Charlie is, again tonight, dead to the world on his bed- we went for another hour walk this afternoon, and added into that two ten minutes boughts of spastic fetch before and after, he's pooped.
I absolutely adore my tennis ball chucking stick thing; I'm not that fantastic when it comes to upper arm strength and co-ordination, so when I can let rip with that chuck-it, Charlie actually gets a half decent run after the ball.
Unless we can go for another walk tomorrow morning at some stage, we'll skip tomorrow because we've got agility training in the evening and even though he could do it all, it's a bit much.
The mystery solved, though, is my aching back: it doesn't appreciate me walking on concrete and bitumen for extended periods. I thought I'd slept on it funny last night, but no, walking this afternoon made it twice as bad and I could definitely feel why it was sore in the first place.
I want to keep up with the walks, it's just a matter of fitting them in. I have to get driven to one of the estates or local more built up suburbs, because walking from our house to anywhere is just asking to be hit by a truck. So there's that to factor in, as well as fitting it around training and the afternoons I work. Weekends are easy, it's just the week.
Mondays I have a lot of web conference lessons for school, and one starts at eight o'clock so it makes things a bit rushed. And in the evening we have agility, which pretty much cancels Mondays out. Tuesday mornings could work, but I'm at work in the afternoon- but that's okay because we have composite class in the evening anyway and I need Charlie hyped for that. Wednesday we had obedience, but not anymore, so that could be an evening walk there. Thursdays are the same as Wednesdays, and Friday I tend to have off of school anyway, but work in the afternoon.
It's just a matter of juggling, which I've never been very good at, to be perfectly honest.
But anyway. I used the more open space this afternoon at the reserve to work more with Charlie's "around"s and he's pretty much got it down pat. He swings out wide which I'm really happy with, and using the chuck-it for fetch as the reward means he absolutely fangs it from the turn. I'll snag a line of jumps at training tomorrow and work on getting him to drive out to an obstacle after going around and see whether it's something he's possible of grasping; never really know with the moose.
This will hopefully be "our way" to start, since it doesn't require any waiting (Charlie's request) and should give me time to still get where I need to be (my request). Gotta have compromises. It's slightly modified from the slingshot we tried out, which worked okay but I still didn't have enough of a head start over Charlie and I never quite got the angle right- and I was always facing the wrong way, which ate up time I needed to get where I wanted to be to start running the course.
This way at least, end result pending, I can flick him around and out to the first obstacle and just take off forward so we should end up more or less at the same spot to start the course.
End result pending, though. I need to head down to the reserve again with a few jumps and a video camera- and someone to video- in tow so I can get more of an idea how this might work.
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