11 more sets of jumps as Conor has driven 4 and a half hours to Surrey today to collect some that we brought off agilitynet, we are just waiting for him to get back now although I think he will be a few more hours. I have made 4 jumps and we had 3 anyway so we now have plenty to practice jumping courses now and we have a venue to practice in too, Stella and Ambrose have kindly said we can use the garden of the house they no longer live in as it's massive. (Until they sell the house anyway!)

This weekend we are off to Dog Vegas, I had entered all 4 days but we are going to stay here tomorrow and practice with our new equipment, we are planning to go on saturday and sunday and we will see how it goes for Monday.

A Sheepdog in the family

We have been away over the last week packing up our other house amongst other things. On Saturday me and my friend Charlotte together with the help of Conor, did our first proper wedding. It went very well and the weather held off which was great but it was such hard work and felt like a really long day!

Anyway onto the dog stuff, yesterday we all headed down to Diamond Dog training in Somerset for another day with Mike Bacon. Conor and Heidi had an agility lesson with Claire which went very well but me and Meg did something very different.

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We were booked in for an introduction to herding session. There were four dogs, two collies a Kelpie and Meg and let me just say she was a little star! We started off by practicing getting the dogs to go into the down then getting them to walk forward a little and then down again. Lets just say Meg needs to work on her down! Next we were getting them to run around an imaginary pen of sheep (See above) but Meg again wasn't overly interested and I thought to myself that this was going to be a very long day!

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After a short break we headed over to the field with the sheep in, they were already in a pen but the idea was to let each dog go and to see if their natural instincts lead them to herd the sheep. We went first and Meg went up to the pen and then off she went, running around them in circles getting them to move around in the pen, she was actually doing it without any instruction. I was very surprised, as was Mike I think. The other dogs had their goes and Meg was straining on her lead the whole time to get another go and again when she was allowed to she did exactly the same again, it was brilliant to watch.
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We had another break and Mike told us about how Belgains Shepherds can go across to Europe to take part in a herding assessment and he said Meg would definitely have no problems at all in passing it as it test natural instinct rather than skill and she definitely has it. He said it was one of the best herding from a Belgain that he had seen. He also said he is trying to get the WBSDS to conduct a herding test and is trying to get it set up so if he is successful I will definitely put Meg forward for that.

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All in all it was supposed to be a fun day doing something different and it certainly was, I don't think we are likely to go out and get a flock of sheep or anything but it was great to see how much fun she was having and doing something that comes naturally to her.

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As for the other dogs there, one collie wouldn't go near the sheep, the other wasn't overly bothered by them either. The Kelpie took a while to get into it but then displayed very similar behaviour to Meg so again, the Belgians beat the Collies!

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(Look at that smile!)

Weave!!!

Our V-weaves finally arrived today so we wasted no time in putting them to good use. i set up six in the garden (the other six are in the shed) and did a little training with each dog.

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I think they will help with all of their weaving, Brian and Heidi were only ever taught with upright weaves and whilst Brian is very accurate he is very slow and whilst Heidi is fast she often misses the first or last pole.

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Brian showed promise with his speed, once he got used to them he was going through a little quicker than usual, I think once he gains his confidence with them he will be flying through. Heidi gets the idea of them anyway as Conor had done some training with her on them when they were at Mike Bacon's a few weeks back so today we did some practices of recalling her through and sending her through, 9 times out of 10 she gets it and then she just misses a pole but we will get there.

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As for Megan I am really looking forward to her learning this way from scratch, she was already getting the idea today of what she had to do with the V opened right up and she was happily going through for her toy at the end, hopefully it wont be long and she will be going through on her own. If it works, it will be nice to have a dog where weaves are not a problem for a change!!!

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I have been having some difficulty finding training classes for the dogs, the closest one I could find for Megan at the moment is Scunthorpe but it's a little far away really and is at 5pm on a Monday. I have just emailed a club though in Skellingthorpe who do puppy classes on a Tue & Thu so hopefully that will work out and our local college run Bronze Good Citizen Classes on a Monday so I am planning to take Megan, so long as we find an Agility club on a different night!

