Practice - Party - Practice More

What a great way to get in some last minute pre-trial work for Piper before going to Pt. Pleasant.

I have a colleague with an office in Mission Valley and we have been looking at a potential case for months so we finally decided to just get together and consider whether to bring the case on Friday morning. Well he knows me and the dogs so he invited me to bring one to his office and we combined an a.m. business meeting with an afternoon trip to Campo for a rare Friday afternoon session on the field.

By the time we made it to Jennifer's Friday afternoon the dog training was mostly over for the day but we put Piper out in the lower field for a couple short working sessions. Her pace from the week before was still there and she had me feeling very good about her reteention of the prior week lesson. A little backsliding Saturday or I just have a bad case of panelhypophobia but overall a major improvement from just a few weeks ago.

Friday evening was fun barbecue with Jennifer and Ron and their friends Mike and Diane (forgot the last name - Sorry !) from Arizona. Dinner was great and the company and conversation were fabulous. I think at least four bottles of Riesling were fuly draained before we all crawled off to sleep.

Saturday Jennifer was expecting a crowd so it was going to be tigght working. Piper and I were up and out early so at about 7:30 Jennifer said to go get some sheep and we got almost 1 1/2 hours work in trading off with Jennifer and Sly before any other studentts arrived. Piper's pace in the lower field was very good and we started working on shedding lessons. The shedding lessons are more for me than Piper. If we needed inspiration we watched Jennifer and Sly repeatedly winnow a small group down to a small group. Sly was like a hot knife coming through butter. Just beautiful.

Then Jennifer and I traded a couple outruns with Sly and Piper. Piper was being her normal outrunning fool self until she was sent away and did not go as deep as normal because as she started to hit the lower field there was a white SUV driving across her path - another student arriving and not realizing we were doing an oiutrun in the same field. Well I guess I can forgive Piper for yielding a bit to the pressure of an oncoming SUV. Her outrun was still good though- just not as deep as usual. She did give me a very rare circle to the head on one fetch though - not sure what happened but we need to watch for it.

Piper's driving was not up to her earlier standards during the group session. I think it was a bit of the sheep being heavy and I was a bit slow with my "time" and doing too much steering.

At the end we did a drill I had only heard about before. Penning with another dog tethered on the inside of the pen to discourage sheep from wanting to enter the pen. I was expecting a lot of problems but Piper managed to get the sheep almost all the way in before we called her off and let the sheep out. She took all of my directions - covered on her own - stayed calm - and would not take any bullsh** from the ewes who tried to run her over getting away from the other dog (now that was a righteous grip). She was so excited by the drill that I had to chain her up to keep her from going out to "help" Tricia and Tipper.

I really think that once she understands the job and the objective Piper is pretty good about doing what is necessary.

Well on to Pt. Pleasant. Let's see what holds up in a trial setting.