Smooth Collies, Border Collies, Danish-Swedish Farmdog

February 2008Monthly Archives

Flyball Seminar Coming Up!

Woo Hoo I am so excited! I’ve been sleepy today but then I got my confirmation papers (email) for the Touch n Go Flyball Seminar in Last Vegas in.. in only a week!

Three days. Well, Friday will be for Tatum, and Saturday and Sunday will be for Chase. Looks like our team, Thunder Paws here in Utah, will have to bring our own box. And I have crates and food and clothes to bring, too. Man, there is always a ton to bring when bringing the dogs. It was so weird going to the Clicker Exp and only bringing stuff for me. I felt so light and empty.

We still haven’t decided who is driving down with whom.. or if we are taking one van or two cars. Or when we are leaving from Salt Lake City and when we are leaving from Las Vegas to come home. But it will all work out in the end.

I will have to pack this weekend, get all my stuff together. Monday will be busy, and Sunday a little bit with a private lesson and puppy class, but I should have some time. And Saturday will be my self-imposed down day. I’m going to need a zero gravity recliner when I get back, in order to rest! I’m sure it will be an information packed weekend and my brain will be loosing it by Sunday. But it’ll be fun!

Cynthia
February 21, 2008
Chase, Flyball, Tatum
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Beautiful Lucy

Lucy Lucy is our beautiful smooth collie girl. She does seem to be slowing down… with her cancer diagnosis and all. But she got to chew on a Kong a lot today, and carry it around and guard it, and guarding is one of her favorite things. Though she doesn’t like it quite as much as Levi does.

Lucy is doing okay. I watch her closely now and I think that her low energy is because of her cancer. But my husband says she is still the same. I just wonder. I worry about her every day. Monday I am taking her to the holistic vet to see what she can do, if anything, and get her opinion.

The rest of the dogs are doing well. I took Muffit and Tatum to Sugarhouse Park today for a walk. I haven’t taken Muffit out until now because he was sick. He’s done with his meds now and he is much happier, he is even enticing Tatum to play. He wants to play with Chase, too, but Chase isn’t ready yet. Having yet another new dog in the house has thrown Chase out of whack, but Chase is doing well and he hasn’t instigated any fights, which is nice. And we are helping him and making the other dogs respect his space, which is good and will help Chase adjust.

I’m please to say that Muffit ignored the people we walked by, sniffed everything, and seemed very well adjusted. :)

Fortunately we don’t need any eca stack around here to lose weight, but I am cutting down Tony’s food as he is a bit chubby now. And Muffit gets a lot to eat, since he is still too skinny.

Cynthia
February 20, 2008
Daily Posts, Lucy
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Too Tired to Think

Dog Camp Sept 2007 It takes me a couple of days to recover from an agility trial. I have decided, no matter how much I don’t feel like it, I am going to start taking the boys jogging again.

Levi did great on Sunday, he should have Q’d both runs and I got mad at the judge for one call.. but he got a Jumpers with Weaves leg and that was good. Man these 10 legs for the MXP and MJP are a long time in coming. And still no double Qs yet.

Today I’m at work and the day is just dragging by. Tomorrow is a short day and I hope to do some blogging catch up then. I actually took yesterday off the computer too and did some dog things, and I need to wash clothes too. Again. Ugh.

This picture is just to remind me of how wonderful, and warm, dog camp was. They had everything there, maybe not kitchen faucets or the kitchen sink, but the food is so good and the weather was so nice. I’m tired of the cold an I’m really ready for spring!

Cynthia
February 19, 2008
Chase, Daily Posts, Levi
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Chase had an Awesome Day

Chase is so much fun to run. :) When we work together, and he pays attention. Today was great. We did AKC agility.

Our first run was Open Jumpers with Weaves. He did so well, he paid attention to me and turned and came when I wanted him too, and it was not an easy course. This judge is hard, but her courses are a fun challenge. Chase only had one refusal on the weaves which wasn’t bad. That’s his second Open JWW leg. One more for his title.

Standard wasn’t so good. I don’t even remember now what we did, but we missed some things. He’s in Excellent A Standard now. I was happy with the run though he did a good job.

