It has been a busy couple of days and I am a bit bummed AGAIN because I had thought my ultra great instructor was going to quit teaching the class but was going to stay around and I would still get to work with her even if it wasn't in the class, BUT then she broke the news she is really trying to move out of state. She came back for one lesson last Thursday and she just helped clear up so many things so quickly that we were having trouble with while she was gone and I remembered again how much I love working with her.
The really sad thing is that Alicia is a great friend and I will really miss having her around, I might gripe about losing my instructor but actually I will mostly really, really miss having a friend who is so much fun, who is interested in so many of the things I am interested in and someone who as a big added plus understands Lizzie and loves dog training. Not sure what I will do to continue our training because I am not feeling horribly confident that we are at the place we can work by ourselves and then go and arrange lessons with other people that can help us tune up, which would be the plan if we were a little further along, and of course I live out in the middle of nowhere so any of the good places to train are over 2-3 hours away and gosh that is not going to work really well to do when Bill goes back to work after the summer and I have to worry about kid care.
Maybe I will just take some time off and just do some herding or something, I just don't know. I want to at least complete what we have started with Breeze, but I am afraid this will be the end for Liz since there are so many places she just can not work yet. I will really miss her if she ends up going, so hopefully....it will not work out that way.
ANYWAY, back to the lesson, so one thing Alicia has really stressed is that I should not be running a lot of straight lines, they give the dog less information and I should be running U shaped lines, and V's and converging further along the path like in this exercise, I keep trying to converge at the first place Breeze's line where there is the first turn in her path, when I should be heading for and converging on her line much further down the path, right before the jump where I am going to again change her line to catch the opposite end of the tunnel from what she will see.
I posted a video because I want to remind myself of what to look for, so it is a bit long but will be helpful to me in the future if I ever get this whole thing into my head.