Zeki at the sheltie training party

Here is a link to the video that Bernadette posted of Zeki doing some training at the puppy party a couple of weeks back.

It was a really good day and Zeki was fairly tired at the end of it and took herself to bed when we got home!

Zeki in her pod!

Naughty Niamh at training

On a Thursday we train at Leah's and I took some photos of Naughty Niamh a couple of week's back. She loves her evening at Chafford Farm and watches the other dogs from her vantage point on the mounting block. I find this to be the only way she will stay. I can't get her to do this on the ground as she just creeps out plus the sand is quite deep and she ends up swallowing it as she plays with her ball. Up here she is out of the way and can't eat the sand.

She knows the drill and takes herself back to her "bed" as I call it after we've finished playing at the end of each sequence. I'm not sure why I call it her bed but she understands it!

Playing with her beloved ball on a rope

Performing tricks to get her ball!

Getting ready to watch Becca and Kit run. Ha ha, Becca tried to hide from the camera but I was too quick!

Waiting for her turn!

December already!

Rather stating the obvious I know but where has this year gone? I can't believe it's December as it seems only yesterday that I was stocking up the caravan for our first outing of 2009. Yikes, that reminds me I have still to clean it out from our last trip. I've put the little greenhouse heater in there to keep the chill off but I still have to have a good clear up. It's never that bad as I clean it out after every outing but even so I really should sort it out properly!

It doesn't seen long ago that we were longing for Christmas to come and go so that we could pick up Kizzy and that was three years ago. Now I have my own sheltie and she started competing in agility this year. Naughty Niamh will be 5½ years old on Christmas Day; Murphy will be 8 on Christmas Eve; Becky 10 and Poppy 13 in the spring.

Lots has happened this year including some really sad things which I won't dwell upon. On the positive side I am really enjoying my doglets. I am so lucky to have the three most wonderful dogs. Poppy is still a joy to me and what can I say about Niamh and Zeki, they are just the best fun to train and run with. They are both so keen and willing and so very different which isn't so good as I'm not very good at switching between the two. Oh well, it's good to have a challenge.

Andy is also very lucky with his lovely dogs. Kizzy is the light of his life and such a character. Becky and Murphy are lovely cuddly dogs who just want to be together.

We are both fortunate that our dogs get on really well as threesomes but also as a pack of six. I know some people have dreadful problems with their dogs on this front and I really feel for them as it must be so hard to manage. We are very lucky in this way.

I so love training my dogs and it makes me sad sometimes when I see people who shout and are horrible to their dogs. Agility for me is the thing that brings me even closer to my dogs and makes me love them and bond with them more than anything. I can't imagine how that would happen if I got cross with them or lost my temper just because they run the wrong way on a course. Of course I get frustrated, same as most people do but it's always with myself and never my dogs. I can't understand the mentality of those who continually tell me that their dogs don't listen to them. I guess we're all different, same as dogs are! Luckily all of my friends are like-minded so I'm lucky to have great people to train with.

What a strange posting this is: I'm not really sure why I started it, just feeling a bit reflective for some reason. Coming to the end of the year I guess.

So, to cheer myself up I decided to "decorate" the blog early for Christmas and post a cute picture of Zeki!

So cute

Had to post these pictures of Kizzy and Zeki that Bernadette took at the puppy party last week. So cute! For once the great big pink croc in the photos isn't mine :o)

Zeki in the Croc

Kizzy in the Croc

Catching up

Haven't had a chance to post on the blog for a couple of weeks. I don't know where the time goes but the scary thing is that it's December next week.

We've been busy doing lots of stuff including trying to keep control of the leaves and debris from the trees at this time of year. We weren't doing too bad a job until this recent stormy weather and now we're on the losing side. Off down again today to try to have a bit of clear up. I cleaned the dog walk and A-Frame a couple of weeks back and could barely move after I'd finished. They look nice though!

Work in progress

The finished job!

