Last chance saloon

With all hopes of Tia ever returning to the ring fading fast, we are making one last attempt at getting her sound. I picked her up from the specialists on Friday, she had been there a week. She looked fab. Took her for a lovely walk on Friday afternoon. Then Saturday morning, she was MEGA lame on both back legs! She eased off slightly throughout the walk. Then she was a bit lame in the evening. This repeated itself on Sunday.

I am going to try something new now. I think one of the issues is she is doing all this fitness training at walk or trot, and a lot of problems seem to occur when we speed her up. So, we are now doing a mile of 'interval' training, I have put interval in quotations as it is my version of interval. We go a total of one mile, most of it is on the road. We walk for 2 minutes, then we jog a distance of 2 lamp posts, then sprint for 2 lamp posts, then walk 2 lamp posts, etc. We sprint a total of 3 times, then the last part of it is walking. Part of the sprint is along a park where Tia and Rix chase each other and have a really good run. Tia gets very excited on this run, she loves going faster than my lazy pace. I'm going to try this 5 times a week for 4 weeks and we'll see what improvement (if any) this results in. She's on a flexi lead the rest of the time to stop her running off at the speed of light, which is all she wants to do at the moment as she's got so much pent up energy. I'm not quite sure whether Tia will ever get back to competing now, she is very weak in her movement and her balance is appalling, she is constantly falling over and slipping. All I want to do at the moment is take her on a huge long walk and let her run for hours chasing rabbits and pheasants without cringing every time she goes faster than a jog!

I always said I would give her a year (April) but that is now only 4 months away, and she's certainly not in the state I'd have hoped she'd be in by this stage.

Picture overload

Ok picture overload of the pups, you've been warned, lol.


Fish - r/w boy

Jumbo - r/w boy

Squiffy - r/w boy

Another r/w boy - with cute pink nose!

The two girlies

The red and white girl

The red tri girl - she's very active for 2 weeks old, one of the more dominant ones in the litter it seems like!

Pups at 9 days old

Some more pics of the pups, I didn't actually take some of all of them as I ended up having puppy snuggles with the red tri girl for 10mins, ooh shes cute. They are so noisy!

My fave piccie - red tri girl!

Puppy snuggles :)

The red and white girl






Squiffy - lol

Cruciate...

Last weeks said lameness is due to Tias cruciate.... ahhhh! If karma is true, Ive done some pretty bad stuff for all this to happen this year!!!!
Shes only strained it, not torn it, so it's not as serious as a tear. She's going to Lowri's on Monday for a week so she can have lots of physio/treadmill/accupuncture/ultrasound. We're also going to start her with TTouch stuff after this, I am lucky as Tilley Farm (where the ppl are who do TTouch) is just down the road from me.
She's also got pain in her upper back, never had this before, it's always been in her lower back. On the positive side, her lower back and intercostal muscles are fine. Tia also had some ultrasound in her stifle.
One step forward, two steps back...

Pup pics

If anyone wants to see more pics I've put them on my website, on
http://www.freewebs.com/summerick/rubyxjaff.htm

Thx to Ant and Jackie for the photos, sorry for badgering you sooooo much!

The two girlies... one has now gone tri... ahhh!! Both are gorge.






Really like this little boy




Group shots

UKA Cheltenham

Well yesterday (Sat) was the first shows of two dogs I train.
Wesley first. He's a 5yr old GSD, they rescued him last September. Loads of probs to start with, fear aggression etc, but gradually we've been getting there and he's doing everything in training, and ready for his first show.
So. First class - Beginners Jumping. Mike Haines had set a lovely course, which Jo felt fairly confident that she could do. Wesley however had other ideas. Round the first one... round the second one... round the third one... quick search for the kids... round the next one. He did a total of 1 JUMP!!!!! Aghhh. Naughty dog.
Second class - Beginners Agility. Over the first one, dog walk, round the tunnel... in the tunnel, aframe, round the fifth jump, backjump the fifth jump, pretend weaves don't exist, seesaw, round the next jump, backjump... you get the picture. Actually he was a ton better than the first class and did the jumps... not necessarily in the correct order. At least he looked vaguely like he had been trained in agility and not just picked up from the Dogs Home the day before!

Jess also had her first show in Nursery with Copper spaniel who's 16 months. Copper's training has been going fab, he is SO fast. He just made a couple of baby mistakes but looked great. He really wanted to do the aframe again on the way back up the line of jumps to it, too many sweeties at the bottom in training :)


I was chatting to someone I used to train when I was at Clifton, Dorothy, and she said I could run her collie, Buffy in the jumping. Buffy is grade 2 at KC shows and is suchhh a lovely dog. We got 2nd in Novice Jumping yippee! It was my first run (bar anysize) since May and soo fun! Here's the run, thx to Lee for filming!


Tia has hurt herself again, this time on her right back leg, so she now only has two legs that work properly. The only benefit to this is that she is now weight bearing properly on her left leg, as she doesn't really want to stand on either of them. Grrrrr.

I AM SO EXCITED!!!!

My puppy was born last night :) :) :)

Ruby had 6 boys and 2 girls, all red and white. I am soooo excited, and so relieved we only have half days on Friday, as I couldn't concentrate for the whole morning and just kept texting everyone to tell them!!!!!

Yiippppeeeee!!