Cleaned Up

Rugby and I signed up for a 12 week "run-through class" at a local club to give us one more place to do get our obedience practice in. Basically we just show up and call patterns for each other. There is an instructor but no instruction is given.

He was looking kind of rough Monday night since he was outside helping us re-do our front planter for the spring time and was a brown dog from the knees down. We couldn't show up to the first day of the class looking like that.

I think Rugby looks like a rat when he is wet so I have refrained from photographing him in the bath for this long, but I couldn't resist any more!

...Look at that EVIL eye he is giving me!

So Rugby can have some dignity still - here he is all dry and clean.

Good thing we are going to this class because it is going to make us focus on not forgetting our open stuff. We have been working so much on utility, and less on open - it showed today. His heeling was wide, and lagged in some places. His fronts and finishes were just...weird today too. It definetely wouldn't have gotten us the scores we got the other week.  At least he "qualified" in all the exercises.

 I was so dissapointed we went back in the warm up ring once we finished and it took me a bit of time to get him back to working normally. I know we can do much much better than we did today. Mediocrity is not okay.

 Now that I sit here thinking about it, I think it was more a reflection of ME than anything else. I handled him differently today than I usually do. I can't really say WHAT I did that was different but obviously he didn't like it. Next week I am going to pay close attention to what I do and treat the class more like a show. The only other difference I could think of is that we ran a B pattern instead of an A pattern... but we run B patterns in Thursday night class all the time, so why would that matter?