Lori Michaels Seminar

Well, Bright’s last agility hurrah before nationals could have gone better. Well, it could have gone worse too, but she was definitely freestyling. But I guess now I know, if there is any chance it looks even remotely like a backside, Bright will take it as a backside. And that her bypass doesn’t really work.

On the other hand, her contacts looked good! Well, this is a relative term. We had no stopping short or creepy contacts, and that’s what I really didn’t want to bring to Reno. Her stops were better and she WOULD do them if I was REALLY insistent about it.  They are not perhaps what most people would think of as good contacts, but I felt like we’re back to what works for us.

Now, we didn’t get to try them in an actual trial, as I’m bad as transposing dates – and even worse at double checking them. You’d think I’d learn, but the seminar definitely made me feel like we had a good workout before nationals. I imagine there will be some freestlying once we get there, and I will love her anyway, because she’s so HAPPY when she does it!

I do like Lori, I had taken a seminar with her many years ago and enjoyed it. She’s not really a ‘system’ person, so that makes it easy to relax and enjoy myself. Though I still argued with her, I’m such a troublemaker. For Bright I really don’t have any ambitions to ‘fix’ what we have, but I DID expect Bright to have skills like her bypass and I really wanted to work on fixing that rather than finding a way around it.

So, with Bright, I really like our trained skills and Justine-esque handling, it works well for her. Well, it works well for her when she actually RESPONDS to it. With Navarre I’m a quest to try other things as, good lord, when I’m running him I just go around shouting ‘Na-VARRE!” continuously. So we experimented with some more handling intensive moves instead of trained cues, and that was fun.

Navarre, of course, does better when I stay right on his head and force the lines. Lori didn’t have much to say about the driftiness, other than watch and connect with him more, and choose more aggressive handling strategies. Which is certainly helpful. Boy can he drift when he gets going though, whew. Nice contacts and weaves with Navarre, I don’t believe he knocked a bar, other than being drifty he was very honest. We’re still finding out way together, we will continue to experiment and see what works best.

A long day, these were two four hour sessions, each with 5 people in them, so we not only got a lot of running, there was not much of a break inbetween. Dogs were still panting when I’d get them out again. I’m not used to doing that much agility!

Some video, I took out a lot of goofing around, especially Bright making it up:

Speaking of Bright, we did swing by the trial on Saturday to celebrate Bright’s MACH in style. Claudia made Bright the most awesome cake, complete with a handmade Bright done in white chocolate with Bright sitting up! It was awesome and then strawberry chocolate, which is my favorite and it was SO GOOD. I feel really bad for other people an their MACH cakes, this is pretty much set the bar for awesome cakes. So thankful, and so proud of my BrightyBright. We’ll never have MACH47, so we’re going to live it up with just one.

This week was ‘yellow’ for our photography homework, which was fun: