Sunday, April 24, 2016
Cart Before the Horse
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Vixen Making Moves
Had fun little class with Vixen today, one hour at The Training Hall, with Christine running the show….we are all counting down the days until we get to have class OUTSIDE!!
Three stations to work…
First, plank work with nose targets. We suck, mostly because I haven’t trained it, like, at all. Now that Rally is on the back burner we can get that back on track.
Second was shaping the tire. The easy stuff was….easy. The testing the understanding resulted in some fabulous failures. It won’t be the last time I say it…FAILURES ARE AESOME!! When we get failures, we also get the opportunity to help our dog understand how to be correct.
I am truly of the mind set now that without training with failure (purposeful exercises set up for the dog to fail, but then also be correct) the dog truly doesn’t understand our expectations.
Vixen had some real thinking moments. When withdrawing reinforcement, she really took a step back and went “what the @#$%!”, then you could see the lightbulb go off! “Oh…I have to do ‘this’ to get reinforcement!” Brilliant!
Last station was some one jump exercises. Super fun. We worked on our backside “sends” and slowly started to introduce “serps” through placement of reinforcement. I’ve started to see that Vixen is not a tight turner, she is a flanker for sure. I know she’ll get it though. It was so much fun working with her on this, that as soon as we got home we headed out back to “the patch” to work on it some more.
Super fun girlie. :)
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Cutting the Cord….is Hard!
Social media has killed good manners, and decency. I hate it.
I wish I could just delete Facebook, Twitter, etc….unfortunately social media is now the “go to” source of communication and networking. So as much as I wish I could ditch it, I really can’t. So I have cleaned house. A clean house is a happy house.
I deleted all but ACTUAL friends and necessary business contacts. I will be careful going forward who I allow in – very careful. Pretty sure there will be an application form and credit check.
It isn’t so much about “who” I let in, but more about who gets in because of who I let in. That is the way social media works. Friends of friends of friends get in….that is scary.
I will likely have made some people angry – “unfriending” is looked up on as an offensive action. It really shouldn’t be taken that way. Simply, if we aren’t friends (defined as we do things in real life, share stories, confide in each other) or connected directly for business reasons, you are out - people who are out really shouldn't be surprised...if they really think about it.
No casual acquaintances, no friends-of-friends, no we can't be friends because of a mutual “like”.
No.
If you don’t directly bring value, no entry.