Ok a the title is a bit lame I know, but I flew over 3,000 km to get to Vancouver, and being just over 3 hours from Seattle, I just had to do it. I have now finished two days of workshops here on the west coast of Canada and everyone has been terrific. Lots of laughing and lots of learning.  Sunday was another double box day but Saturday was Foundation Handling Skills. This is quickly getting to be my favourite workshop to teach. It is a new one for me, I taught it only once  previously in Minnesota and I will teach it once more while I am here in Vancouver. Basically it is foundation stuff I do with my own dogs but haven’t had time to teaching in my puppy or skills camps because there is sooo many other things to cover. Foundation Handling skills is made up of about fourteen different categories of skills that I further break down with 4 or 5 games in each category. Mostly they are games you can do with out agility equipment. Some may be anal, nit-picky stuff like observing the way your dog turns when he goes into his crate. Encore only ever turns right when she gets in her crate so when she is on my right side and turns right she is rehearsing a “flick away” from me every time. So she has rehearsed thousands of flick aways I am sure during her lifetime of play crate games or just being sent to a crate. Raising Feature I made sure she always turned towards me when entering her kennel. Does this mean Encore is more likely to flick on a course than Feature? I really don’t know, but if rehearsals make for perfect performances I would rather my dog not learn to “flick away” on me at any time. So that is one of about 50 tidbits I threw at all of them on Saturday. I did mention that that might be getting a bit too OCD for people, but the other 49 things definitely were worthwhile and pertinent to everyone.

Today is my day off. I am up in beautiful Whistler with me dogs. I am staying with friends and wow, is all I can say. Living here I think you would never get tired of being gratefully for just living here (I have got to get photos and then you will know what I am talking about:)).