A historical geography lesson in the context of difficult weave pole entries, not to be confused with stipper poles.

I went out to practice really early yesterday morning before work, because I wanted to see if we learned anything in the seminar. And I was sad. EVERYBODY else went back to the Silvia seminar but I had to go to work. Also, Gustavo had started doing one of those dogwalks with the slowing down on the down ramp at the seminar, and that freaked me out. You've seen that, right? Slow down a little to hit the yellow paint? NO! Not the dogwalk we want. Regular old fast, not what we're looking for. I like agility that looks a little CRAZY.


I think it was just the nerves of the whole thing. Mayhem Gustavo was back practicing, and the super fast dogwalks were right there the whole time. And we practiced some of the wild seminar pole entries. I believe these are called the kind of poles you do if you live in Europe. Somewhere like Slovenia. Weave poles, right? You know that's what I mean and not stripper poles if I say poles? Just checking. And now, back to our history lesson.


I realized I had NO IDEA where Slovenia was. It is a sandwich between Austria and Croatia, in case you're as lame as me about Central European Geography and History 101. Former Yugoslavia. When I was all blah blah blah I met Silvia Trkman My Agility Hero, which is what I tell everybody now, and it makes most people sort of glaze over and look at me funny, someone asked me where Slovenia was. I sort of gestured vaguely east with a fluttery hand, mumbling something something former communism. Slovenia is actually the happy country that came out of Stalin, Tito, death of the USSR, and Yugos. In case you were wondering.

Ooh la la.

So I found this. Kaki seems to be a glamorous french super model opera singer living on a beautiful tropical island in some kind of villa and is training Silvia Trkman style running contacts in a sun dress! She is our inspiration for today. Let me just repeat. Beautiful model in tropical island villa with border collies that have perfect running dogwalk contacts. Do you think I am making this up? She has a website and a lot of videos on youtube. I don't speak french, but when she is cooing out "Slalom, slalom, Tre Bien!!" to her perfect fast weave poles, you get the gist of it all.

Youtube Video of her running contact training session on tropical island villa steps

The running dogwalk contact ones are very, very interesting. I have been pondering them as I train Gustavo. Right now, he is planned to have a 2o/2o on the dogwalk, a sliding down on the teeter, and a running a-frame. Ruby has running everything but they aren't 100% trustworthy because they were modified from a 2o/2o in a half assed fashion. Otterpop has a quick release 4 on the floor for dogwalk and a-frame, and a sliding down on the teeter. Her contacts have proven extremely trustworthy, but she did have the whole teeter paranoia issue in the ring. So I've covered a lot of contact territory is what I feel like.

Maybe what I'm going to do is learn to sing songs in french and just get him to run real, real fast and when he does it I will trill in delight "Tre bien, mon chien, mon dieu, Je taime!" Because it sure sounds like a lot of fun and looks great in french. On the tropical villa garden island. I just have to make hitting contacts as fun and exciting as chasing birds on big sunny low tide beach on a perfect clear morning with no one else out there.

I'm just getting rid of you today.

Timmy decided we all need to wake up at 4am today! Thanks Timmy! He has actually been having pretty good week, so if he wants us to all get up at 4am sometimes, then I just go along with it.

It was hard to go back to sleep due to the smoke filled house. Did you happen to drive by my house last night around 9pm? And you saw all the smoke pouring out of the house? And you probably saw me sitting on the porch drinking some wine, sort of deciding whether to weep, leave, or just drink some more wine. Because I forgot to clean the oven yesterday. After I forgot to read the pie recipe the day before. I have this recipe ISSUE. So I filled up most of the oven with the pie, instead of making a pie we could eat. So then when I made some dinner in the oven last night, our whole house was filled up with smoke all night! Do you see what happens when I actually cook? Thanks Take out Food!

Here. Go enjoy yourself on some other websites today.

How much do we enjoy this new agility hero? She has an ad for a seminar she is doing in Ohio next month in Clean Run and I saw this and maybe I can adopt her. http://www.silvia.trkman.net/

Read an article that features me that actually uses all my bad grammer in it. This is not glamourous, I can't believe I'm even telling you this, it's in the local dog club's newsletter and has little interviews with Rob and Dee and also me, all the agility teachers for their dog club. But it's something to read.

All right. Here's your last one. This girl seems to be a photographer who rides her vespa across the country and moved to a log cabin in Wyoming and started raising an abandoned coyote puppy. Wow! My life is so boring. http://dailycoyote.blogspot.com/