Adventures in…

Grooming, for starters. I love the look of a cleanly clipped Poodle face. However, it’s been a while (okay, nearly three decades) since I’ve groomed Poodles, and Simon is a very wiggly puppy. Grooming has been something of an adventure for both of us. The good news is that we are getting better, and his face is mostly clipped these days. The bad news is that I regularly see places I’ve missed. Eh, we’ll get there eventually.

In other grooming news, he’s undergone a pretty radical transformation. We were both tired of sealing with soggy puppy fuzz with all the rain we were having, so he’s been sporting a Miami for the past month and a half.

Again with the “We are learning as we go along.”.

We’ve tidied up a bit.

And we are in need of a trim again.

He outgrew his car crate, so he got an upgrade.

We’ve been doing some training, of course, and he’s earned four titles already. He’s got his 2K9 and Novice Trick Dog from Do More With Your Dog, his Beginner Seeker geocaching title from GeoPup Sports, and his Foundation Skills Level 1 from All Dogs Parkour. Plus, he’s graduated from our local Petsmart puppy class. He’ll be 21 weeks old tomorrow.

And I’m trying to figure out just how on earth he’s gotten to be that big and that old already.

More adventures to come.

More catching up

Well, another long gap in posting here. Rather a lot has happened since my last post, so I guess I’d better bring things up to date, then try and remember to post more often in the future.

In the “good” column for dog sports, both Leo and Lily earned their GeoPup Sports Novice Seeker and Tracker titles in August, as well as their Outdoor Dog Wagging Walkers Level 2 (distance track) titles this month. In the “good” column for life in general, we finally got our central heat and AC units replaced this past August, nearly a year after the old ones died.

In the “not so good” life in general column, my husband was in a wreck (he was fine) the last week of July that ripped the outside shell off the front passenger side door of his car, and it took nearly a month before the other person’s insurance finally agreed that they were responsible for the accident and that they would cover the repairs (they actually totaled it out, but it did cover the repair cost). Meanwhile, his car was sitting at the body shop. Once we got the money for that, we had to wait nearly two more weeks for the mirror (which had to be ordered from Ford) to come in before we could pick it up.

By the time we finally got his car back, our son had brought home some kind of respiratory bug, and passed it around to the rest of us. He missed a week and a half of school, he was so sick. The real fun part though, was me. I was getting better when I relapsed, getting even sicker than before. With three doctor visits in as many weeks, I wound up doing two courses of antibiotics, as well as steroids and heavy-duty prescription cough medication. A month later, I am just starting to feel human.

In the “you have *GOT* to be kidding” column, we had Tropical Depression Imelda come through earlier this month. Our area got 24″ of rain in roughly 24 hours. Other areas got up to 40″ in the same time frame. Thankfully, I live in one of the highest parts of town, and the worst we had was some street flooding that quickly subsided, and ankle-deep water in our back yard. Other people weren’t nearly as lucky, and after just finally recovering from Tropical Storm Harvey flooding two years ago, they got flooded out again. My son’s school had water get inside some of the building. Most of the schools reopened yesterday, but his school, as well as one other that took on water, has a tentative reopening date of October 14th.

Before I got sick, I sent in a special submission to the International Dog Parkour Association. I had been making compilations of the girls’ passing IDPKA videos, but I couldn’t find all of Ilka’s Novice video clips. I thought that maybe checking the date on her certificate might help me locate them, but after looking through my binder of unframed certificates, I couldn’t find it. Thinking that maybe I had downloaded it, but not printed it out yet, I checked my computer files and still couldn’t find it. Since I’m bad about not deleting emails, I decided to see if maybe I hadn’t downloaded it after all. That’s when I finally figured out that I had never submitted it. I’d lost her before we finished it.

After verifying that I could submit for her Novice Parkour Dog title posthumously, I started digging through all my videos of her, hoping that I could find enough behaviors that met the IDPKA requirements, which are somewhat different than our more usual ADP parkour. After finding videos I thought would work, I sent it off. I finally heard back from the IDPKA on the 24th… More than two years after her death, I can add PKD-N to her alphabet soup, and she officially finishes her sports career with a total of 20 titles between six different organizations.

