Lots of stuff

Once again the weekend has whizzed past. Have been really busy and not had time to update the blog over the last few days.

Friday

Bernadette and Karen came over to play! Bernadette brought a course plan which we set up and then played with. It was quite a testing jumping sequence with lots of ways of handling the various components. We all had some good runs and some bloopers (Bernadette's phrase!) We took quite a bit of video and I'm going to put some of this on the blog (especially for Jan!) ..... hopefully in the next couple of days. In addition to the jumping pattern I did some dog walks with lots of helpful feed back from the girls. This included rather a lot of yelling at me to run, Nancy, run (should that be run, Forest run!) I tried to tell them that I was running, it just doesn't look as if I am .......

Then we went off for lunch, well I went for lunch. Karen and Bernadette went out for TWO lunches. I promised I wouldn't say anything but I can't resist. I had a jacket potato and they chose soup and a ham salad but they also couldn't resist the deep fried brie also. Well, the food arrived and both were full meals. The look on Karen's face when her second plate arrived was priceless. It was so funny.

After lunch we went for a nice walk with all of mine and Karen's dogs plus Hex and Hob-b. It was a lovely walk and Hob-b decided to join Kizzy and Becky in the cabbage patch and munched her way through that field!

Karen went home from the walk but Bernadette came back to give Kizzy's ears a good trim. Kizzy's coat is slowly coming back and now she has beautiful ears and is starting to look much better after her massive moult. Bernadette tried everything to get her floppy ear to stand up but it ain't having it!

Saturday

We got up early to walk the dogs so that I could be back in time for my beginner group at 10.00 am. The dogs had a good walk and came home clean - wonderful!

The beginner group was glad to be back having had last week off in order to allow the ground to recover from the previous week's flood. The dogs are really coming on well and all seem to really enjoy their agility training. I enjoy training them as they are lovely people and dogs and we have a good laugh as well as doing our training.

Straight after the lesson I had to gather all my bits and pieces together and leave for Polly's where I was booked with Naughty Niamh on a training day with Natasha Wise. The was the second training day I've done with Tasha and it was brilliant. I really enjoyed it and felt that Niamh did some really good stuff including lots of dog walks! Tasha is an excellent trainer she is sympathetic to your partnership with your dog; motivational and full of good humour. The session flew by and I was disappointed that it had finished!

Sunday

I got a text from Bernadette to say that Dennis was home with my new camera, a Panasonic DMC-FX30. So, I "forced" Andy to get the bike out and go and get it. I use the term "force" very loosely as it doesn't take much for Andy to find a reason to get the bike out especially with the weather that we had over the weekend. The camera is lovely but has a lot more options than I realised. It can be used as a simple point and shoot but I'd like to learn more about the features. The manual is quite thick and I thought that it was in lots of languages but it's a full English version so now I have more bed time reading! I need to get a case for it now as I'm scared I'll get it dirty over the fields, can't have mud on my new camera!!!

I'm going to take it on my walk this afternoon and see if I can get some nice pictures of the dogs which I'll post on the blog.

On Sunday afternoon Andy and I did some training. Andy did some of Friday's sequences with Kizzy and overall they were pretty good. He still has some work to do on her wing wrapping. She's really good at it if you break it down and practise over one jump but when she gets up speed she forgets and her turns are a little like the QE2 until you remind her politely that she's supposed to wrap the wing! Andy also did some weave entries and weave proofing. Niamh and I did some more, yep you got it -dogwalks and also a couple of jumping sequences. Again we did a bit of video and I'll be posting that on the blog in the next day or so.

Straight after training we took the dogs for a late walk. It was lovely over the fields almost spring like until the sun went down and then it was pretty chilly. It was just about dark by the time we got back to the car.

Lastly, we heard some very sad news from our friends Jackie and Terry; they had to have Jackie's Saffy put to sleep in the early hours of Sunday morning. She was fourteen and a very special happy girl. All day I kept cuddling Abbey as she is about the same age and they trained together as puppies with Val Venables. I spoke to Jackie on Sunday evening and neither of us could believe where that time has gone. Bye bye Saffy we'll miss your silly antics. Abbey is now the lone member of the AA club!