Keep it Simple Stupid

On 4 dog craziness blog she mentioned a shirt she had seen, I think it was a shirt with the saying on it, GREAT DOG, SLAP THE HANDLER, LOL. Alicia gave me a shirt that says RUN FAST-THINK FASTER, LOL. I think both of these things sort of sum up our current difficulties. I used to be able to walk a course and usually pick a pretty good path to take. I used to just go by what "felt" right and it usually was. So lately I have learned a ton and am trying to think about angles, and tight lines and leads the dog is on and converging lines. Of course then I end up using converging lines when I just need to run straight and running straight right along the line I should converge with, and yanking my dog around and giving them impossible angles. YIKES! I just do not have the confidence and seem to keep pulling out the wrong tool at the wrong time. Then when I run Chloe I plan a great course and about half way through I figure out that the border collies could have done that but it was not a good sheltie option. Breeze and I are still getting our timing down and one day Liz wants to be right next to me and the next day she wants to sail wide and when I move close it really pushes her away. A few times I have thought up some pretty rinky dink things and then when I see a nice straight path I feel like slapping myself in the head and saying "I should have had a V8". So after this weekend where I had set up a really bad angle for my dog where I am really thinking I could have hurt her.....I deceided to handle things like how I usually handle them -I fished out all my old Clean Run magazines and any videos that I thought might give some magical answers to my current brain disfunctions! The one thing that just slapped me in the face in my "research" was a statement from Kathy Keats in her Walking the Course DVD. She said something to the effect of "don't make things too complicated!". Humm, interesting. So along with trying to settle down and have more fun again, and maybe try to listen to myself and what feels right more and quit trying to second guess myself all the time. Lately I just look at a critical handling area-as Deanna would call it-and I freeze up trying to think which things should apply in this situation. Alicia also said I should start walking the path of the dog and paying more attention to that again-I know that but I wonder why I do not go to that first?. Hope some of that works and I really hope all this starts gelling together or we are going to be in some pretty serious trouble because we have trials coming up!