Oh yeah, does anyone see the typo in the video? I didn’t see it until after I’d already uploaded and shared it, so it’s staying.

Want to try something new?

Like walking or hiking with your dog and like geocaching?

Like walking and hiking with your dog, but haven’t a clue as to what geocaching is?

Like boating or camping with your dog?

If so, then I’ve got a couple of new online titling organizations for you.

The first is GeoPup Sports, a fun way to combine exercising with your dog a geocaching. For those of you who are wondering “what in the heck is this geocaching thing?”, geocaching is basically a world-wide scavenger hunt using GPS coordinates. Unlike an actual scavenger hunt, though, you don’t need to drag home some ridiculous item, just record your finds on the Geocaching.com website. Most caches are containers that hold a physical log for you to sign, and, depending on the size of the container, may also have some goodies for trading or a trackable item. Trackables are items with a unique code that you can look up on the website, and move from cache to cache. There are some caches that aren’t containers, but rather places. Those can be called either Earth caches or Virtual caches, which are frequently historical and/or educational.

To earn GeoPup Sports titles, there are two main tracks, the Seeker division, where you look for caches, and the Hider division, where you place your own caches. There is also the Tracker division where you can look for and place trackables, as well as a Drifter “add on” title for finding or placing caches outside of your home territory. Each level, from Beginner, and progressing through Novice, Experienced, Skilled, and Proficient require you to either find or place a certain number of caches with your dog, log them on the Geocaching.com website, and snap a picture of your dog(s) with the caches. Leo and Lily have both earned their Beginner Seeker and Beginner Tracker titles, and we are logging more caches and trackables for the higher levels, as well.

The second organization I’d like to share is called Outdoor Dog, and it’s all about getting into the great outdoors with your dog. They offer titles in walking (flat paths or city/urban areas), hiking (hillier, wooded and/or wilderness type areas), paddling sports (kayaking, canoeing, and other human propelled watercraft), boating (non-human propelled watercraft), and camping (RV, cabin, or tent). Each titling opportunities has two different “tracks”, based on either outing, location, distance, or time, depending on what you are doing. One thing I like about Outdoor Dog is that, unlike some other organizations, when going for walking or hiking titles, dogs don’t have to wear backpacks or carry a certain amount of weight.

The fun part of of these two organizations if that you can make a single outing do double duty. Since Leo, Lily, and I are city girls, we hunt for urban caches (the wildest places we’ve been have been overgrown, neglected areas of some city parks), so we can keep track of the distance we walk (for an Outdoor Dog Wagging Walker title) while hunting for geocaches (for a GeoPup Sports title).

Currently, both organizations are being run through Facebook groups. Information about GeoPup Sports can be found here
https://www.facebook.com/groups/GeoPupSports/and more information about Outdoor Dog can be found here
https://www.facebook.com/groups/438259740246580/

All Dogs Parkour Premier Titles and More

There are currently two dogs with ADP Level 1 Premier titles, and one dog with an ADP Level 2 Premier title. Leo and Lily are those dogs. Now that summer is upon us, and teams in other parts of the country get out and about, I’m sure that there will soon be other dogs with Level Premier titles, but it’s been great to be the “guinea pigs” for the program.

Leo’s Level 2 Premier title submission.

 

Lily’s Level 1 title submission.

 

In my last post, I mentioned a new organization that combined dogs and Geocaching, called GeoPup Sports. I’d heard of Geocaching, but had never had any interest in doing it until GeoPup Sports started up. Turns out, it’s kind of fun, and we have enough caches logged to apply for their GeoPup Sports Beginner titles next month. This is Lily’s first find, called “Under the Nose of Voodoo”.

 

For more information about GeoPupSports, you can visit their Facebook group. https://www.facebook.com/groups/GeoPupSports/ For more info about Geocaching, you can visit the Geocaching website. https://www.geocaching.com/play/search

As always, I suggest you check out the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy for great classes. http://www.fenzidogsportsacademy.com/ Enrollment is open until the 15th, and if you need a scholarship, they are taking applications through the 10th. This session, the girls and I are taking FF280: Empowerment, CC430: Helping Dogs Thrive: Massage for Performance Dogs, FE238: Structure and Motion, and FE600: Shoot the Dog!. That last one is a photography class, by the way.