We got to try Slayte on sheep after our club’s frisbee playday today. It was just like Enzo. At first he barked at them like they were scary and then as soon as they ran from him, the switch went on. He seems to be a little naturally wider working than Enzo but just as crazy. At the end I told him to lie down and he did actually hesitate for a split second!

He also did great at frisbee today. His retrieves were great and his focus was good but we only had one dog at a time in the fenced area so the distractions were at a low level. He also caught a bunch and his tracking skills are awesome.

Jenn and I just got back from the 2011 Crusty Classic, which is the California disc dog championship and is dedicated to a former competitor. It was loads of fun and great weather. It was our favorite Crusty Classic to date.

Saturday:
The wind was about 25mph during the toss and fetch round. Enzo was awesome all day and had the highest freestyle score. He ended up in 4th overall because we only got 3 throws in toss/fetch and missed 1 of them. He was running fast and hard but I was throwing all the discs past 50 yards – ie, 10 yards too far. It is a strange situation to feel like you did as good as you could, yet knowing you could have easily done better. Tooney had one of her best freestyle rounds ever and put the highest toss/fetch score up for the day and ended up 2nd place overall! More and more I have learned that toss & fetch is the most important part of the game in terms of winning. Enzo has the best freestyle of the day, yet Tooney ends up placing ahead of him simply by getting 1 more throw off.

Tooney did all of this after cutting her foot last weekend and we weren’t sure if she could compete. The last couple of days before the competition she seemed better so we wrapped it up and she showed no ill-effects during the competition. She was also blowin’ mud, so she probably wasn’t feeling too good. And she just turned 9. Every year I am more and more amazed by how good she is. She won 2 competitions this year (with big turnouts including all the big guns) and gets a 2nd place at our state championships. Wow!

Jenn ended up 2nd overall in the intermediate division with Enzo (the highest level toss-fetch only division). They had 2 great rounds and Jenn had 1 throw at 50 yards!!! I think her 2nd round probably was her best round ever.

Sunday:
The wind was strong all day, probably in the 20mph range. Enzo had a really good round with only a handful of drops. He also had a solid “bulls-eye” score – which is a toss/fetch type of thing. He ended up 3rd overall for the day. Tooney did really well, but in the last round was pretty tired and missed 3 throws that were right inside her mouth and pushed her out of contention. They didn’t mention any of the other placements so I don’t know where she finished. They handed out another award, which was best overall toss/fetch and Tooney won it!

At the competition, they brought some awards that were not handed out at our USDDN qualifier, so Tooney and Enzo got their awards from that. At the end of the day we ended up with 5 trophies and 1 medal. 3 for Tooney and 3 for Enzo. If I have the breakdown correctly it is:

Tooney: 2 for toss/fetch, 1 for freestyle
Enzo: 2 for freestyle, 1 for toss/fetch

Really proud of the pups. They have been awesome all year and have some big wins. World finals are next weekend. I hope Enzo continues his great run.

We started competing in disc dogs about 7 years ago and were getting awards at the local level pretty quickly. Then after they started cluttering the house and even our cars, I decided to only keep awards from the big regional championships, if we were ever so lucky to earn awards at that level, or if we got super lucky, placements at the national level. I then threw out loads of awards that didn’t meet this new standard. A clean start…

The very next year, we start placing regionally. And the year after… and the year after that… so on and so forth. Every award at regional or national level began filling space in the house. My plan was beginning to backfire because the awards at the higher level, as it turns out, are physically much bigger. Go figure. I have a smorgasbord of winnings with something from pretty much every possible placement, division and organization that exists. Plaques, medals, big framed photos, trophies, special production discs, shirts, certificates, etc. Whatever they gave me, I kept it. Anything from the local championships – straight to the trash (or if the organizer would take it, I would immediately give it back to be used at another venue).

Now I sit in a house with these awards all over the place. This weekend we did really well and ended up bringing home 6 more awards. I said to Jenn: “WTF??? This is getting ridiculous. Maybe we should have someone melt all these things down, shape it into a disc and just keep that as the cumulative memento.” Jenn just laughed at me.

The real issue is that these awards have no meaning to me. When I see one sitting in some random location in the house in most cases it doesn’t spark a memory in most cases. My memories are simply about playing with the dogs.

