Did I really write a whole Wardrobe Essential post about being sweaty?
Here I am, trying to make dog agility the new brown or black or iphone and I am writing about sweatiness. This is an issue I sometimes have about editing. I have never been a great editor of anything. My mouth runs off into places it shouldn’t. My house is so full of stuff that I just can’t stop collecting. In the art show days the pattern had to be painted EVERYWHERE and I had to always add more tree branches. My sentences get really really long because I have to keep adding words. Don’t even talk about my how long my paragraphs are. The subject matter runs amuck and makes weird tangential turns. Have you ever heard one of my riding lessons?
To make dog agility the iphone, I have to remember not to scare people! Have you seen an iphone? It would never scare anyone. It is like having your best friend turned into a tiny little, um, thing, and it goes on the internet right there in your palm and your favorite pictures and songs are there and you can be in ebay and the real estate listings and team small dog and then the phone rings and it is Santa! Or it could be a mom trying to reschedule her kid’s lesson too, but it could be Santa or my nephew with a song. This is sort of like how cool dog agility is but the iphone had such good marketing and dog agility has so very, very little.
Except for my blog! And when it’s on the Animal Planet. And when everyone tries teaching their dog to do it and they are so happy, just like they got an iphone of their very own. Not just using Karl’s. An iphone is full of information, negligibly essential information. Is that a word? Like, you don’t really NEED an iphone but you can convince yourself that you do and it is not just a cool little, um, thing, you worry about breaking and take out to check the weather. Dog agility, is it essential to our lives? Would be we sad if it just went away and there were no more dog shows? Yeah, we would be. We would get back to being a regular artist again, the studio would be less full of boxes and the couch with the BROKEN LEG and magnolia. The trees in the yard wouldn’t be dead and the office would have been done by now.
But do you see how much we like it for us and for dogs that we actually take time out to go train the dogs so they will get good at it and exersize them? So here is what Gustavo is learning now, getting ready to be a good agility dog.
His contacts are doing good-nice and solid on the end of his little board and contact stuff.
He is hitting a fast down on the table and on the end of a stationary teeter. I am holding him in the down and getting him used to motion by moving it to a table.
He is solid on jump and tunnel and tire. On a straight line. We are working super easy patterns with front cross, no rear cross for now, go on and I am just starting an Out.
We probably spend 80% of our time practicing just doing tugging out there and close (come on over to my left side and do not do the tunnel 8 times) and side (come on over to my right side and do not run up the dogwalk a-frame and teeter while i blink my eye) just working on control. So the other stuff is coming together more slowly but we sure do need a LOT of control.
Since I am essentially a completely LAZY dog trainer (ala NOT Susan Garrett!) the control issues are being built out there on the agility field and not in the obedience world. A training flaw? Yes. Is it fun to do obedience? No. There, I said it. It is out. I am a bad, bad, bad dog trainer. But I do not have an iphone and I am not hardly being an artist and we still don’t have a ranch so there you go.
Um, what was the point of what I was trying to get it here? Something about editing and not writing about sweatiness but good marketing? I can’t remember and I have to go to work and there is no weave pole training (still open channels and cages on one side halfway through) this morning but OK! Have fun!