we are back .. maybe....

Things had been crazy busy.  Last summer I spent preparing Brandy for our utility debut as well as finishing our CDX. By the time we had finished the UD (in  5 attempts) I was so burned out that I didn't really want to train at all, plus it was November, the days were short and even if I really wanted, training wouldn't have been really possible in the evening.
Mozart had finished his retrieve class and we had started working on articles in the fall.
Poor Belle was kind of abandoned outside of our usual Thursday night classes where Kid#1 was working her.
Come spring of 2013 and I had started trying to bring myself back into training and exploring past UD opportunities although not very successfully. We've been in the ring maybe 4 times and NQed all 4 times.  Brandy needs lots more work around barking and out of control dogs. Yeah, like that's easy to find in a control environment:-)

I was looking forward to summer in hopes that I would have more time, when I realized that it's already July and I am still hoping, so I went to a book store and got myself a famous "moleskin" notebook. I didn't really know it was famous until I bought it though. It came with a story telling how some of the famous writers and artists favored it in the past. For 2 weeks I had been pretty good about keeping my training log. I tried keeping my training log on my phone, found a couple of useful applications, but I realized that I really miss the pen and paper. It's amazing how much more productive I get when I actually creating a training plan for the day the night before, even if I do not manage to work on all of the exercises I planned on, it's still pushes me to try hard to stick with the plan.  When you have a three dogs that have to be actively trained I can't imaging doing it any other way.

Here is a video of one of Brandy's open runs. Unfortunately I have no videos of our Utility runs.