Jedi was the energizer bunny this morning. Napping is for suckers, he says. The good news is that he generally self-entertained while I worked from home -- and by that I mean he didn't spent a huge amount of time dropping toys on my keyboard to get my attention. Jedi has embraced the wonder of the window seats and is spending a lot more time there these days. He will join in to see what the fuss is if someone else sees something, but he also is starting to spend time up there on his own -- often with a toy hanging from his mouth, watching the world go by.
Tonight was Jedi's final night of Agility Foundations 2 at Canine Sports Zone. While we have both enjoyed our 12 weeks of fun during these two sessions of classes, I have to admit that I look forward to driving 225 fewer miles each week and not driving home 2 hours in the dark. It was worth it, though, for the great experience that it gave Jedi of working around other dogs in a charged environment. His ability to focus is remarkable and he's even managed to work through the struggles of other people using squeakers! That was by far the most difficult thing when we first started.
Our class wasn't terribly structured tonight. There was a sequence on one side that people took turns on one by one. The rest of the time we were pretty much on our own to do whatever we wanted. The instructors have pretty much just turned me loose to do my thing while they help the other students, and this is totally fine by me. We started with a few simple tricks so that Jedi could get part of his dinner in him, and then we went over to the turf arena to play.
There was a PVC table frame off to the side not far from the teeter, so I drug both of those out and used the frame to prop the teeter up about 6" off the ground. We worked on teeter slams in both directions. It's a pretty noisy teeter, but Jedi has never seemed to mind that. After some bangs I set up some of the jump standards in a shallow serpentine pattern. I worked on running Jedi through this and gradually flattened it a bit. He did well, but did run past the middle or last jump standard on occasion. I also worked on adding a rear cross into the last jump and he did super.
When it was our turn over on the sequence side the trainer pretty much just stood back and said to do whatever I wanted. The sequence was a simple two jumps into a curved tunnel followed by another jump and the table. Thankfully Jedi didn't have any issues with the dark curved tunnel this week, so that was just an oddity from last week. He drove nicely through everything with great speed and enthusiasm. He overshot the table most of the time, but he did try to grab it (it's just paint/sand and has no base, so he hits it and just slides off it). We wrapped standards and did rear cross wraps back into the tunnel, and we did rear crosses at the tunnel. I pretty much did what I could with the simple sequence and Jedi surely enjoyed himself.
He was panting quite heavily from all of the running, so we took a little break from running and playing for a bit. We spent some time playing on the wobble board and used up the rest of his dinner playing with paw pods. Eventually I took him back into the turf arena and did a few more teeter slams, and then ran him through the serpentine a few more times. I ended with a few stays/recalls across the big arena. His stay is so good these days that it's just like doing a restrained recall for as excited as he gets. I figure if he can stay on a dock in front of a pool then he can stay about anywhere.
So that's that, class is done. We had the option of doing one more sequence on the other side, but they'd replaced a couple of jumps with a broad jump board and the tire, neither of which I'm a fan of running Jedi through at this stage (the training tire has a raised bar on the bottom that absolutely terrifies me with the way Jedi runs) -- so I passed on that turn since it was already 8:30 anyhow. We drove home through a magnificent lightening storm and hit a monsoon about 15 miles from home. It was fun getting the dogs outside when we got home, between the lightening, thunder, and rain -- but Jedi was completely oblivious to it all. He's going to miss class, but imagine how excited he'll be the next time we go to a trial at CSZ!
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