My task wasn't made any easier by dear little Kizzle who insisted on dropping her ball into my bucket and then barking at me to throw it for her, I was up and down the ladder with a scrubbing brush in my hand throwing the damn ball for her. On at least one occasion the scrubbing brush got thrown whilst I tried to clean the A-Frame with a planet ball. All the other dogs are content to race around carrying their various toys but not Kizzle, she wants to interact all the time. A good thing really I know, BUT not when you're trying to do something. She is just as bad when you're raking (that is trying to rake) leaves. The ball continually lands in the middle of the neat pile of leaves and whoosh they all spread out again. Bless!

As mentioned in a previous post we are getting ready to build a small external studio for Andy's massage venture.

The first job was to clear the site and we did this at the weekend. Our neighbours Liz and Geoff wanted the greenhouse and so we got together on Saturday to dismantle it and move it next door. In fact there were two greenhouses bonded together so it was a bit more manageable than we thought. We started by removing the glass panes (between 40 and 50) and then taking down some of the pieces of support timber. We labelled everything so that they have a reasonable chance of putting it back together at some point.

We got to a point and decided we could probably lift the smaller of the two greenhouses over the wall and did achieve this quite easily. Then we decided to do the same with the larger one as it seemed such a shame to take it all apart just for them to have to fiddle for hours putting it back together. God, that was so hard. We managed it just about but Liz and I really struggled with our corners. Luckily we got it over in one piece. Then just the small task of handling all the glass panes over the wall rather than walking them round the long way. I was very scared about this as it was quite a risky thing to do. We took our time and every sheet was passed safely across. I think two panes got broken when Geoff was re-stacking them up at his loose box. Not bad considering the number of panes moved. Boy, was I glad when it was all over. Once again I could barely move.

I did manage to take the poor dogs for a nice long walk whilst Andy cleared up. They had been so good sitting indoors for the whole time we worked on the greenhouse, it was just too dangerous to have them out with us on this occasion.

Before

The small greenhouse gone!

Some of the glass (just from the small greenhouse)

Moving the small greenhouse ready to lift over the wall

Andy and Geoff getting ready to hoist it over

Shifting the large greenhouse - we must have been mad!

There it goes!

Poor Liz trying desperately to hang on, it was lot heavier than it looks even without its glass

Safely over the wall and all in one piece!

All gone, now just tidying to do and then lay a new concrete foundation

On Sunday we were invited to join the Girlpower Pups first birthday party. This was in the format of a training session followed by lunch and pressies and a wonderful cake for the dogs. Personally I thought Bernadette (and Dennis) quite mad but I was proved wrong as all the dogs were very well behaved and believe it or not, it wasn't that noisy!

We were supposed to train in Bernadette's garden but instead she had very kindly hired a local indoor school with equipment as it was too wet to train outside. Johanna was over from Denmark and did the training for us. It was a very good session focusing on one of the current FCI trends of 'collection' followed rapidly by a big gap where the dog needs to 'power' away from the handler.

I wasn't in the mood to train at the start as we all got soaked getting from our cars to the school and then helping to get the equipment in (not that I did much of that, I decided it was better to let Andy and Dennis get wet doing that!) I really hate getting soaked and seeing mud everywhere especially when my dog has got to walk through it all. I had just bathed Zeki and she looked gorgeous and the thought of getting her filthy was too awful for me. However, the training was so good that I managed to cheer up. Training my dogs nearly always has a positive effect on me. My mood was helped by cheerful prods from Bernadette and Karen to buck up - thanks girls and sorry for my demeanour first thing but you do know how much I HATE MUD!

The training was so good that we 'borrowed' the pattern for our Tuesday evening training and had another good session. Thank you Johanna for your great training and ideas.

Training

We have done quite a lot of training just recently. I am desperate to get Zeki into different places to continue work on her dog walk. So far I am happy with progress but I know I can't afford to be complacent.

A few weeks back we had a lovely day out at Liz's training field. It was a bit noisy as there was Zeki and her brother Ziga (neither of whom are known for being very quiet) and then we had Zaz and Itzy with Bernadette, not so noisy for sure but adding to the volume nonetheless!

