Great Weekend

The seminar was fabulous. I intended on writing a blog post each night but I was too tired. In fact, I am still too tired. But if I don't write it down I will forget.

As always Terry was full of great ideas, challenging sequencing, and fine tuning tips for handling. His sense of humor and simple approach to better handling was very refreshing. Everyone got a lot of feedback and I am sure that people will have stuff to keep working on for a while!

The overall theme seemed to be serpentines, one could be found in just about every sequence we ran. Also 270's, threadles, and lead outs were discussed.

Pixel was in the friday morning session. She did pretty well although was a little unsure at first. I am finding that I need to rev her up a lot on the startline and lead out as little as possible. Also, I need to go deep into tunnels and pick her up out of them to get more speed. She worked very hard though and I was impressed with how well she did.

Boone worked in the friday afternoon session and did very well. He was super excited to be there and was focused almost the whole 4 hour session. We worked on 270's, and although Boone is very reliable with the pattern we still got a few pointers.

Wicca worked all saturday morning and did awesome. I was able to handle her pretty well on some challenging exercises. I need to work on moving through a serpentine and trusting that she'll take the jump even if I am leaving.

Boone worked in the afternoon and did a great job with some tough stuff. He listened so well and didn't do anything flaky at all. It was pretty amazing actually.

Sunday I alternated Boone and Wicca in the morning. Boone was fairly strange by then and had a hard time focusing. We worked on finding tight lines and handling efficiently. The less yardage the better. Terry gave me some good suggestions for Boone's drifting and disconnect on course- talk to him on turns, go back and work on rewarding close on turns, and use his tricks more to reconnect before a run.

Sunday afternoon I worked mostly Pixel and she did great! No hesitation this time and she really was able to get some good speed. I was very impressed with her. We worked on front and rear crosses- and of course some serpentines.

All of our students did great and I think that everyone came away with more than little to work on. Terry did a great job of really figuring out each handler/dog team. It was a very fun, but long weekend!