Breakfast this morning was a little rushed since I was slow to get out of bed (Luke had some problems again last night that had me up). We went downstairs and played on the peanut. Normally this is a fairly quick way to go through breakfast, but Jedi continues to have a heck of a time eating and keeping food in his mouth right now due to a serious lack of teeth. He tries to mouth it out of my hand and food just dribbles everywhere -- oh, and there is an excessive amount of spit being produced and covering my hand with slime as well. I'll be glad when his teeth come in. We spent some time doing spins and twirls with the toy, followed by check-check and nanana around the cone. I threw something new at Jedi by asking for spins and twirls around the cone (this is a "turn away" move). He picked it up really quick!
I didn't get home from work until 2:00 and elected to skip Jedi's lunch again in favor of taking the extra rations to class tonight. We left right at 5:30 -- Jedi got stuck in the van while I fed the other dogs and then we were off. It always amazes me how well he travels after having done nothing all day (well, not really nothing, he did throw a toy around by himself for a while this afternoon). He pretty much slept the whole trip. We got to Canine Sports Zone about 10 minutes early and spent some time wandering outside before going in. When we went in -- holy hot... Apparently the air conditioning bill was pretty bad last month and they are trying to cut back on costs, but ugh.
Jedi had another great night. We didn't really do anything new tonight. Jedi and I started on the tunnel side. The tunnel had a bit more of a curve tonight. I figured I may as well challenge Jedi, so I really pushed the "around the clock" game and had him finding some pretty impressive entrances -- especially from the back side. The last time I tried that he did a lot of circling of the tunnel, but tonight he did really well and found the entrance every time. I was pretty impressed since I've spent exactly zero time training this skill since the last time we did it in class. One of my training weaknesses with my other dogs is those backside tunnels, so I'd really love for that to not be an issue with Jedi (yeah, yeah -- if I would work on it...).
Over on the other side we played with cones. Jedi got to show off his check-check and nanana, and then we were asked to do some figure eights. The little stinker still shoots behind me occasionally when calling him in to my left hand, so we still need to work on that. After the cone work we moved to bottoms on the travel planks. My travel plank was conveniently located between two cones, so I used the cones to send Jedi around and have him come at the plank with a bit of speed. He overshot a few times and then started to catch on. I was using his new double tennis ball tug for this portion of class and he thought that was pretty awesome.
When we switched sides again we did chute exercises. I used this opportunity to start proofing Jedi's stays by lifting my arm and waving it around a bit. I got him a couple of times, but then he started to figure out the game and waited nicely for the verbal release. The class took a short break for everyone to get water (I offer it to Jedi throughout the night because he plays hard the whole time). I sat down with Jedi by the paw pods and started working him through his dinner since he hadn't really had a chance to eat anything yet. Our next exercise was Linda Mecklenberg's one-jump exercise where you sit by the standard and have the dog jump back and forth in a nice arc. Jedi and the other dog in our rotation, Jamaica, are too young for this so we did call to heal exercises with a jump standard instead. I started to push Jedi's angles a bit more.
They introduced the double jump tonight. Ours was set at 4". I worked on Jedi's lead out and threw in some blind crosses on release. When we rotated again I made the executive decision to take Jedi into the turf arena next to our training arena to work on proofing his stays without distracting the other dogs in our class. Then I started asking Jedi to leave the toy on the ground to go wrap the jump standard before being released to his toy. This is still hard for him, but he continued to get better as we went. The poor guy was hot and panting at the end of all of this and attempted to swim in his water dish for a bit.
Things ran a little long and we didn't get out of there until about 8:45. Normally when class runs long I'd be like, "cool, more training time" -- but with our drive home I'm not keen on getting home even later, so I didn't stick around to chit-chat at all tonight. We made good time and got home at 10:30. I chucked the ice from the cooler onto the deck, which pretty much made Jedi's night. After he'd had enough of that (or it melted, I would guess) he started throwing a toy in my face. You really think he'd be pooped after all of that running at class tonight....In other news, I noticed today that Jedi is starting to grow "pants." He's finally losing that puppy fluff and growing an actual coat!
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