January 6, 2011: We Did it - Finally!

Yep, the new fence is done! I hand dug post holes...then had to fill them in again when we made a last minute change in the fence line. I'm blaming Bobby for this make work scheme...afterall, it was his idea to change the fenceline. But, I have to say, it was a good idea. For goodness sake don't you all run off and tell him I said his idea was a good one. I'll hear no end to it. Thank you Antony for putting in the posts for us...and we now have superbly hung gates! Antony had a few hairy moments when his bombproof machinery did some wicked slides down various wee hills. Super exciting to watch. Only once did we have to go cap in hand to our neighbours to get a tractor to pull Antony's truck out of the mud. Kelvin will be setting mole traps at the neighbour's place for a while to come to thank them for their tractor services.

The good news is that our main training field is now twice as big and has decent right and left outruns with no tricky corners or gates to navigate!! Yippeee. We removed the old fence dividing two fields and hey presto! a great big field. The old fence almost fell over so it was a pretty easy task to remove it. A few trees have disappeared as well but mostly smaller hawthorns. I recently had a dog suffer an eye injury after hitting a low hanging branch so the chainsaw was pressed into action and any branch at 'dog height' was removed.

Of course the first thing I had to do when the old fence was removed was test the outruns. They passed muster! The dogs were completely perplexed when I would not let them run to the usual hole in the fence on their right hand cast. Some looked at me as if to say "are you off your rocker asking me to pull in when I KNOW there is a hole in the fence further up?" One dog tried to pull in at a sharp angle to a gate on the left side of the field, only to be told to bend out again...and it made a bee-line for the right hand hole...and got a pull in whistle for its trouble. It took a bit to convince this dog that there was no wire on the fence and that it could, indeed, go through just where I was wanting. Little Sioux took every whistle without question - bend outs, pull ins, the works. GOOD GIRL! While I thought I was going out there to test the outruns, in reality it turned into an exercise of seeing just how well trained my dogs are on bend outs and pull ins. I discovered I've got a lot of work to do yet! Sometimes it's just so darned hard to change a dog's mind once it has committed to a course of action, or decided it knows better than me (which most of the time it does!). Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

The downside of this bigger field is the hill I now have to run up if my dogs blow me off! But I've got a plan! I'm going to walk to the top of the hill and stand there to train my dogs. If they blow me off, at least the run to sort them out will all be downhill. I'll be able to get there a darned sight faster ...and I won't be so hot under the collar when I get there. I figure this is win-win for both parties. Now this is where I should say 'my dogs are so obedient I don't have to do much running'' but I'd be fibbing if I said that. None of them have really tested me yet...but just in case they do, I've been out running to get fit.

Happy New Year to you all. We started the New Year with our annual New Year's Day run. Kelvin even laced up his runners and joined in. We will call the run a draw...even though I won the sprint to the finish. Kelvin is still belly aching about me not telling him where the finish line was. Can't understand his complaints. I mean, really, who doesn't know that the front gate is the finish line? Sheesh!!