Day 175

What a jerk she was this morning. I really need to look good with the demos I needed to do and she chooses this time to pull one of her "I don't do this stuff and I am being put upon" numbers. Ended up putting her in a kennel run with all the other dogs and having Wrap come out and do the demos for me. Sure did make Wrap happy.

Later while fixing lunch I had one of my drop-it spells and just kept on dropping things. I hate that. "Fingers hold", says my brain. "Go to H", says the fingers. Wrap was somewhere else in the house and most likely fast asleep. Sanity was standing right there watching me. Water bottle hits the floor, "Sanity, fetch" and she does and she sits crooked, but in front of me and delivers it to hand. I close my fingers over it, or more to the point my brain says "fingers close". I say "give" and the bottle just slips out of my hand. "Sanity, fetch". And she does.

A few minutes later I dropped a pill bottle. "Sanity, fetch" and so she does. Then after lunch when I was having a problem getting up I called her to me to do a stand and brace. Not a serious one, but still the help would have been nice. She comes, she drives me half crazy with her dancing around, finally gets in position, I say stand. She locks it up and feels pretty solid. So I start to stand and at the critical juncture where there is the least amount of balance...she sits and dumps me back in the chair. Guess she just doesn't want me to get to complacent about how the training is going. She dances away and I swear she is laughing at me.

Evening and off we go to class. This is my night to teach the Novice class and I bring along my new "toy". Everyone in the class has a chance to try out the new tiny training table. Then I leave it sitting in the center of the training floor, send Sanity to it and that is where she perches for pretty much the rest of the class except when I call her. My goal is to be able to call her out to teach something and then send her back and to be able to do this with little more than the twitch of my finger. In time, I hope she will be like all her predecessors and know my teaching style so well that I won't have to call her or send her away at all. She will know because of what I am teaching when to appear and when to leave. But that sort of working partnership takes a couple of years of work to fine tune. I have hope we will get there in record time.