A day in the life :-)

So, we are in the middle of a 2 day wind storm that last night produced a few crazy blizzard squalls, the first snow of the year!

Today we woke up to a blown in screen door, a shattered truck topper window, and... drumroll please, hanging insulation in my building with a nice gap between the building and the roof! I immediately started calling people, insurance company, guy who did south side of roof, guys who redid North side of roof, Geoff. To say that I am was a bit stressed is an understatement!!

It is the first real windstorm of the winter and we are already potentially losing property!

I am continuously in awe of the complete lack of Colorado contractors to build things with an understanding of just how powerful the wind is here! I am not even a native and I get it!!!

I do not want to wake up to another roof scattered around 50 acres. Tomorrow "the guy" in charge of North side of roof comes to check out the situation, I can hardly wait!

Anyway, I discovered the lovely roof problems when I took Merger to the building to work on revamping his contacts.

Geoff is now Mergers handler, but, of course I am still Mergers trainer :-) He is running so much faster these days and he and Geoff are really becoming a team! Part of his increase in speed has rendered the current version of running contacts pretty useless, well his dogwalk anyway :-)

I am teaching him to run to a mat and lie down on it, which he is doing brilliantly actually. The goal is to tech the mat as a separate obstacle and gradually move it closer and closer to the end of the contacts until it "becomes" the end behavior.

Why not just continue to work on the running dog walk you ask? Because I think Geoff will need a behavior that is more criteria based that he has more control of. I am also reworking his teeter so that he drives into a down at the end of the teeter plank. His sheer size means that he needs to lower his center of gravity to actually bring the board down before he is off and running!

Danger is helping me type this blog tonight, it is one of the pleasures of his life right now, freedom in the office while I am in here. He goes for his 8 week check up on Thursday and hopefully that will mean even a little bit more freedom! Right now he goes to PT once a week, gets 2 10-15 minute walks per day and a bit of freedom in the office with me, not much for a 11 month old BC puppy but we are getting by. He has figured out how to destroy anything in a matter of seconds with his incredible jaws and chainsaw teeth!

He has also increased his already mouthy self by barking pretty much continuously when not being attended to, it is very special indeed!

After Dangers Ortho appt. on Thursday SoBe, Wally, Danger and I are headed to Eau Claire, WI to participate in the Silas Boogk, and Linda Mecklenburg seminars. Wally is coming a long for the ride, Danger is coming to use the underwater treadmill and SoBe is working all 4 days of seminar!!! I am so excited!

Silas is known for his take no prisoners, balls to the wall running style, I should have probably been on a diet the past few weeks! Linda is teaching an International handling seminar 2 of the days, it is going to be a blast!

There is another very exciting thing happening over the weekend I will talk more about that when I get back.

Well, here's to less wind, good travels and lots of awesome agility!!

USDAA Nationals!!!

Need I say more?? Always my very favorite show on the planet, OK maybe World Champs are a little bit higher on the list, but not much!!

Although we were in a new venue this year and a totally new part of the country USDAA Nationals were once again a highlight of the year for me. :-)

It was really great to get to see and compete with essentially a whole "new" group of dog and handler teams! Since the Nationals moved East, not east coast, just east, there were a lot of new faces this year.

I know a lot of the people who were showing, however, I have not had the pleasure of competing with many of these people for quite some time.

The caliber of talent was definitely as good as years past and it was always exciting! Well, as exciting as it could be with a significant amount of down time. I must say this years Nationals were not without disappointments, I was just fortunate enough to have had some truly awesome runs with my dogs and being able to bring home some bling definitely allows you to forgive other flaws!

The atmosphere this year was not that of a National Championship in my opinion, it was more a very large trial or even Regional with very high caliber talent.

The energy that usually accompanies the National Finals is usually much greater, people are more involved and hang out to watch/cheer more.

There is generally a much greater sense of comaraderie than was evident this year and truly missing out on the evening events "under the lights" was a bit of a disappointment.

I think, however, the biggest disappointment was the lame turn out for the GP Finals. It is the premiere event, the reason we all come and to be honest it was not only anti climactic but just plain sad for the finalists.

Folks practically burned rubber to get out of there Sunday morning and they were rolling up the rings around the finalists before they even competed.

I stayed until the bitter end and was very glad that I did, it was a very competitive finals and a pleasure to watch, mostly though I wanted to be there to cheer everyone on!

I do not fault folks for leaving, it was 6 long days of inhaling dust and traversing the expo from one end to the other trying to find something to do!

Next year fewer days, less dust and a more cohesive schedule would make things 100% better!

I also vote for Perf. Speed jumping, Steeplechase, PGP and GP finals all be held as evening events finishing out the weekend with the team relay on Sunday morning and off we go!

Everyone wants to play in the night time events and these events always draw a much bigger crowd!

In all honesty, I, too head to Nationals to make Finals, ALL finals but if I have to choose the most exciting it would be Steeplechase because we play at night!

How fortunate for me I made the Steeplechase Finals over the GP :-) Yes, there was a bit of sarcasm there!! I was a bit disappointed to be "in the stands" for GP finals but crap happens I guess.

As I said earlier though, I had a GREAT Nationals! SoBe decided to show me just how awesome she is and made it very clear that she is now wearing big girl underpants and I need to start handling her as if she were a big girl! Message received and so I will try to be the handler that she is asking for :-)

What a special girl she is!! She not only held her own all week but she finished out the week with a 6th place in jumpers, this was accomplished in the 22" class which had 331 dogs! Not to be out done, her daddy won that class!

Wally also made Steeplechase finals and finished 5th overall, I am ecstatic! Wally placed in the top 12 in 2 other classes as well and along with Maze got to play in relay finals!

Maze had a great Nationals from the standpoint of having fantastic runs, not such a great Nationals if you count the 1 glitch that occurred in all 3 tournament classes that kept him on the sidelines ultimately. Oh well, there is always next year!

I am so incredibly excited for next year!! Maze and Wally are running faster and better than ever, SoBe is a grown up girl and really ready to start competing and Danger seems to be on the mend! Yes, it will be a long road for him, but we are moving forward!

Well, I am off to bed big weekend teaching coming up and I am still recovering from the marathon we called Nationals this year.

Congrats to everyone who qualified for Nationals, here's to next year!!