2011 in review

Well, I managed to accomplish many of my goals this year!

Dodger

Finished his OTCh in March by winning four straight Utility B classes and a High in Trial on the last day.  He semi-retired from obedience but still won HIT and HC at the CCRCA national in April, and HC at the NCCCRC specialty in October.  He also finished his ASCA CDX and earned an ASCA UD leg, plus finishing his GN and OM2, and earning his GO.  He is focusing on field work now, passing the WCQ again in April and learning a lot from flunking Master tests.  ;-)

I had hoped to continue in agility with him, to finish his MXJ and NF, and get started on his MX and maybe go further in FAST, but it just didn't happen.  He enjoys field work far more, so with the time he has left I plan to do as much of that as possible.  He has two HRC Seasoned legs, so if we can get to one of their trials, we'll see if we can finish that too.

Proxy

Earned her CDX with class placements, her UD with class placements and now has 15 OTCh points, a UDX leg and a good start on her OM1.  In the field she earned her WCQ in April and will begin on her SH in 2012.  And we finally got around to enough conformation shows to finish her Ch!  Really glad that's done!

As with Dodger, I'd hoped to do some agility with Proxy this year, but she barely got any training, much less entered in any trials - as of Jan 1, 2012 it will be two years since I've been to an agility trial!  If I can handle it, I hope to have her ready to run by the CCRCA specialty in September - we'll see.  Working on her OTCh and SH take precedence.

Teaz

Earned her WC in April, two RN legs with a Second & First place, a BN leg with First place and a handful of Ch points.  Next year she'll go for her JH, finish up the RN and BN, go on in Rally and maybe start in obedience.  She's also doing a little bit of agility training, mostly weaves and I guess we'll try a few conformation shows too.

Joining us next month to ring in the new year will be the first Schipperke I've had since high school (a very long time ago...).  Having four dogs in training, particularly two in advanced field work, will be a challenge!  But, I should be traveling less so hopefully I will have the energy to go with the time.

In other news, the redo of the house continues.  Almost all of the kitchen cabinet doors are paint stripped and we are starting on the wood that frames them.  Rick finished mudding & sanding the foyer and primed it, and is beginning work on the beam in the TV room.  Guess I need to stay home more to work on that too!

Merry Christmas!

tho Kitty says bah humbug... <G>

Snow in Irvine!

Heh, not really - it's hail but it did look like snow sitting in the planters.  Funniest part was I was nearby at the mechanic and tho we got the thunder, lightening and rain we didn't get the hail.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Sorry dear, but if this isn't a total cliche......

Yup, he fell asleep while using the TV remote.

more destruction

Rick has four days off so we are trying to get as much as possible done on the house as we can.  Today I took the old facing off of the kitchen peninsula.

and did more paint stripping of cabinet doors.  Also made dog veggies with my, er, crop of green beans...I planted them late in the season so I guess I'm lucky I got anything!

Right now, Rick is in a turkey coma and I'm eating pumpkin pie, drinking champagne and watching Monsters, Inc on TV.  Tomorrow I'll be useful.

Vegas pictures

Las Vegas appears to be working on city beautification, at least on the 15 freeway!

Once we got close to home, it started to rain and RAIN.   Southern Californians really 

do not know how to drive in any sort of weather other than dry and sunny.

I don't think I've ever seen the 91 this empty, even in the middle of the night.

I live in an HGTV house

While I was in Vegas finding out that Proxy is still too green to really take her act on the road, Rick destroyed more house...

There used to be "accent wood" on the door and the wall around it, and big decorative 

beams going from the front door to the right to the entrance to the back of the house.

Here is the top of the front door - Rick took the trim off around the 

doors and you can see where the beams used to be.

The opposite side

There was also a decorative beam near the TV end of the back of the house and when Rick took that one down, he figured out that there used to be a wall there, so there was a fifth bedroom in this house.

There was another one of those beams across here.

More decorative wood used to be here.

This is what that decorative wood looks like - I don't think I have any pictures of the 

beams - they kind of looked like the bottom portion of this picture except bigger.

So, this Thanksgiving vacation we'll be sanding, mudding and painting!  Rick also started stripping paint off of the kitchen cabinet doors and I'll work on that during the week.  I'll be very glad to get "new" cabinet doors!

sigh

Update to my last post, I have apparently either injured myself (doctor thinks no) or am having an RA flare (may find out on Monday) due to the Flatcoat WC/X test last weekend.  I ran setup/test/pickup/bye dog and did some training on both Friday and Saturday, and stayed too long on Saturday.  At some point during the weekend I woke up in the morning to a very swollen knuckle on my left hand, one of the ones closest to the hand not out on a finger.

 

This is it after a course of steroids and anti-inflammatories, and mid day when it is at it's least irritated.  I cannot close nor open the hand all the way, and I probably shouldn't be typing with it.  ;-)  But damn it's boring not being able to do anything!  I don't use it in the mornings at all and very little the rest of the day.  It most likely will turn out to be another indication that I cannot do much in the way of field work anymore...

For something much better - Kitty!

I thought she was awfully cute with her paws over her eyes and took a picture...
 

Apparently, she didn't think much of that!  ;-)

Self image

Well, the weekend went pretty badly - other than Teaz doing decently at NCCCRC's obedience trial on Friday, and me not having any problems driving up there and back, it was rather awful.  Proxy flunked both Open B and Utility, Dodger passed both but with low scores due to uninspired work and got his first GO leg the same way.

