New flyball class started

Hey, it's me again--two posts in one day, can't beat that. Some of my fans have complained to my person that I'm not posting very often. Luckily, she doesn't try to pin the blame on me, but still it makes us both pretty embarrassed. Anyway, a couple big milestones for me in flyball this week.

First, I've been getting to go to practice all by myself because my poor buddy Renzo had to have his dew claws removed and has been out of commission for the last couple of weeks. Poor guy, but hey, it means I get sole attention from my people at flyball practice (and it's pretty quiet without Renzo barking out his cries of joy over and over and over and....).

So, anyway, last Sunday one of my people decided that we had to try a new strategy for keeping me focused on flyball and not on going to visit. So, she told all the people to be really mean to me (actually, she just told them to tell me "no" if I came over, but as far as I'm concerned, she might as well have told them to kick me in the gut...). And then they did tell me no--I went from person to person, wiggling my whole body, trying to lick and say hi, but they all said "no" adn some of them even stamped their feet at me. I was really confused, I mean, really, really confused--I thought everyone really liked for me to come and say hi and I know that I like it. But all the while my person was also calling come and it was so much nicer to be with her than with all those people being mean to me. So, slowly but surely, I'm starting to understand that I can only go visit when my person says it's o.k., not when I decide it's o.k. Hard knocks, really, but my person hopes that I'll start to see that flyball is really the ultimate fun. I probably will.

Then, I started a new flyball class on Thursday with a new instructor, Pam Shulz from Slammers flyball club. She's pretty cool and was able to keep a pretty unruly bunch in line. I got to run and noodled off to visit, but remembered after just two no's that I was supposed to stay with my person. I did really good on the box-=hitting it hard and coming back to my person. I'm also feeling more and more confident. I think I'll be pretty close come summer, but who knows, life is so full of fun that you never know what might be waiting for you around the corner...

I'm also taking another obedience class at Country Kennel with my good friend Neva. I'm the baby in the class. There are several labs and they are just really different dogs than me. I don't get the whole laying around thing, but that's what makes it such an interesting world--we're all a little different.