Balance, presents and judging

Sooooo... the responses I got (privately of course) was very diverse and surprising and some of it even made me giggle.  Calm down people, I was a bit pissy... it happens every now and again you know.  I am not clinically depressed, manic depressed, schizophrenic, bipolar... yes, I am slightly insane, but if you read this blog you already know that...

Anyhow, on to bigger and better things...  if any of you are IRL friends (for the non computer nerds, irl= in real life), for my birthday you can either get me a super duper spiffy nice HD video camera or some awesome super duper high tech video editing software... I am addicted to making movies... I don't even post half of them here... I don't want to bore you guys THAT much... anyhow, I love making movies.  Haha, if you want, send me your vids and I will make some movies of them too!  Yes, on top of being insane I am weird...  anyhow, I made two quite cool compilations of the AWC last year, but then Moviemaker started fighting with me halfway through the second one.  Here is the first one, second will follow as soon as me and Windows Live have settled our argument...



Watching all these videos again, inspires me, but it also makes me think.  At the moment I am not the 'prettiest of handlers', I rely more on my training than my handling, so seeing handlers getting THEIR part right, brings me to tears... haha, no not really, but you get what I mean.

Now that all of my dogs are better again and my fingers are not swollen the size of pork bangers, I have done some training and shows and generally enjoyed my agility.  I really try to keep balance and variety as part of my training routines.  If I train complex handling sequences and advanced behaviours with Chaos once a week that is a lot.  I do speed circles, silly little one jump exercises, which are in actual fact NOT that silly and help me a lot.  At least once a week I try and proof all my contacts and weave poles, important for any 'set behaviour obstacles'.  Here is some of Chaos's training and shows over the last month:



Now although Chaos is quick, he lacks what I call 'forward momentum drive', yeah I am sure some big name trainer has already coined another term for it, but this is what I call it.  There are a lot of speedy dogs out there, they move swiftly over the ground, however there are those dogs, the use every inch of muscle to create forward momentum and build on that.  Hard to describe I guess, basically it comes down to dogs that run (albeit fast) and dogs that DRIVE forward... Chaos runs, I am hoping to teach Volt to DRIVE forward.  Actually I have been making a point of watching a lot of small dogs run all over the world, across many years the last while and it would appear that small dogs tend to just run (once again very fast), with only a special few that truely drive forward.  For now, I am having fun with Volt... actually a lot of it.  We are doing very simple foundation exercises.  The biggest surprise (to myself) is the amount of 'tricks' I have taught him.  I have never been a trick person, it's nothing personal, it has just never interested me.  But EVERYTHING is fun with Volt, he has more confidence than Spaz and Monster and he is always SO keen.  I love it, love it, love it.  So here is some things I have done with Volt in the last month:



This coming weekend I am judging and I am REALLY looking forward to it, I have designed some good, challenging courses and I am hoping for a big entry...