Day 48 - Brenengen Chevrolet Sparta

It's a work from home Friday! My favorite day of the week. It's a good thing that work was pretty quiet this morning, because Jedi was a bit nuts. For his breakfast training session we pretty much spent the entire session on the behavior of holding the jump bar. He's doing well with figuring out the grasping behavior with one paw and he often tries to do both paws (he's still not strong enough to hold himself up for any length of time in the pretty position). Interestingly enough he's been more dominant with his right paw with this behavior.

Around mid-morning I finally gave up and took Jedi outside to chase a ball. It was either that or keep having him walk over the top of my computer. This made him extremely happy and things stayed pretty quiet until lunch. A note about this picture -- Jedi is becoming a mountain goat. Today he assumed Kizzy's position on top of the couch behind my head (thankfully she wasn't there first so she didn't care). He has scaled the couch a few times, and he's jumped onto my bed two or three times now. He's figuring out how to operate all four legs together, I guess.

I kept up the ritual of nail-trim Friday for our lunch training session. Jedi was well-rested from his nap, so he was on the squirrely side today. He was fine about his feet being handled and the nails being clipped -- he was just hyper-focused on the food dish in front of him and not terribly patient about waiting for me to deliver it to him. He did well waiting his turn while the other dogs got their nails done, though (I toss pieces of food at him occasionally to reward his patience).

After lunch we tossed/rolled some frisbees to wear Jedi out for the afternoon. The pools weren't terrible today and it wasn't as hot as it has been, so Jedi (and Secret) had to settle for what came out of the hose while I refilled the outside bucket.

Jedi pretty much slept until we had to leave for an oil change appointment at 3:00. My hope was that they would allow Jedi to hang out in the waiting area so that he could have that new experience today, but I figured we'd hang out outside if we have to. They had no problem with us staying inside, though, so that's what we did!

I came prepared with Jedi's bag of toys. I sat down on the floor with him and started to go through the bag-o-fun. If I tried to put a toy away and wasn't fast enough about getting another one out, Jedi tried to go and get his own. He's got that bag figured out, that's for sure. I ended up settling on the holee roller with a squeaker ball inside of it because this was something Jedi could use to self-entertain without leaving pieces of everything all over the floor. He played with that thing for a good solid half hour (and entertained all of the people there).

After that first half hour I took Jedi outside since he'd been playing pretty hard and I didn't want to be caught with him needing to empty himself when we had to pay or something. We walked out to the patch of grass up by the highway and he did his thing, unfazed by the numerous cars going by. I was hoping the construction crew across the highway would be at work, but I'm guessing they took off early for the holiday.

Back inside I tried to get Jedi to just settle, but it's hard to settle when there is a bag of toys in front of you. I kept our games to lower value toys and we worked through some tricks and behaviors, including the start of a hold (in his mouth).

We were there pretty much a full hour (I got my tires rotated, too) and Jedi did great. He thought it was a super fun place to visit and wasn't bothered by anything.

Tonight we worked on pivots for dinner. I'm terrible about teaching stuff and then never doing it again, so I figured we should revisit this from the earlier step of full circles on the raised bowl. As I figured, when we go a while without doing something it doesn't come as easily. It didn't take too long to get full circles back, though. We moved into doing pivots to the leg on the raised bowl, and then ended with the small plate.

I'm skipping the idea of heading out to that other horse show tonight. The radar didn't look good so I figured I wouldn't chance it. Jedi was pretty pooped out from his earlier adventure today anyhow, but he's awake now....!