Playing Catch Up, Part 4 ... June Fun, Yard Visitor and Floods

These months are just getting away from me these days.  This post will bring you what all we got into during the month of June.

Honestly, other than an agility trial there wasn't much else that went on.  Our hiking and picture taking took a break.  No conformation shows for Tucker happened since he decided to start blowing his coat.

Teach continued to do nose work every week and started to do really good with it and catching on to what was needed to get that reward.

I do have some videos to share from the agility trial.  This one was held where we wnet back in January, at an indoor horse arena.  While it wasn't air conditioned it was at least out of the hot sun.  So that was nice.

We'll start with Teach because he really rocked his first class.  This Touch 'n' Go course was particularly hard and even the upper level dogs struggled with it.  Teach was one of just a few that actually did qualify during this run.  And not only that, but also placed!!!  I was SOOOO proud of him.  If we had to leave right after that I would have been thrilled.

Here's his run and you can see how tricky it was.

Teach got his next Q from the tunnelers class which I'm sad we didn't get on video.  We do have his round 1 where he didn't qualify based on time, but he did everything.  He's a big dog and not speedy so I was thrilled he did get a Q.  

Here's his first run which didn't get a Q but still looked nice.  This was also the last class of the day and it was getting hot ... so he was even less speedy.  LOL!

He ended the day with 2 Q's out of 4, not bad.  And class placements in both.  Good boy Teach!!

Tucker had 2 Q's out of 6 (he did the weaves class which I'll get to in a minute) and even stayed on course and only wanted to visit the judge once and I was able to call him off before he got there.  So even better than the last trial.  It helped that there was no jumps so no need for ring crew to be sitting around.  

Here is Tucker's first Q in Touch 'n' Go Round 2.  Was really proud of this run for him, he gave me a great start line wait to get to the other end of the tunnel to get a good line for the dog walk.

And here is his tunnelers Q which was also round 2.  He's not quite as big as Teach but still doesn't cover the ground like some dogs do for this class.  We really need to clean up our lines to get that time down!

As for the weaves class I mentioned earlier, Tucker decided he didn't want to do them.  He had one good set out of 3 and after we got that I called it good and we finished the class. For the second round I scratched him.  I didn't want to create a habit of blowing by them.  After this show we have gone back to really working with them.  I did get pretty lax on practicing them (being new to agility) and didn't realize how easily they can fall apart.  Lesson learned on my part!  Now we try and practice them several times a week and even then it could be more, I think.

Here is a picture of the boys showing off their ribbons.  

June also brought a cute little visitor to our house one day.  The boys were out back playing when they started checking out our little kid playhouse that we have for Madalynn.  At first I thought great, they have a snake in there and Randy is gone.  Then I saw brown and thought a chipmunk must have went in and now can't get out.  I was wrong on both counts. Check out who was there:

This picture shows where the house is located and the fawn was behind that blue door!  CRAZY!

Thankfully the mama deer did come back for it that night and by morning it was gone.  It was so adorable!!!!!!  Probably won't ever happen again, but I guess she thought it was a safe place to be.

If any of you follow the news or the weather you'll have seen that we have some devastating floods come through southern West Virginia and completely wiped out several small towns towards the end of June.  Even now, almost 2 months later people still are recovering.  And will be for a long time to come.  The lake/dam that is north of us, Summersville Lake, saw its highest levels since it was constructed back in the late 60's.  Randy and I took a drive up there 2 days after the flooding to see.  Water was in the trees and just 10' shy of cresting the spillway.  The release gates at the base of the lake only normally release water during Gauley River White Water Rafting season that starts in the fall.  Normally the outflow for then is 2,800 cubic feet per second.  The amount of water they were releasing once the levels downstream started to recede was 14,500 cubic feet per second.  The campground was completely under water and where RVs normally sit, boats were tied off to trees there that had gotten loose from the marina.  It really was something to see and without that dam towns downstream probably wouldn't have existed.  Here are a few pictures and videos from the lake.