Bernadette set Liz and I lots of little sequences including, of course, the dog walk and also some tricky weave entries. Bernadette then gave me some hard sequences to work on with Niamh (it was nice and quiet at that point!) particularly one which involved quite a hard, flat weave entry but with an angled jump that was not to be taken. We got it right after a couple of attempts! Then we did some simple exercises with the puppies. Before we knew it 3 hours had flown by. On the way home I stopped and did a long walk on the Ashdown Forest, one that I hadn't done for ages and when I got to the end of it I remembered why - there is a very long, steep hill to get back to the car park. I had taken Poppy along for the day out and so all three of my girls were tired and happy when we got home. I really did enjoy that day. Good company, good training and three tired little dogs at the end of it. My perfect day!

Last week I had a lesson for Zeki and Niamh with Lesley. I travelled down with Bernadette and we were really lucky with the weather. It was quite cold but dry and so we were able to train outdoors. As usual Lesley found some holes in my training and gave me the appropriate exercises to work on to fix the problems. One of these was with Zeki in that we were not very good at jumping diagonally across a hurdle and wing wrapping the hurdle with me pivoting rather than collecting. I hate pivot turns and so avoid them as much as possible but I should still train them. So I have done some with Zeki and now I must do the same with Niamh. More of pivot turns in another post!

I also worked on Zeki's A-frame and think I made some progress on proofing my turns as we got Zeki turning away from her food pot which I hadn't done before.

Her tight turns off the A-Frame are pretty good and I can turn her neatly into a tunnel under the A-Frame (180°) both towards me and away from me. For these turns I use her 'left' and 'right' turns (i.e. same principle as a wing wrap). For turns of a shallower degree such as 90° then I use her name and 'come' if I want her to come towards me and just 'back' or 'out' to turn her away from me. These turns are much weaker and are, at the moment, more likely to make her over stride on her A-Frame partly because I am peeling away to the side within her vision whereas with the tight turns I am holding back. So, more work on those turns off the A-Frame, particularly when they are towards me, is required. I am drilling this type of turn at the moment using a long jump pole at the bottom of the A-Frame to encourage her all the way through and round before she executes the turn.

Here is a tiny film clip of the type of turn I refer to. Thanks to Gran'ma for the videoing and enthusiastic cheerleading!



We also did some work on her dog walk, again trying to get me to move on from where I'm at. I am quite good at getting others to do this but not so good with myself as I enjoy small successes and so I don't always move forward as fast as I should.

Here is a tiny clip of her dog walk which I think you can see has improved as we've lost the horrible stutter. I would say it has come on again in the week since we visited Lesley.

One thing I am very pleased with is that all my 'mental' work on getting myself to learn left and right has paid off. I'm not saying I'm perfect but if I compare my ability to remember left and right now with the beginning of the year then I would say I am 90% better. I have formed a habit of keeping this going and have little drills in my head that I work on. Sad but true! I have found this method really helpful so am putting a link back to it here in case anyone is interested in trying it if they have the same problems that I HAD! The bit about learning left and right is about two thirds of the way through the rather long post (not like me to put up a long post ....)

Zeki trains regularly twice a week, Tuesdays at our own training school and the other time on a Monday evening at Leah's where we have a split class, half with Leah and half with Wendy. It is very good training with the added bonus that Zeki has to concentrate when other dogs are working. She occasionally forgets herself and goes off to chase but it's pretty rare now and the best part is that she comes straight back when I call her.

Niamh also has two regular classes each week, Tuesdays at our school and Thursdays with Leah. I really enjoy this class as the wicked Leah makes us do very difficult stuff. Niamh adores her training and I love training her. She and I have hit a really nice groove and understand each other really well. I hope we can carry this on into next year when we start competing in championship classes. I am so looking forward to that, I can't wait!

Onto Kizzy. Andy has been doing lots to improve their contact performance and I think things have improved a great deal. Again, we need to keep moving them forward but I think they have a good foundation to work from. Kizzy enjoys workshop classes at training club as it means she gets masses of rewards (food and toys) so this is how we plan to work with her over the winter. Next project is to improve their turns as this is still nowhere near what we're after. One thing at a time though ....

Here is a lovely picture of my dogs especially for people who like posts with pictures :o)

Aches, pains and massage

It's time to do one of my rather incoherent updates as I haven't written anything on the blog for a couple of weeks with the exception of one notable item, i.e. Princess Kizzy's birthday.

