Welcome!


Join me as we have fun with our dogs, and then paddle along with the Dog Paddlers—a dragon boat team in Victoria, Canada. You'll meet my Silky Terriers—Abby, Zack, Sami and Gemma—and their feline sister, Bridget. Share with us the joys and challenges of strengthening the human-canine bond as we participate with our dogs in canine agility, trailwalks and canine freestyle.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

SPRING FLING

Whew. Another agility trial in the books. Not a bad way to spend a spring weekend; even the weather kind of cooperated, with a very nice day on Saturday, and an intermittently rainy day on Sunday. All in all, not bad days for walking your dog(s) between runs. And yourself to the washrooms in the OTHER building on a repeated basis throughout the day. There's nothing like an upcoming agility run to make you feel that you absolutely HAVE to go pee, now.

Zack, alas, still seems to be stuck in first gear, although he did manage to pull out four Qs from the weekend. His Sunday was a complete bust, and he seemed to slow down throughout the day on Saturday. Still haven't quite figured out what's going on in his mind, as he's bouncy going in, and bouncy coming off the course, but he's just stuck in slo-mo in between. I'm sure we'll work our way through this eventually.

Abby seemed to be able to find over-drive off and on throughout the weekend, and sauntered away with eight Qs, including a rip-snortingly fast Tunneler's run at the end of Sunday. Much, much faster than her Tunnelers run on Saturday. Maybe she knew it was the last run of the day, so she put her all into it. I think her speed was something like 4.5 yards per second on that final run.

Poor little Gemma continues to have to sit it out, waiting in the X-pen with Abby and Zack until she's old enough to compete. She was very patient, and got lots of pets and cuddles from everyone, so I'm sure she didn't feel totally left out. Just a few more months before she can hit those courses herself!

As always, the ScallyWaggs were consumate hosts for the event, and everyone had tons of fun. We missed having Lorri and Mylo there for the weekend (Lorri was doing some volunteer work on Saturday, and woke up with a migraine on Sunday, so we didn't get to see Mylo bounce around the course with his usual happy smile on his face). And Peni was there on Saturday, running both Betty and Switch. Switch keeps improving, through Peni's hard work. Switch spent more time headed forwards and less time looking backwards and giving Peni's legs the evil-eye; he's still a challenge, to be sure, but he's so, so much improved.

Pecos was much more adept at his weaves this weekend, making Ann quite happy. And Ann succeeded in not sending any rabbits to bunny heaven on the way to the trial, so no "bad bunny karma" to combat this weekend (although she did mention something about a dead otter from earlier in the week....but its demise didn't seem to have had any nasty after-effects on their runs).

Cindy and Joe joined us for Sunday, and Joe was his usual, happy little self, bounding around the courses. You wouldn't think that a dachshund could run that fast, but he's just a joy to watch as he whips his way up, over and around all the obstacles.

Swift and Emma had some good runs, and some not-so-good runs. Swift had a blisteringly fast run on Saturday (I can't remember which one it was—possibly a tunnelers run—in which she ran something like 6.7 yards per second. Ya gotta wonder if her feet even touch the ground on runs like that!). We also got into a discussion about the finer points of when is going fast through the weave poles NOT a good thing, and sought some clarification from Eric about this. Faults have been called on dogs who appear to be pushing the poles aside, rather than actually weaving. Eric explained that now what the judges are looking for when the dogs are weaving is that their body actually is going around the poles. It's a safety issue. They don't want dogs to get hurt running into the poles. So I video-ed Swift in the weaves, to see if we could see exactly what it is that she does:

We've all decided that Swift does indeed weave.

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