Then the hunt test.  In Master, Dodger had to be double handled on a fairly easy land triple, partially due to bad luck and partially due to a mistake I made.  In Senior, Proxy refused to go on the land blind, maybe because of pressure last week in training except it looked more like she flat didn't know what she was supposed to do.  I may have also rushed her on the line as well, I don't know because at that point I was simply exhausted.

Sooo, it's probably time for me to reassess whether or not I can continue to do advanced field training.  We worked hard these past weeks getting ready for this test and both dogs went out in the first series. That hurt, a lot; actually, it still hurts a lot.  For decades a big part of my self image has been me as one of the top field trainers of Curlies in the country, which doesn't mean much really but still, it was there.  Now?  Looks like I'm going to have to give up a big chunk of who I am.

I know that there will be those who will say that I shouldn't make decisions based on how the dogs acted when I was so tired, but the fact is I was pretty beat up even before we left for Dixon on Friday morning.  We'd been out to Prado three times that week, Tuesday thru Thursday and even tho it was only for 2 - 4 hours each time, it really took it's toll.  I had already dropped working Teaz in Junior since she wasn't entered in this test, now I am going to try making Proxy the priority instead of Dodger (since it doesn't look like I'll be able to get him back up to speed in Master in the time he has left) and see if that works.  I guess if I really wanted to hold onto field work, I'd drop training for obedience and agility as well, but I have always been a multi-event trainer, so I guess I'm even more invested in that than field work.

So, we'll see.  It's a bitch being old and broken at only 54.  I'm going to go take a nap.

Fauna we don't like...

...at Prado.  As I was setting up a water triple with double blind at Fred's for Dodger to run, Helena motored up in the golf cart and told me that a rattlesnake had bitten one of her workers, who fortunately was wearing boots so the fangs didn't go thru.  They'd tried to get it, but it got away into the heavy bushes on the other side of the water.  Right near where I'd set the line to run from of course.

This isn't the snake in question, it's one I saw while looking at wildflowers in one of the county parks a couple of years ago, but it is most likely the same species.  I went ahead and ran that setup, but for Proxy I put the line on the other side of the pond!  Hopefully they will find and dispatch the bugger before the hunt test this weekend.

Later we went to the front field to run some marks and blinds there, and OMG the flies are getting insane.  They know that winter (such as it is here) is coming, so they are going crazy trying to do something - I suppose lay eggs that are going to winter over or something.  I was twitching and swatting the whole time I was there.

 

Let us in let us in!!!

And just as I was picking up the winger after we were done, here come four Pointers from waaaaaay down the other end of the field, right thru where one of my marks and one blind had been.  Ya know, I like Pointers, Leslie has cool ones and I may have one some day.  But the people who train them for field work at Prado have got to be some of the most clueless folk and these ones were no different.  They let all these dogs out of their truck, maybe 400-500 yards away and then just ignored them while they ran amok.  They were very lucky that I was done before that happened!

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised - when this guy drove in the front gate, he was going way too fast and almost spread himself all over the front of a semi that was taking silage out.

Field training in southern California

The last AKC hunt test of the year is in a week and a half, so I've been out to Prado several times recently, to see if it is at all possible to get a leg!  ;-)  Noticed that the crawdads at the T pond are acting weird...

 

For some reason, before they come out on land, they wave their claws around above the surface of the water.  Dunno what it's for!

 

A couple of them waving their claws and one on the shore.

Not much for flowers this time of year, except for these big yellow ones which are all over.  These are at Gordy's in one of the very few surviving clumps of cattails (the trialers don't like having any cover in the way of their marks).

Dusk at the T pond!

One of those great weekends

The mutts and I went up to the Sacramento area for the three Sacramento DTC trials and the two Donner Trial KC shows, all held at the fairgrounds in Roseville.  Saturday were two trials and Proxy's debut at working on OTCh points.  In the a.m. trial, she was Second in Utility for 4 points and in the afternoon trial she won Utility for a nice 10 points!  She wasn't entered in Open as I thought she wasn't quite comfortable enough in the ring yet... ;-)  Well, she did manage to flunk the signals on Sunday!

On the conformation side of it, on Saturday Teaz won the point and on Sunday Proxy won it.  Unfortunately, both days we were trying to put the point on Brisa, sigh.

field training

Dodger, Proxy and I spent four hours training at Prado this afternoon, and since it was hot and I am old I had to stop and have a sit down every so often.  One of those times, Dodger was cleaning burrs out of his coat and he decided that a burr on my shoelaces had to go too!

 

silly dog

 

Success!

There were a lot of big dragonflies out.

Beanstalk!

This -->

 

became this -->

in less than a day!  And I didn't even plant magic beans... ;-)

variety

First, the required pictures of Kitty!  ;-)  I had hosed off a soft crate and brought it in Thursday night so it could finish drying off.  For some reason, Kitty thought this was an excellent place to hang out.

Saturday evening we went to some friends house to see OC Elvis, a local Elvis impersonator - much fun!

 

Our hosts, Roger and Tara

This morning, we went to train in Long Beach and saw Holly for the first time since her surgery - poor thing, she looked sooooo pathetic.

Labor Day

We got quite a bit done over the three day holiday, most significantly the trailer is cleaned up and repaired so can be put up for commission sale.  I also found a stand at a garage sale that would fit a big tank we had stored and then moved the goldfish that were in two smaller tanks to the one big one.

Sunday was also my birthday - Rick got me flowers and a sweet card, plus we went to dinner.

Bonus!  Picture of Kitty in the sun by the sliding glass door.