We almost made it without Jedi barking this morning. At least that's not what woke me up. The other dogs were starting to get up and move around, so that's what set Jedi off this morning. Extra incentive to try moving him into the bed? We'll have to see. I don't have anything going on this weekend, so maybe we'll test the waters. He's not super skilled at jumping up on the bed just yet and it seems more like luck that he ends up there most of the time, so I think my only concern is his ability to come back up if he jumps down. Then again, my motto has always been, "You move, you go in the crate," so I suppose I could just go back to that.
This morning I worked on leg pivots with Jedi in the living room. I think we need to take that show into a bigger space because Jedi is starting to default to a sit at my side, which makes it hard to get him to stick on my leg as I move forward. We moved on to doing leg lifts on the window seats. I was trying for a lift with both legs (hand stand pose), but Jedi was in pee trick mode so I rewarded that. When we were out for last potty before I left Jedi got a little obsessed with climbing the a-frame -- so much so that we had to move to the other side of the yard to get him down. The good news is that he doesn't leap off of it. I always make sure to go over and lure him down into a bottom, so hopefully he never gets it in his head to leap.
When I got home we had to do a quick training session because I had a 1:00 meeting I had to call into. We went out and did a teeter session. I recorded it, but that session didn't make it on video because Kizzy was just all up in the way the entire time. I think I'm going to have to make it a rule to lock up the dogs (or at least Kizzy) when we do teeter work. I still worry that shooing her away has led to some of Kizzy's recent teeter issues at trials, so it's not helping her, either -- but Jedi also goes slower and is more hesitant about driving to the end if Kizzy is right there, or if I'm stepping around or over her because she's in the way. He did fine, but I used the video I took yesterday. Speaking of, here it is!
I also included our cone work from today in the video. I'm super pleased with Jedi's progress in learning to read my handling, although he still sometimes struggles to come into my hand when going to the left -- He crosses behind me to go around the other cone. That's fine, I just try to pick him up the next time and make the toy hand more obvious. He's figuring it out. Things are getting better with the initial sends off the left, but Jedi does still occasionally get "stuck." The end of the video has some bonus footage of Jedi playing with the hose and the insane rolling he always does after (although this was tame by normal standards!).
This afternoon I was working on something when I noticed that there were some birds going kind of bonkers outside. It had gone on for a bit, so I finally got up to check things out. Jedi was over by the fence, occasionally jumping up at the birds above him. He was also sniffing around at the bottom of the fence, so I wondered if he had found a baby bird and that's why they were all carrying on. As I made my way out Jedi came running and he got dive-bombed by a couple of angry birds. It didn't take long to see that Jedi wasn't the cause of the problem, it was Kizzy. She was guarding her prize. :o( Why they weren't dive-bombing her is beyond me. Thankfully I got it away from her easily enough. Dumb birds, I hate when this happens. 
I got pulled into something late this afternoon for work, so we were a little later than usual in leaving for our daily outing. Because I have school tonight, I needed to stick closer to home to be home by 8:00. Butterfest is happening in Sparta this weekend, so I thought we'd go see if anything was going on over on that side of town. We've been to Memorial Park in Sparta before, but last time we checked out the south end of the park. Today we hit up the north side.
I parked all the way down at the end by the golf course and then we made our way back up to the main park area. Some of the carnival rides and tents are out already, so we made our way along the path to investigate everything. The dogs didn't even seem to notice anything, but nothing was on and there weren't any people around, so I guess that isn't very surprising. I would like to get Jedi down to the park this weekend, but it's supposed to be horrifically hot so we'll have to see how that goes.
Once we got past the carnival area I saw that there was a softball game going on at the ball fields. We went off in that direction and found a spot in the grass to sit and watch for a bit. We stuck around for a little over an inning. Jedi really took things in and paid attention to the action on the field (especially the foul ball that came over the fence and bounced off the roof not far from us). He let out a couple of little (shrill...) barks, but I think they were more because he was bored of sitting still versus overstimulated by anything in front of him.When we left the ball fields we went up the walkway and took the sidewalk along the main road. I've always said that Jedi has had excellent leash skills with zero training -- well, that went away tonight. He started out pulling like a freight train and needed several reminders to walk nicely. He figured it out, but for a bit there I felt like I was in class working with a student's dog. Ha! Once he got it out of his system he walked nicely the rest of the way to the van. In all we were out for a little over 45 minutes. It was a nice night to be out, especially considering the awful heat coming our way in a couple of days.
I just checked in on Jedi a bit ago because he was out in the yard by himself. I caught him running laps with a weed in his mouth. Apparently I should have ran him again tonight?
No comments:
Post a Comment