I just came off the road from Pennsylvania where I had two days of seminar with a great bunch of trainers in Altoona. On the way home on Monday I stopped for a 4-hour session with Linda Scopa and her students in Delmont (near Pittsburgh). Linda’s done a great job bringing their skills up. So I mostly spent the morning fine-tuning mechanical things.

I haven’t been terribly busy the past month being an ardent fan of the 12 hour work week. A family came down from Wisconsin to spend the week in one of the cottages and get several private lessons with me each day. They had Dachies, and so wanted to focus on teacup / small dog training and handling. They were a lot of fun.

In a couple weeks some folks from Florida will rent a cottage a dog three-a-days while enjoying the property as a vacation. We’re booking more and more of these. I’ve become so accustomed to the 12-hour work weeks that I can barely remember what it was like to work 40 (and often enough… 60.)

I started writing this on a plane bound for Chicago where I’m schedule to do two days of seminar for Wiggles & Wags and the Eastwoods. Unfortunately the it turned into a screwed up travel day. I only made it as far as Cincinnati where all the flight arrangements fell apart because of both weather and mechanical difficulties. The airlines has put me up in a local Hilton, and I have an 0’dark:30 flight out in the morning to Chicago… so I’ll still arrive at the seminar site in time. The real downside is I’ll be wearing the same underwear tomorrow that I’ve worn all day today… because my bags and clothing are still “with” the airline. And the weather channel is promising snow tomorrow in Chicago even though we’re a good month into Spring. That’s my life.

Since I have a 4:00 am wake-up call… I can’t really wax eloquent tonight.

Reruns

This is a course designed by Bonnik Berthelsen of Denmark for the April through June running of the International Agility Link competition back in 2002. The course length is 129 meters according to the course-map. And since I don’t do metric conversions I can’t really say that that works out to in yards. I’ve got it around 160. But it’s hard to tell if I drew it exactly right because the course map was based on meters so I couldn’t tweak down to the usual foot-marks we see in this country.

This course looks easy by American standards. However it is typical of European design as the speed builds nicely and the challenges are subtle. I’m trying to find out what happened to the IAL. I suppose I’ll have to get in touch with Steve Drinkwater and just get him to confess. The International Simul-match seems like a great application for JFF agility. 

Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston: dogwoodbud1@earthlink.net. And Checkout my new publication the Idea Book – Agility Training for a Small Universe available at www.dogagility.org/store.