Interestingly enough, I realize how bad this sounds to most people. It may sound like there is some level of arrogance associated with it, but I feel absolutely no connection to the awards. I can’t be faulted for NOT being materialistic can I? I feel fortunate, lucky and blessed to have 2 awesome disc dogs with another currently in training. The only award I really like that I can think of right now is a picture of Tooney and I the SoCal club presented to us. And the reason why – you guessed it – because it’s a picture with Tooney. It sparks immediate memories. I pick that up and I know exactly what it is.

I am not sure what to do. Maybe I junk all the regional ones and keep just the nationals? If I still feel they have no value, why should I keep any of them? At the same time, it seems really stupid to throw out national level awards, even to me!

One thing I have not said is that the above feelings are towards the hardware itself. I LOVE the memories I have simply playing with the dogs. They are truly what Jenn and I live for.

I don’t care about the awards. At all.

Why am I posting this? Apparently I’m having guilt from the fact that I feel like throwing them all in the trash. Maybe by writing it down and going back and reading it and updating this post as I have new thoughts, it will help. Hopefully Jenn will read this and think about it also and give me some advise. Maybe one day they will all be thrown in the trash and she probably won’t even notice for a year or more.

Proof of Slayte’s nuttiness when we first met him. This picture was from the first time that we met the puppies when they were 6 weeks old. Slayte pulled so hard on my pants that he put a hole in them. We had a hard time decided between Slayte and another puppy. The other one was the breeders pick for us and the one in the litter that was the first to do everything. Slayte just seemed to have a little more intensity when we saw him. We left the first time thinking we would take the other one but by the time we went back again we were leaning towards Slayte. The second time we met the puppies we decided on Slayte and this is how I knew it was the right decision. When we were going to take the other I felt bad about not taking Slayte to the point where we were considering taking two. When we decided on Slayte I didn’t feel bad at all. When I asked Jeff he said he felt the same so then I knew it was right.

Right now Slayte is passed out after a day at the agility trial which is why I have some time to type. He had tons of fun visting with old friends and making new friends, people and dogs. He’s such the social little guy especially when you compare him to Enzo! He gets all wiggly and cute. Enzo crashed a jump in JWW today which was a little strange and scary but he was fine. He ran clean in standard, good running dogwalk course today.

Slayte is doing really well in his puppy agility class. He’s been in the foundation class since he was 3.5 months old. He was and still is the youngest in the class but is keeping up just fine. He now knows 180’s and 270’s with no bars on the jumps. He also does a two jump leadout pretty well. It’s not 100% but he’s pretty good. Starting to do around the clock jumps and me standing a little lateral from the jump. We’ve been working the end of the teeter. Trying to get him to hop on from the side drive into a down at the end with his head facing forward. The teeter drops about 6 inches right now. I’ve also just started having him run on a flat board to a Manners Minder. I’m just using a 2’x4′ piece of plywood right now because that’s what I had lying around. I also figure it doesn’t look quite like any piece of equipment so if I screw something up right now it won’t matter too much. I am also working on the PVC box with him. I’ve only done a couple of sessions just shaping him to get in the box. He did the tire for the first time on Thursday. At first he was a little confused and was actually trying to push off of the tire but after several tries he was sending to the tire and wrapping back to me. Oh and the table, we started working table in class and we are walking past the table and just having them stop. We’ve been working downs on the flat a lot but I haven’t really asked for it on the table but he started offering downs when I went past the table! really cool!

oh well, he’s awake and barking at me again so no more blogging!

A couple of weeks ago Jenn came home from puppy agility class with Slayte and started making the dogs dinner. She asked where Mindy (our 13 year old forgotten dog) was and I didn’t know but said she was fine earlier. Mindy is deaf and doesn’t really like us so she’s sort of just a resident at the house. It’s like if you put an ad out to rent a room to somebody and some random person responds. The only difference is Mindy doesn’t pay us and we have to feed her because if we didn’t, it would be inhumane. Anyways, she was nowhere to be found. Jenn goes outside and I left the side gate wide open. DOH! I felt really bad and stupid. I cut the grass in the back yard and I didn’t close the gate. I can’t believe I did that…

