Christmas Spirit

Today is Christmas....with that comes pictures in front of trees with obnoxious collars on....poor Tax. ;)

A couple of things I have learned within the past 24 hours...1. Giving Tax a toy with a squeaker at 1 am after being at the late night Christmas Eve service at church literally drives my entire family insane. 2. Tax is not too found of my movement. The latter is something that honestly did not surprise me and really was not something I learned in the past 24 hours, but more or less was something we worked really hard on in training yesterday.

Yesterday we went and trained at a friend's field. We had so much fun! Lots and lots of training with lots of fun, relaxing breaks to discuss life. My favorite kind of training. I think Tax enjoyed it too, as he got to just relax in the pool and under a tree for most of the day. So when we weren't just enjoying the Florida weather in December we worked on some jumping. Basically if I was stationary, there were absolutely no problems. As expected. Then if I was moving in the same direction as Tax, no problems. Ok, again, as expected. The work came in when I added angles into the picture. When I would send him to an angle but not babysit the jump or shape the turn before the jump, he would try his hardest to try and catch up and take the shortest path; which usually meant a bar would come down. This didn't happen ever time but was an obvious weakness. So we worked and practiced so many different angles. There was definite improvement throughout the training session too. It was really good though to get him to a new location since he was fairly excited to run when he first realized there was agility and managed to run perfect the very first run. That is always a reassuring feeling.

So to follow up the angles practice, today I did some basic foundation jumping drills with the boy to practice the angles with a lot of speed and me not necessarily always being there. He did a really good job with it. Nothing like jump work to make the perfect Christmas present to an agility dog. ;) Tax has definitely been a really good boy and has been the perfect guest. Dad loves playing with him...and Tax doesn't mind that too much either. ;) For now it is time to relax, watch a movie, then go to bed. :) Oh what a happy Christmas.

Angles and Jumping. Jumping and Angles.

I decided to start a blog about the training I am doing with the Tax Man. I figured a blog would be the easiest way to really explain my thoughts and feelings about the training we are doing....which is kind of a lot.

I have had some interesting training sessions the past couple of days. After the seminar with Ashley Deacon on Tuesday I decided to give the wild man a break so training did not happen again until last night. He did a good job after having a little break. I was afraid all would fall apart and become a mess, but being the good boy that Tax is, he managed to have some really nice sequences. There were a couple of bars down, not all of which were his fault however. I am still having to figure out my timing with him so that I don't mess him up. Oh the handler errors, always keeping me on my feet. ;) Ashley helped me a lot to realize I do a kind of weird thing with my shoulders on my front crosses that coincided with some bars Tax took during the seminar. So I am working really hard on my moves to make things go smoother. I also found that Tax had some issues with jumps at an angle. So we mastered straight on and slightly angled jumps, but needed to refined the jumps that are at more "crazy" angles. So today I did two different sessions with a jump and a cone. Unfortunately I do not have a tunnel here at my house so I used the cone to help him build up some speed. We did a lot of the foundation stuff Ashley showed me and in the second session he did not knock a single jump. I even stepped up the difficulty by doing more extension into collection at an angled jump. Very pleased with the boy. :)  He really is trying his hardest to please me and I am pretty sure he is having a lot of fun. I know I am having a ton of fun with him so I just hope he feels the same way about me! ;) Tomorrow morning we are going to train at a friend's house which will be a lot of fun. I am excited to see how Tax does with the excitement of a new location and new equipment.