Aches & Pains

So, what have we been doing. Well, rather a lot to be honest and I am very tired so I have decided that I am going to get younger and not older. Getting older isn't fun. I have numerous aches and pains and have managed to acquire lateral epicondylitis better known as 'tennis elbow' through my own stupidity. To explain, Zeki likes to jump into my arms and I encourage her to do this so that I can be sure to get her out of danger on a walk or if a large dog were to run into the ring at agility etc. She is a very cuddly dog and will stay in my arms until I put her down and I got into the habit of balancing her on my left forearm. Because she is small and light I didn't think much of it but unfortunately my arm did! Andy has been doing some work on my arm and things are improving but we have had a busy week and I haven't had a treatment for over a week so it's a bit sore again. I also have lots of pain in my neck which is really debilitating at times and I keep meaning to get him to do a treatment but I never seem to find the time. This leads me onto the next update in this voluminous rambling.

Massage training

Some of you may know, others may not so here we go. Andy has decided to resurrect his skills as a masseur. He trained a long time ago and worked in the treatment room at a gym. However, he didn't take any exams but just studied under a trained therapist. The main reason for this change of direction is that he would like a break from the drawing board and enjoys physical work as well as mental. In an ideal work I think he would really like to split his time between architecture and massage. So, Andy has gone back to college for two nights a week. On one night he studies anatomy and physiology and the other Swedish massage. His exams are next year and once he has qualified A&P and the Swedish massage he is going straight on to a sports remedial course. In the meantime he has to clock up over 100 hours of therapy and so already has a few people coming regularly for him to practise on! He is lucky that one of his fellow students lives just half a mile away and so they are able to practise on each other and help learn the various routines together. I am also an occasional guinea pig but apparently I'm the worst patient in the world. That I find very hard to believe!

At the moment he is using our small sitting room as a therapy room. Great, just as we had the fireplace installed ready for the winter so I could sit and read in there at the weekends (that's a joke by the way!) now the room has been taken over by Mr Masseur. But hopefully not for long. Andy being Andy always likes a project and so we are going to build an annexed studio as a treatment room. We are going to demolish the existing greenhouse which is really used as a wood store/shed and build the studio in its place. It will be slightly larger than the existing greenhouse and will have a treatment area plus a tiny kitchen and toilet/shower area. It will double as a place where friends can stay with their dogs which will be nice. We have had to apply for planning permission but hopefully this will soon be through and then Dennis, our builder, is geared up to come in and start work hopefully by the end of the month. No time like the present then! Liz and Geoff from next door are going to help us dismantle the greenhouse and then it will be moving next door as Liz's polytunnel is on its last legs and they will get good use from the greenhouse. It's nice that it's being recycled and not just dumped. It's a good old fashioned greenhouse and very large.

Andy had his first test last night in A&P and passed so he is a happy bunny. There is a long way to go but hopefully it will be worth it!

Happy Birthday to Kizzy

Happy Birthday to our gorgeous, beautiful and perfect Kizzy, three years old today. She requested a nice sleepful day as her birthday present! Here she is below enjoying her present!

Pond makeover

Our pond has been getting murkier and murkier and even though we bought a new filter it just wasn't coping and Andy was having to de-clog the filter every week which is quite a big task. I felt sorry for the poor fish swimming around in such horrible conditions.

We got a local company Aqua Techniques to quote to sort it out and although it was quite expensive we decided to go ahead and last week they came and sorted it for us. They are a really good company and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. They have a structured approach and do exactly what they say they will when they come to appraise the job.

They erected a huge fish tank to transfer the fish whilst they completely emptied and dredged the pond. Sadly most of our goldfish had disappeared and we think they were taken by the heron. There were only three large goldfish left (there used to be at least twenty) and our Koi Carp 'Sharkey'. There were also about a dozen small goldfish still black in colour and very tiny, it's 50/50 whether they'll get to grow up as the larger fish will eat them given the chance.

The pond was full of silt, about a foot deep so all of that had to be removed and spread onto the borders in the garden. All the plants were taken out because they had over grown and the guys split them down and re-planted sections of the pond. At the moment it is totally bare as all the plants have been cut right back but they will grow again in the spring but it will be much more structured. They put a net on the pond for us which will serve two purposes: one to stop the leaves filling up the pond as we head into the main falling period and also to stop the heron from stealing any more fish. I feel a bit sorry for the fish as they've nowhere to hide at the moment but I'm told this isn't a problem and that they will just go to the deepest part of the pond when they want to rest.

