Obedience Show N Go (Novice)

Obedience Match for Perri today!  This match was outside, with all of the weather unpredictability and noises and distractions that will be business as normal at future shows.
Additionally, this was the same site that Perri had her first Beginner Novice attempt at (You know, the place where she sniffed goose poop the entire time and broke her stay on the recall?)  Yeah, this was the place!

 Awesome-
-- Perri barely sniffed at all!  She has a history of doing plenty of stress sniffing since we started training Obedience.  The absence of that shows me that Perri is becoming more comfortable in the ring.
-- I am truly seeing the beginnings of attention while heeling.  It's in there, and will continue to grow.
-- Groups stays.  Solid.  Even when a cup flew off of the stewards table and onto the ground.  She gave it a good stare, but stayed put.
-- The recall was fast.  Perri at last understands her job here.   The finish was hand signal only and prompt.
-- The judge told me that she can see the Perri is smart and motivated and said that I am going to have a great little working dog on my hands in the future.  I will remember that forever.


Not Awesome-
-- For the FOURTH time I was told by a judge to MOVE. FASTER.  She even told me "Get Going!" during the heel free (I appreciated it.)  I see lots of dipping my shoulders towards Perri in this video and that causes her to lag even more.  I am an enormous problem with Perri's heeling and I need to train myself just as much as her! (this is actually the sole reason that this is on video, so that I could watch how I use my body.)  Lumped in with this was a lot of Perri being distracted by Everything and also not sitting at halt, and hopefully a lot of that could be fixed if I would pick up my pace and handle my dog correctly.
You can see the improvement that a faster stride on my end made on the Heel Free.
-- Crooked front: This problem just popped up a few weeks ago.  Perri is recalling fast, consistently.  I think that since her body is coming to front much different than it used to, I need to entirely re-teach her what is expected of her.
-- Paws moving on the Stand for Exam.  Not awesome.  I plan to work on proofing her Stand-Stay by throwing toys or food around and at her and by finding more victims to perform the SFE on her.
-- Run for the shade!  I would not let her drink before we went in the ring (Ya know, since she PEED in the Novice ring before.) and it was direct sun in that ring.  She did not leave me during an exercise to do that, so this is not too awful.


Next Match!  September 8th.  Maybe we can clean up our act in two weeks time?  We sure will have fun trying.

Whaddya mean this is all the space I get to sit in?!