Sun, Sea & Sand

Today has been really hot, so hot I got quite badly sun burnt on my back whilst I was out in the garden doing jobs!
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The dogs had a pretty boring day, we had to wait in this morning for the BT engineer to come and fix our broadband which is running really slow (it didn't get fixed, someone else needs to come out) and this afternoon we were waiting for the delivery of our new bed which I am very glad has come. I can't wait for Conor to get here to put it together at the weekend! I have swapped over my mattress though so I get to sleep on the new one tonight.
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Anyway once all the deliveries had been I decided to take the doggies to the beach. Dogs are not allowed on the beach at Cleethorpes during the summer so I took them to Theddlethorpe which is about 40 mins from here. Stella and Ambrose had told me about it and said that it was always really quiet. Well they were not wrong, whilst there we saw 2 couples walking dogs in the distance and a family packing up from their day at the beach but that was it. We pretty much had the whole beach as far as you could see to ourselves.
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I had forgotten that Megan had never been to the beach before but she absolutely loved it! The tide was out so we had a long walk to the sea but as soon as her and Brian spotted it they were straight in chasing the ball. Heidi watched for a minute or two before joining in, I guess she wanted to make sure her feet would be firmly on the floor.

The dogs had a brilliant hour there before we headed back to the truck. They are all absolutely shattered, Megan is even snoring! Mind you i'm looking forward to a good sleep tonight! I hope the weather is good for the weekend and Conor can come with us this time and we might even take Millie along too.
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This weekend we were supposed to be doing agility at the WBSDS show but when I entered it I didn't know we would have moved and its now too far for us to go for the day and we dont have the caravan up here so we wont be going, there are a few shows like that in the coming weeks, hopefully we will get to at least one of the Dog Vegas days though at the end of the month as it is only about 30 miles from here.

Sunshine!

Yesterday was really hot so we had a very busy day spent gardening. First thing I took the dogs out for a walk to get their silly energy out then we came home and they all pretty much hung around trying to help in their own way. Heidi sunbathed on the front lawn and Megan helped sweep up by trying to attack the brush! Brian pretty much sulked as he doesn't like the mower but came out to see what was going on from time to time. We got the front garden looking nice and then moved onto the back. I am waiting for the apple tree to be cut down so we can re turf the back garden as the grass is a mess but we cut it anyway so it looks a bit tidy.

I then spent a good hour clearing out the shed which Megan thought was just for her and made it her new den. Pictured above she is sunbathing in there! When Conor got here we headed off to get a new computer desk and then he set up the computer in the spare room for us.

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Today we are going to Stella's for dinner, they are looking after Millie at the moment (Daniel and Julie's dog) and they all really like her, Brian especially. On Friday when we popped round all four of them ran around together for well over an hour so hoepfully they will today too.

Rain

Well since we got back today all it has done is rain! I hope it clears up over the weekend otherwise we could be in for a boring one. We got what we needed to do at the other house done yesterday and left this morning with a car load of stuff to head back up here. (We managed to squeeze in some of the agility kit too). Yesterday the dogs enjoyed a lovely walk on the plain, in the Sunshine I might add. They played ball for about an hour before we met up with Sarah and Sarah and their two dogs Fifi and Harold. I was taking some family pictures of them and some pet portraits and they came out rather well.

Good news is that I have found Brian an Agility class, on a Thursday afternoon in Ludford, just a few miles from here. I didn't make today and I would doubt it was on anyway because of the rain, hopefully next week we will make it. Bad news is I am not starting my job in September as I thought, it's not until January now so I'm looking for a job quite urgently,as much as I'd like to be a lady of leisure I can't not have a job until then!

Healthy Heidi

Well the computer is dead again! I think it is well and truly broken, luckily I still have my laptop and we have another computer back at the other house so I'll collect it this week.
I forgot to post yesterday that Heidi's vet phoned to say her Pancreas results were back and they are all clear so she has been given a clean bill of health, thank goodness. She is also eating well now, more than ever actually. Her foot isn't quite healed yet although it doesn't bother her. She isn't wearing a bandage anymore as it spent more time off than on! I think the offending piece off skin will fall off soon enough.

Megan just wants to say well done to her brothers Zippy and Reno who qualified for Crufts yesterday at the Belgian Shepherd breed show. Well done puppies :)

Back on line

Finally we have a working computer, Conor has fixed the broken computer and has brought my laptop up this weekend so I shouldn't be without the Internet now. We have had a very busy week really, done lots of painting, I had a go at tiling the floor under the stairs and the garden has been cleared, providing us with 10 sacks of rubbish and 2 trees to take to the skip today. This week I intend to get the front garden sorted and finish the tiling in the utility room as under the stairs went well. On Tuesday I have to go back to our other house as I have a few things on down there but we should be back here on Thursday evening or Friday at the latest.

The dogs have settled in really well, we have found some nice walks and are hoping to get to the beach over the next few weeks. They have made the most of the larger garden, Brian has made a den (pictured right) where he spends most of his day asleep although the girls do try to push him out so they can get in! Heidi and Megan have been having lots of fun running around including running up and down the stairs (it must be a novelty as we didn't have stairs before). All in all a good first week really and the dogs seem pretty happy up here which is the main thing.