Then Chase ran in Open FAST. Oh. My. Gosh. It was an awesome run. The send was HARD! It was tunnel, weave, tunnel, and quite a distance, too. And as soon as he entered the tunnel I was yelling ‘WEAVE!’ and so he nailed the weave entry, finished them all (which is hard for him when a tunnel is after the weaves) and then hit that second tunnel. Wow! He was one of only two dogs that Q’d in that whole class! I was thrilled. So was the other woman who Q’d! We celebrated. LOL. Chase even picked up 79 points (out of 80)!

So I’m proud of Chase this weekend. He did great. That’s his open FAST title so I moved him to Excellent FAST tomorrow. He’s great at fast, his distance handling is nice, and we can just point collect. ;)

Levi’s runs weren’t so good. Well, they were good, but just one mistake each run again. ugh. Actually, I think maybe more than one today. But it was a great day all around! We had fun!

Tatum came with too, and she was very nervous. It was a place she had never been before. But that’s okay, she needs to come to different places to get used to them.

So now I’m tired and I need to go to sleep! It was a long day.

Cynthia
February 16, 2008
Agility, Chase, Levi, Tatum
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Good days and Bad days

I guess I’ll be up and down for a while with this diagnosis of Lucy having cancer. I have managed not to think much about it since Wednesday… thinking about it now just makes me cringe.

Wednesday was a bad day. I was really down all day after the vet appointment on Tuesday. Even though it wasn’t too bad… what.. what am I talking about? Any cancer is bad! Ugh. The vet said they had ‘good news’ so we were really hoping to go in and have them say “It’s not cancer!”. But they did not. They just said they could not find a main tumor. I didn’t think that was good news at all.

Anyway, Lucy gets to go to Dr. Kim Hennemen on the 25th so that will be good. I like her a lot. Her limp is doing okay… as is mine. LOL. I need some posture correction, and some ankle and knee therapy, it seems.

I have agility all this weekend, both Saturday and Sunday. I hope it goes well. I’ll try to get and post up some videos. I run Chase and Levi. It’s AKC. I have to really be serious about it… get the Qs! Bah.. just have fun, eh? Yeah, just have fun. And hope I don’t hurt my ankle or my knee anymore.

Cynthia
February 15, 2008
Agility, Info, Lucy
15 comments
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Foster Dogs over the Years

Collections For the last few days I’ve been loading up my dog pictures from my old album backups and into Flickr. Flickr is very convenient and easy to use, and it helps me not use up lots of my server space.

We have helped a lot of dogs. I am proud of what we have done. Some of these dogs are no longer alive, but hopefully we were able to touch their lives and make them better in some way.

We have to take a break from rescue for a while, with Lucy’s cancer and her health a concern, my husband not having a job right now, an us just being overwhelmed. So no more foster dogs. I will try to coordinate collie rescue when I can, but that is hard without any foster homes. *sigh*

Click on the image to see all the sets of our foster dogs. I know one is not there… Alice, she was cute and I can’t find any pictures of her. Bummer.

All these dogs with the exception of Bria are from 2000 and later. Bria was at my old house pre 2000.

Cynthia
February 13, 2008
Daily Posts, Rescue
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Buying Dog Stuff

I buy a lot of dog stuff online. In fact, more than I should. And because of it I’m a bit poor at the moment. And when I buy online I actually do worry about identity theft. I probably am not as careful as I should be… I really like that I have good credit and I can get a loan if I need to, at any time. So to have that be threatened worries me. As I really want to be able to provide for, and protect, my dogs not matter what happens.

There’s a company called lifelock that will help with identity theft. They have credit bureous set alerts on your accounts, and they repeat it every 90 days. They ask for our names to be removed from pre approved credit junk mail.. that would be awesome. They order free credit reports. They also have a protection plan if your wallet gets lost. Wow.. impressive stuff. I’m going to look into them more!

Cynthia
February 13, 2008
Info
7 comments

Muffit is Better

Well good news, after a couple of days on the new meds Muffit is much better already. His breathing sounds clear, no more snuffling and no more major green nasal discharge! Yay! He is eating well, and starting to play, too. Still a bit low on energy but that will come.

I’ve started him on the clicker and he doesn’t quite understand yet, but he will soon. We’ll start with what he knows, sits and downs, and add the mat work. Tatum really liked starting with the Mat.

So the days go by, we wonder what to feel and do about Lucy, and we just plug along.

Cynthia
February 13, 2008
Clicker, Lucy, Muffit, Tatum
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