Roxy training diary month 73

June 2009

Jun 27. With Rosemary trying to rest, my job is to keep the pups occupied.

Roxy is fairly sedate and easy to please — mostly she wants to be left alone. That's her personality. Sky, on the other hand, is much more of a High Maintenance dog, partly because of his youth and partly because that's just the kind of guy he is. So, we spent some time midday running off energy.

The orange Hurley was already out, so I tossed that a bit, but he loses it in the green grass. If you ever had any doubt that dogs are red-green colorblind, this would clear it up. With the help of Vischeck, I made a composite to show what the Hurley looks like in the grass to Sky. I figure it must not have much smell, because he has a hard time scenting it out, too.

We abandoned the Hurley and went to the garage to pick a new toy from the wide selection to be found there. A Foxtail was just the toy he needed. We had a lot of fun with it. Finally, wiped out, he took it into the tunnel to hide and rest in the shade.

I put 8 miles on my running calendar. Not what I was aiming for, but it's something.

Sky on the Table

See Sky Run. Run, Sky, Run.

Hurley in the Grass

Sky Lurks in the Tunnel

Sky Goes for the Gusto

Jun 26. Rosemary's back from the hospital, with a gloriously clean pathology report. She would like to remind everyone who has a cervix to get an annual Pap smear. Her Pap smear saved her life.

Here's a picture of all the flowers that she received from family, co-workers, and friends. It truly is a blessing to have such wonderful people to hang out with.

I picked up Roxy and Sky at the K-9 Rehab Center where they had been boarded, and then headed up to Kelley Creek to do some herding with them.

On the way between Bountiful and Huntsville, I stopped at a roadside stand and bought several bags of cherries. The local cherry crop has just come in and it's a summertime pleasure for me to drive down the road, bag of cherries on my lap, hocking the pits out the open window. If I spit at the driver's side mirror, I can watch as the pit floats away, and then stops, suspended in time and space, as the wind catches it and takes it away.

Say It With Flowers

Herding practice went well. Considering that they had been boarded for four days, and that the grass was thigh-high on me, and that they couldn't see the stock or me very well, they both did very well. After their herding lesson, they went for a swim with Astrid's and Diana's dogs and got to run off some energy they had accumulated from being cooped up.

Then, with Sky's first trial just two weeks away, we did some agility practice. I worked Sky on the A-frame/tunnel combo, the dog walk, the table, and the seesaw. He insisted on running to the end of the seesaw as fast as possible and having it drop from under him, just so he could get the cookie he wanted. The kid is fearless.

Jun 19. Sky got to board for the first time today, in preparation for his longer boarding experience next week. Rosemary took him and reports that he had no emotional scarring from the incident.

I've been working with him on the see-saw. He's doing great now. We use the method we learned from Stuart Mah where you put the table under the "up" side of the see-saw to limit its travel, then put food on the table and sit. When Sky climbs the seesaw, and walks off the end onto the table, he gets the cookie. Anything short of that, and no cookie. So, being Sky, he would climb very slowly and tentatively up to the pivot point, then when the board tips (BANG!) he would run to the end of the board and get his cookie. Smart Sky.

I am trying to get back on track with my running, now that a month of rain seems to have abated. We'll see how it turns out. I ran only eight miles today, but I feel like I've been beaten up. I must be horribly out of shape. That doesn't bode well for the SF Marathon July 26.

Jun 8. Roxy got her first crack at a ranch herding course, and Sky got a crack at a Junior Herding Dog leg.

Neither one qualified. Sky was being difficult. He will be better another day. Roxy, on the other hand, gave it a valiant effort but the whole course was just too much for her.

Let's see if I can do this from memory:

• Go get four sheep from the "take pen" and move them out the gate and into the field;
• Push the sheep to the other end of the field (about 200 ft) and hold them in an open, three-sided pen for 15 sec;
• Get the sheep out of the three-sided pen and take them out another gate and into an even bigger field;
• Push them to the other end of this huge "graze" field (perhaps 500 ft long);
• Go back and get them, then push them back to a gate near where she started;
• Take them down an alleyway and through a tight gate, where they will join five other sheep;
• Hold the nine sheep in one place long enough for me to put a ribbon around the neck of one, then take it off;
• Push them through a Y-chute so I can sort four into one pen and five into another.

She got stuck on the Y-chute. The rest of it she had done pretty well, although not well enough to qualify, so we quit at that point because she was really not getting it and the sheep were not cooperative. I was proud of her! She did her best on a very difficult course.

Thorn and Roxy

Family Resemblance

Since we were in Baker City, Roxy got to visit with her sister Thorn. They were the last two left in the litter; Thorn has been appearing in RoxyLogs since the very beginning.

See Thorn and Roxy together as puppies.

See video of Roxy herding.

Jun 6. We had an interesting night at the Roller Derby.

We have been wanting to go for a long time, and the local club, Junction City Train Wrecks, was having a bout at the Golden Spike Arena against the Inland Empire Kung Pow Kitties so we headed out there. Of course we were rooting for Purple Haze (pictured here), since she and Sky have the same name, but the most interesting thing that happened was that Rage-N-Red took a spill and had an open fracture of the leg.

We won a bunch of swag from $10 worth of raffle tickets, enough to pay for the admission and then some. So it was a good night.

Purple Haze