Tuesday, April 27, 2010

GKCDTC weekend

As usual I am behind blogging. So much is going on in my life and even though this is Miller's blog, I have to share! I have mentioned it before but I am opening up a small business for dog training in the wamego area. I have joined the APDTA and am meeting with a small business consultant tomorrow. I have lots of questions and lots of excitement so looking forward to ironing out some details. I am still not stuck on a name and have contacted the local Wamego OZ theme person and she is helping me to think of a name and a tag line. My homework this weekend is to watch the Wizard of Oz and read the book looking for cool names. I love the name, Run Toto, Run, but this is the name of a wine at Oz winery so don't want to copy them. So far the best name we have come up with is Ozsome Dog Training and the tagline is "we will train you and Toto too" or "we will train you and your little dog too". Still thinking about this so nothing is set in stone.

I am so excited yet so scared too! My worry is that this will take over my life and my real job. I love what I do, could never not be in science or at a lab bench doing science. I also want time to work on my own dogs as I have so many aspirations for all of them still! I still want to do agility and tracking with all of them and get into herding with Deuce and Harley. I want this to be a side thing and not my life. I have a life and i like it. The book I am reading talks about how you have to set boundaries if this is a side job. For instance, if someone calls, not answering it and calling them back until you get off of work and having set hours to do paperwork on think about classes. I know me and I am very impulsive so it will be very hard for me to do this.

I will have to admit that my head is spinning with all of the possibilities i need to think about. Insurance, having others train with me, finding a location to have group classes, and what type of small business i am going to become are all things that i need to think about and process. I sometimes feel very overwhelmed and I haven't even started!!!! Then comes all the issues that come with teaching such as the people themselves. I feel like I am good with dealing with people but you get so many different kinds in classes or lessons. They mostly want a quick fix, don't want to do their homework and sometimes have dogs with issues that are truly behavioral, which I am not trained to handle, especially any type of aggression. Those will be the tough cases as I will have to turn them away as I not in any shape or form trained to handle these cases. Maybe someday, when I win the lottery, I can go back to school and take behavior courses and do internships at shelters or behavior training facilities and become more knowledgeable in these types of dogs, but I figure that won't happen for a long time if ever. I am going to try and read as many books as I can but reading books does not make you an expert in any way. Firsthand
experience with a knowledgeable expert helps and I have no clue how I would get that.





Okay, enough of my ramblings about my small business. This weekend was a good weekend for the Miller man with a double Q on Sunday and a single Q in JWW on Saturday. We would have had a perfect weekend but for whatever reason, he refused the chute in standard. It is weird chute, i will admit, but he has been in it before so this is not the first time we have done it. This is the only club that uses this type of chute in our area. It is a dog house and the barrel is in the house so the dog has to jump up in it and then go through the fabric part. Oh well, you win some, you loose some. We need one more Q for AKC nationals and then like 2oo points but I am not going this year so it doesn't matter. I guess it would be nice to list that we qualified 3 years in a row though? Anyway, Harley had a silly weekend where his contacts fell apart in standard and he knocked bars in JWW. In the video, the JWW run where he knocks the triple, we measure and he took off 8 feet before the obstacle!!!! I think Harley's theme song was I Believe I can Fly!!!!! I hope this isn't a trend for Harley, to become inconsistent again. He is doing so well in open practice and I am really pushing them and making him try hard things, just like Lori did when he was in her class. When he tries to get away with rears, I make him do all fronts or whatever to get him out of his comfort zone. One of the things that I think I finally got through to his head (which shouldn't have taken this long) was that he does not do contacts the same in class as in practice. I got him to working on a true running a-frame tonight and I hope he will continue to practice this. Harley seems so much happier when he can run the contacts but he needs to truly run, not run part of the way and then superman off. Tony was really surprised he did as well as he did tonight just using the hoop and the Frisbee to get Harley to focus ahead.

So we got to do some fun stuff this weekend, including some very good Italian homemade food on Saturday night (best lemon bars I have ever put in my mouth) and some very good KC BBQ on Sunday to celebrate miller's QQ. We even got to see a real steam engine come into Union Station while we were there. We also found a store we have been wanting to go to but it was closed. It is an architecture salvage place and we are hoping to get some cool doors for our house. I love when we get to explore but probably won't be able to do that much more as we have to take Harley and Deuce with us and leave them in the car as they won't behave in the hotel room like berry and miller will. We are going to buy a fan that uses a tool battery this weekend, which will help but not in summer time:( Oh well, we have had fun exploring this winter! Can't wait to go back to Omaha in a few weeks and go back to Upstream brewery and back to the antique shops we found there! One of them had antique door knobs and I am so excited!

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