It was a big task but they completed it by 6.00 pm and it's such a relief that it's done.

Here are some pictures of before, during and after!

Too many overgrown plants - you can't see the fish!

Looks pretty but might as well be a bog garden!

Emtpied out and all the silt removed by hand. This took a lot of time to do carefully so as not to damage the liner

Fish back home and starting to re-fill the pond. You can see slimmed down planting!

Back up and running with netting in place. It does look a little bare but it's nice to see the fish

Sharkey and his three friends!

Hopefully we will have some more fish soon as a friend who comes to me for some training has too many fish and so we're going to 'rescue' some!

Zeki and the dog walk!

Gosh it's a long time since I did an update on Zeki's training. It's all been about her competition debut.

As well as having fun and thoroughly enjoying her first few shows, a great benefit from these few weeks of competition is that I have a clear idea of what I need to train and/or train better. The list is quite long!

First of all, as is apparent from our various videos, we have had a bit of a problem with the dog walk so that's really what this post is all about. I'll do a separate post about other areas of her training and development ... gosh that sounds like I'm back in the world of management!

The weak dog walk performance is completely my fault because I rushed the process of teaching her to stop. I couldn't make that final decision to give up on the running contact and then before I knew it the time had come for Zeki to be spayed. That meant a good five weeks out of training and then just two weeks to train before her first competition. In that short space of time I kept changing my mind about final position and ended up going for a four-on option. I chose this because Zeki was stopping naturally in a four-on position and then I was asking her to nose target the ground but it was happening in two distinct stages and costing time, I didn't like this.

I will never again teach this. The end result was her four-on gradually getting further and further back until she was targeting the middle of the down plank. Yuk, what had I done? You can see a good example of this in the first run of this video.

I know a lot of people would not have run agility classes until the problem was sorted, normally I would have gone down this route but I wanted as much ring experience as I could possibly get with Zeki. So, rightly or wrongly, I decided that we would have to make do until the end of the season and then work on this over the winter. But I couldn't wait that long as it was bugging me so much. I thought long and hard and took some advice and set about improving Zeki's dog walk. I tried first of all with a toy and had varying degrees of success but no real consistency. Then one morning I woke up and decided that I would go right back to basics, if necessary with a plank on a step but the most important decision was that I would go back to using clicker and food. I had become very stubborn about this because I worked hard to get Zeki into her toy and didn't want to lose that but I decided the toy drive was now strong enough that I could do separate sessions for food-reward training.

As it happened I didn't need to go back to the plank because as usual she was prancing around and offering behaviours once she clocked the clicker so I put her straight over the full dog walk and she ran to a two on two off position and I clicked and rewarded her. I had cooked some chicken (yuk) as I wanted really high value food to cure this problem and also it's very visible on the ground. She was very happy to receive such a tasty morsel.

I decided to stick with her offered position which was a sort of crouch with her two front paws clearly on the floor. In the past I had tried to insist on a down with a nose touch. I really didn't want to make too much fuss about the position and although I didn't want a 'stand' the crouch was a good compromise and it meant I could mark and reward her instantly rather than waiting to encourage her into a different position. I felt if I insisted on a down then I would be back to the two-staged performance and I wanted to reward her for running to the bottom without hesitation. That was and still is my aim!

Next stage was to start varying my position and rewarding her after one, two and then more obstacles, still clicking the moment she reached position. Occasionally she self-releases but I'm not making too much of that for now as I just want the confidence to keep coming. If she self-releases I simply don't reward and have another go (well that's the theory but sometimes I get carried away and forget and she still gets her reward!) The idea with moving the reward further and further out is to build value into the obstacles after the dog walk so that they become the reward. If we do a sequence with two dog walks then I will just verbally praise the first one and release and then click and reward the second one. Each time I do something new such as holding back or running by or some extreme position then I go back to first of all clicking and rewarding immediately and then build into the above pattern of moving the reward out and sometimes just verbally marking before release.