The search was on, but it was almost dark out. I jumped on my bike and started biking around the neighborhood. Jenn took a walk around the block and came back and jumped in the car. We both got reports that people saw her, but we found no trace of her. Since she was half deaf, calling “Miiinnnnddddy” was probably a total waste of time, but what else can you do? I rode the bike for about an hour or two, I forget now. My ass and arms and everything were hurting and I was totally exhausted so I came back, dropped the bike off and got in our other car. Continued driving around for about another 15 minutes or so. At this time it was around 10PM and we decided to come back and print out flyers, assuming she was probably already “gone”. Of course the printer won’t work. We fought with it a while then gave up after getting 2 test sheets printed, figuring 2 is better than 0. We put 1 up then went to the other side of the neighborhood and put the other up. As we were walking back, I saw people standing around with some dogs. One of them was Mindy! We found her. People were holding her and were going to walk her around the neighborhood to see if she recognized her home. After we put a leash on her, she led the way home. We really don’t think she was lost. We think when we got her she said “ok, you got me… the fun is over”. We had reports of people seeing her on every road but ours. It’s pretty clear she knew where home was and just didn’t want to go back.

Yes, she just takes up space here, but I’m glad we found her. I would have felt bad if we found a pile of brown fur the next day on the road somewhere. It would have been sad.

Slayte (ie LG/little guy) is nuts. That is really my only point to this post. I think that is why Jenn has abandoned this blog – Slayte has destroyed what has made us human. OK, it’s not that bad, but you get the idea.

We got what we asked for I guess. When we went to check out the puppies, this one particular puppy was pretty much insane. Non-stop bonkers. Biting everything, untying our shoes by pulling on the laces, tripping us by grabbing our pant leg as we walked by, chewing on Jenn’s hair, overall just being a nightmare. This 1 puppy had red lights flashing, signs saying “keep away” and horns blaring “danger, danger”. Well, that turned out to be the one we chose, Slayte.

Fast forward 4 months. Slayte now decides to harass us at 1AM-4AM by standing on us in bed, barking at us, barking at Tooney, destroying our laundry baskets (which have been moved to the hallway), destroying the bed, squeaking toys, etc. Hours of play time before bed is clearly not enough for him. Jenn and I have a lot of energy and really can pour a lot of time into the puppy (we have no lives outside the dogs, so the dogs is what we do), but he’s wearing us out. Jenn says her arms and legs feel rubbery all the time now. I hurt all over. We tug, play Frisbee, teach tricks, obedience, agility fundamentals, etc from about 5PM until 10 or 11PM. I’m not even including the play time he gets during the day chasing Tooney and driving me nuts while I try to work. 5-6 hours straight before bed!!! When I say straight I mean it. It is non-stop playing. Jenn plays with him, I play with him, he chases Tooney around. We try to take a break – he won’t let us – he stares at us and barks non-stop and we give in to it and tug or play Frisbee or whatever for another 30-45 minutes. It’s just a non-stop cycle. Our only short breaks are when he chases Tooney around for a bit. It probably only lasts 5 minutes.

He also destroys anything cardboard or paper related in the house. It makes our house a total mess with tiny shreds of the stuff all over the place.

He has learned so much because of his endless energy. I’m running out of things I can teach him because he’s not old enough to do the more physically demanding stuff. He knows pretty much all the basic Frisbee moves that there are: left, right, through, on, scoot, over, around, circle, dog catch, blah blah blah.

Would I change anything??? NOOOOOOOO! I would take a puppy like this any day. He’s a total blast and is everything we really wanted. I wouldn’t even want a dog with slightly less energy or slightly less drive. Heck I’d even be happy if he were even more bonkers (not sure that is even possible). We love him and are so happy he is this way, even though he acts as if he’s taking crack with a speed chaser constantly! It’s just difficult on us physically.

Jenn put together Slayte’s videos from USDDN. He had a good time. He kept trying to get away from the sun. In 1 round you can see him actually run to the shade. In another round, he keeps trying to veer off to the side, but I manged to bring him back in. Thanks to Jenn for cutting out the part where I threw from the wrong line.

He’s a cute little guy, isn’t he? How great for a puppy only 6 months old. So impressive. Tracking skills are awesome so far. He just need to get a bit better at timing the catches. When we do short throws, he tends to catch the disc deep in his mouth (a good thing), but on longer throws, it tends to be caught barely by the rim of the disc. He will get better with time I’m sure.