Day 39 - Sparta High School

Jedi's braces have been in for a full week and were starting to look a big raggedy, so today I decided to take them out. The Uni-Solve wipes that I picked up at the pharmacy the other day worked really well! Jedi was a good boy and sat quietly while I just continued to rub the wipes back and forth to free the glue from his ears. I think the smell bothered him, but he was a trooper.

His ears continue to stand gloriously tall without the braces! I'm under no delusion that they will not need to be braced again as he continues to teeth. It's quite likely, I'm sure -- but I'm electing not to brace while I don't have to, so we'll see what these babies do over the next few days. It would just figure, though, that I would buy all of the supplies and then end up only using them once.

This morning I switched to a small plate for our leg pivots. Jedi didn't appear to notice a difference. We also did leg crosses and sit pretty with target touches. We ended with spoon/bowl -- this morning I upped the difficulty by moving the bowl away from me. This did cause some confusion at first, but Jedi figured it out.

Before I had to leave for the office this morning, we were outside wandering around when I looked over and saw Jedi starting to climb up and investigate the a-frame (he appeared to be licking the moisture off it). Uh, no buddy. Not yet. I chuckled, though, when he did a "bottom" unprompted on his own. He likes putting his back feet on stuff.

When I got home from work I grabbed the video camera and taped our training session outside. I used the small plate again for leg pivots. Considering the obnoxious neighbor dogs were barking the whole time, I thought he did well to keep his focus. We also did some back-ups onto the a-frame, and some more teeter bangs.

I had a meeting at 1:00 so playtime had to wait. Once that was over with we went outside and did some sends around the cone. Jedi is getting the hang of sending from both directions, although he still likes to cut behind me when going counter clockwise. He does a bit better if I do a collar grab and release him.

After work I decided to head out with Jedi and Secret to the local high school for our outing of the day. I was hoping that maybe there would be something going on at the track or ball fields, but unfortunately when I pulled up the only thing going on was girls soccer practice that was wrapping up. Oh well, so much for that idea.

I parked the van at the back edge of the fields and we just started heading for the main road. There is a little neighborhood across from the school, so I figured we would check that out. Jedi unloaded himself while we were cutting across the grass, so I found myself in search of a trash can. I spotted one across the parking lot at the school, so we made our way in that direction. As we turned around and started to head back to the street I heard a noise, looked up, and saw us being charged by an off leash dog. Sigh.

At least I had a lot of warning, because I could hear him coming from a mile away between the sound of his nails scrambling on the pavement and the growl he was emitting. I elected to pick Jedi up to avoid any possible interaction, knowing I wouldn't have any hesitation in kicking the dog in the head if need be. Jedi let out a couple of tough guy woofs but in general was really good at not doing anything to escalate the situation. Secret gets a giant gold star for silently making it very clear that she had every intention of killing this strange dog if he came any closer (I thank her for the silent part because I'm sure this helps to not get Jedi riled up). She bared her teeth at the dog while I yelled at it and stomped at it to get away. Thankfully the dog wasn't stupid enough to continue his advances. Eventually its owner started yelling for him, although the owner couldn't be bothered to actually come out in front of the house to see what his dog was up to. The dog managed to cross back across the road without getting hit.

The rest of the walk was pretty uneventful. We crossed paths with a couple of folks out walking their fat but well-behaved lab mix. There was a very playful husky tied out in the front yard of another house that we passed by twice. There were also a LOT of bunnies in this neighborhood, but Jedi didn't seem to notice them (Secret did).

We came back out of that neighborhood and decided to continue our walk by going around the front of the school along the main roadway. I elected not to make the dogs pose in front of the school sign since there was so much traffic passing by and I didn't want to look like an idiot.  :o)  I didn't want to go another full block up the street, so we cut up to go behind the school and ended up walking the fence line of the track field to get us back around to the ball fields where we could walk back to the van. We were out for about 40 minutes today.

For dinner tonight I set up some "cavaletti" to get the last bit of video for our puppy class. Silvia says to use objects like boxes, drawers, etc., but I can't come up with anything here so I elected to set up jump standards and just use low bars. I set everything at 4" but most of them ended up getting knocked down. I let that go for now with the goal of getting him to stop hopping/loping through (he's supposed to trot). For his first time I don't think he did too bad, but he's definitely an eager beaver.

We finished up by getting video of door/drawer slams and a quick clip showing his progress of 4-in to the food dish (since I can't keep him out of the darn thing lately). And yes, with all of this talk about video I did manage to get it edited tonight! I still need to submit it to class to get feedback from Silvia.

I would still like to put together clips of the other stuff that Jedi has been working on (like the spoon trick, backing up the stairs, side legs, sending around the cone), but I elected to keep this video limited to the stuff we're actually doing in Lesson 3 (I did include a little teeter slamming at the end, but I figure that goes with the drawer bit).