Zeki carried this behaviour well into our training school and also at Leah's where she trains on a Monday evening. Leah has been away in Wales and Mac and Wendy have been training us. Wendy has been very supportive of my efforts and has helped to keep me on track in another environment.

Our first attempt at this new dog walk was last weekend at Weald and as I mentioned in my earlier posting Zeki was brilliant. Obviously I couldn't click and reward with food but I made sure to mark her finished position verbally before releasing and carrying on with the round.

My plan is to continue with the food for some time but still moving out the reward further and further from the dog walk and then eventually, hopefully replacing the food with her toy. Once I feel the behaviour is fully trained only then will I become more rigorous about release and who instigates it!

At home I split my training into dog walk drills using my clicker and food and then separate sessions where she works for her toy. So far I've been lucky at training club as we've worked on jumping and weave sequences first so I've been able to use the toy (thrown in perfectly every time by Elspeth!) and then finished our lesson with contact sequences. Perfect!

Interestingly the more we progress the lower Zeki's position is becoming. She is almost back in a down and if I ask her to hold position for a couple of seconds before release then she is offering a nose touch. I'm not specifically asking for it but she is starting to offer. What I won't do is wait for that to happen before I click/mark, if it happens naturally then that will be a bonus.

I am lucky to have good friends who have helped me, one in particular who has the eye of an eagle in terms of what I'm doing during this re-training process. I am grateful for the constant support, advice and encouragement to make sure I keep moving the process forward and don't get stuck in a rut!

Once again the clicker has helped me out of a spot. I know lots of people don't get on with clickers but I still find it the best and fastest way to teach and importantly re-teach behaviours.

Onwards and sideways as the saying goes (well in my world anyways!)

Very strange and a bit scary!

Yesterday afternoon I was working in the office. I thought I heard some kind of bang and went out to the kitchen to investigate. One of the plastic dog beds was sitting in the middle of the floor where Niamh had lept out of it and it slid away from its normal spot. I thought that this had been the source of the noise and left it at that. I had no idea why she had leapt out of the bed but sometimes if a fly lands on her she panics so I didn't think much more about it.

Before I went out to training I emptied the dishwasher and was putting away all the clean stuff. I opened the cupboard where I keep the mugs to put some clean ones back and saw that the whole shelf was covered in shattered glass. I do stack the glass mugs one on top of another but even if one had fallen down it would only be by a drop the height of one other mug. I could understand if it fell and broke in half or something but this was totally shattered (bit like a windscreen) and the shelf was covered in a browney/black dust. It was almost as if the cup had imploded or exploded and obviously it was this noise that I had heard earlier in the day and what had frightened Niamh.

I showed Andy when he came home, he was just as amazed and puzzled as me. He thinks some kind of chemical reaction must have occurred hence the strange dust particles.

Scary!


From this:

To this:

As well as the shattered glass you can see the brown particles of dust laying on the newspaper.

Weald Show at Golden Cross

Zeki's fifth and last KC show of 2009. I'm disappointed it's all over but glad I got the opportunity to do some KC shows with her this year. Above all else it has given me confidence that she is focused and not going to run out of the ring to chase other dogs. On top of that she has done really well and I'm very proud of her. It's a shame I hadn't got the dog walk properly trained before we started competing but we have been working hard on this and have made lots of progress.

The funniest thing was when I arrived at the venue and wandered in to see if my course was soon to be set up, I didn't know anyone! The show is for G1-5 small/medium (a new world for me) and G1 large. Luckily soon after Amanda and Kodak and Anne and Roxie arrived so at least I had someone to have a coffee with. Then I saw Tamara and Erin and we got chatting so much so that Tamara forgot to remind Erin to walk her course - oops, my fault I think!

All my girls came with me and were wrapped up in their lovely Hurtta coats as it was quite cold sat out in the car. My plan was to walk them on Ashdown Forest on the way home but we didn't do that in the end because my first run was at 10.30 am and my last run at 4.30 pm. It was a long and at times slightly boring day but I'm still glad that I went.

