La di dah

Again - another non-eventful week over here! Mind you it was lovely to have a nice break on the weekend (3 day weekend... bring it on!). Downside is of course that this is the LAST allocated long-weekend for us until CHRISTMAS as the queens birthday/ cup weekend is not recognised by the university... so will have to be taken as annual leave (aka cup weekend ;-) ). I have to keep telling myself "2 weeks for christmas, 2 weeks for christmas".

Sooo... what did I get up to?! Well Fri/ Sat was spent showing at Lancefield/ Sunbury. Was an enjoyable weekend and we picked up a few points too :). Nothing overly exciting as they were small shows in the way of Aussies. Still over 1200 dogs each day I think?! Anyways - at the moment i'm trying various things to improve Kinta's coat, or rather quantity of it. Her coat is actually quite nice and healthy, but it just lacks...... volume! So I've changed her diet and also going to wash her in "royal jelly" to see if that will make a difference at all!

Saturday night was spent with the gals - and yet another Harry Potter night (ok, so the first 2 weren't planned that way, it was more a 'come over for dinner and watch a movie' by which time were were already suckered into HP!). Sat it was kind of planned as we knew we were going to end up watching it anyways ;). We have gone a little 'up market' of late - read: rather than ordering pizza's we have been cooking dinner!!! Surprisingly no-one is dead yet.... I think the closest we came was at MY dinner.... not because of the taste of it (Chicken Parma... self crumbed and all thank you very much :p )... but because the bl**dy non-stick greaseproof paper apparently isn't non-stick!!!! ROFL!

Job hunting is still.... well.... hunting ;). No news there.

Very excited about this weekend - we have our ASCV open show on Saturday - Leo and Kinta entered. Will be interesting to see results as our aspiring judge is a fellow Aussie breeder, so it's always nice to know the type and style that they like :). No points are awarded at open shows, just so you know :p. The main part of the excitement however is that we also have an agility trial on Sunday - a NADAC one (ie: not the usual trials we go to) and Kinta's first trial! I'm very excited about it as I'm curious to see how both dogs will go, Leo too as I've been working on him a lot lately to get a bit of speed on him.

I have also commenced Leo's UD training. Am using Morgan Spector's method of teaching Leo scent work and all seems to be going well so far. I am sure we'll come up with a zillion glitches, but I have a heap of people to call on if the going gets tough! So far:

Lesson 1 - he indicated pretty well up to about 4 articles - when he occasionally started to pick up the wrong one. Ended the session on a high and feeling quite proud of ourselves.

Lesson 2 - seemed that lesson 1 didn't go as well planned as I thought - turned out Leo thought the idea was to pick up ANY article (possibly caused by my too eager clicks when he 'sniffed' the right one). Went right back to start and I *think* we are on the right track now. He will 'search' for the right scent and will confidently pick it up when he has found it - sometimes he searches for a while, other times he picks it up immediately. Much higher success rate. Up to 3-4 articles now.

Another lesson tonight, and the next... then he'll have a few days break. I always like to give them a break after a 'new' exercise has been introduced as it sort of lets the whole scenario 'sink in' and I seem to get a really good response from doing this (whether I am right or not, who knows!!!)

That's it from me I think... back to work!

ETA - now seriously guys - comment on the blog - I haven't had a comment since Feb and am feeling un-loved... I know people are reading ;).... Please..... *bribes with pieces of chocolate*