Our first round was G1-5 jumping and we came 2nd by a tiny margin. Zeki worked really well in this and I was pleased with her turn after #2 where a lot of dogs and handlers went wrong and took the back of the next jump. I wasn't pleased to see my handling, I was stooping too much (damn it why do I do that); my arms were totally wrong in one of the front crosses (doing exactly what I suggest others don't do) and I did an arm flick after the weaves. Video is good for spotting the errors. It's funny, though, how sometimes you feel as if you've done a really awful round and when you watch it back it wasn't so bad and conversely you do a round which feels great at the time but when you watch back it wasn't so good. This one was definitely an example of the latter (handler, not dog I hasten to add!)

Thank you to Colin and Lian for videoing Zeki's round for me. After her little shake on the start line she looks so much like Zen it's unbelievable! She is still not driving quite as she does at training but I know that it will come, most of it is transmitting from me as I'm still not trusting her and over-handling in a lot of places.

Then it was time, fault and out. We started off well but there was a tunnel to collapsible tunnel combination and I had told myself when I walked the pattern to make sure of the collapsible as I haven't trained it enough and Zeki had run past it twice in previous competitions. What did I do, yep I ran past like a headless chicken and she ran along the far side of the tunnel barking at me! Homework on that needed!

Our last round was G1-5 agility. I was glad that they'd taken the dog walk out of the time, fault and out as it meant we had just one crack at the dog walk and I was determined it would be a good one. I am pleased to say it was perfect. I ran wide of the contact and there was no stutter, Zeki went straight to finished position. A short hold in position and release. Yay Ha! The only glitch was that she got caught up in the pipe tunnel. It was set at quite a sharp right angle, not even a curve and I think she hit that part and bounced back. She took an age to come out and I actually thought she was going to reappear from the entrance but she didn't. Other than that the round was great and we ended up 2nd. Beaten by the same dog as in the jumping by almost exactly the same margin (a couple of 100ths of a second.) After I came out of the ring several people mentioned about her being stuck in the pipe tunnel including the judge. Someone said she somersaulted - poor little thing!

This was our best result at a show and I was delighted with our performance. A nice way to end the KC season for Zeki. I kind of wish I had won her into G4 though, not because I especially want to progress at speed but it would have meant she had a couple of runs at North Downs show in November and I just want to keep going as we're enjoying ourselves. Never mind, I think Niamh is very happy that this will be a day out just for the two of us!

Birthdays, old friends, beautiful autumn sunshine

Andy has taken some time off today so we could go for a long walk with the dogs and have lunch. This is really to celebrate his birthday (and no, I'm not going to say which birthday but it's the wrong side of something for sure!) but also time for me to reflect on the passing of a very old friend and someone who meant a lot to me a very long time ago. I wanted to mark his passing on my blog and I hope that he finds peace and meets up with old friends on the other side, including Lizzie, Bess and Daisy the beautiful dogs and cat we shared.

So, off we went for a lovely Autumn walk which was a good thing to do on this beautiful but sad day.

Here are some pictures of our doglets enjoying themselves. Happy Birthday to Andy and I'm sorry that I'm not the best company today on your birthday.

I'm not sure how much energy Kizzy will have for training this evening!

Our little visitor has gone home

We had Zaz to stay for a week recently whilst Bernadette and Dennis visited family over the pond.

She has gone home now and we really miss her. This was her second stay with us in a short space of time and it was so sweet to watch how easily she fitted back in on her second visit. Her confidence had grown and she was part of the family. I did tell Bernadette that she couldn't take her back but for some strange reason she ignored me!

I loved having her to stay as she is such a good little girl. She adored Niamh and followed her on walks. Our sheltie playtime became even more over the top with three of them racing round and climbing on each other.

Here are some photos taken during her visit:

The bone box full of bones

Someone paying the first of many visits to the bone box

All the bones have now gone, I wonder where?

That's easy, here they all are and they're all mine!

Three-way sheltie play time (interestingly Zaz didn't join in with this ritual on her first visit but was well up for it second time round!)

More sheltie play time - there's that damn Croc again!

Here is Zaz playing with Fred the Frog, Susie Spider watches in the background!

(I know, I am sad!)

Niamh wants to join in but this is only for shelties!

So she gives up and retires to the sofa, hurt and offended

But not for long as home comforts are much better than playing stupid sheltie games!