Post by hooligan on Jun 23, 2011 11:21:10 GMT -5
. . . but I'm placing it in this section, anyway. Some of you may know that Jack and Bill were scheduled to compete for a BH last Sunday -- and they did, with incredibly, horrendously, unbelievably awful results.
It was one of those days when everything -- and more -- that could go wrong did. We're laughing about it now, but we sure weren't laughing on the day. And this from a team that several experienced SchH hands were suggesting had a shot at high BH.
The first portent of imminent disaster occurred on the pre-competition potty walk. Jack pooped (this was good), and Bill scooped. But then Bill popped the bag into his vest pocket -- where it promptly exploded! Yikes!
And things went downhill from there. Bill was left to decide which was best: to change the garb that Jack was used to because it had been worn in every training session for the past six months or to try a quick cleanup and hope for the best.
Bill elected to try the cleanup. Bad decision. Jack got out on the field and clearly wanted nothing more than to stay away -- very, very far away -- from the stinky vest. His lack of focus freaked Bill out, and as Bill became more freaked and more stressed, Jack got worse . . . and worse . . . and worse.
This rattled Bill sooooo completely that he lost his objectivity and later said that as bad as things might have looked to onlookers, they seemed 10 times worse from his vantage point on the field. And faced with that, he started making every error that a novice handler could possibly make.
By then, the train wreck was well under way -- and the long down was still ahead. Jack's long down has actually been pretty secure for months, but less than a minute into it, he responded to Bill's stress by rolling over, sticking his legs in the air, and giving himself a nice, satisfying back rub on the grass. Then he stood up and walked a few paces over to the nearby scrub, where he lifted his leg and took a stress pee. Aaaargh! This sealed his fate.
But once the whole gawdawful thing was over, nice stuff started happening. The number of experienced SchH folk who sought me and Bill out to offer encouraging words and reassuring (and sometimes very funny) stories about their own spectacular failures was amazing. One is even giving us a DVD chronicling her own early disasters.
So the whole thing turned out to be a huge learning experience, in a way that it wouldn't have been if Jack had held the long down and squeaked through with a pass. In fact, Bill is now grateful that this didn't happen -- because it has given him and Jack an opportunity to go back to basics and really solidify their foundation work, something we had talked about doing, anyway. And in the long run, we think that this will be a very good thing.
So the moral of the story is . . . never, ever, ever put a poop bag in your pocket. LOL.
It was one of those days when everything -- and more -- that could go wrong did. We're laughing about it now, but we sure weren't laughing on the day. And this from a team that several experienced SchH hands were suggesting had a shot at high BH.
The first portent of imminent disaster occurred on the pre-competition potty walk. Jack pooped (this was good), and Bill scooped. But then Bill popped the bag into his vest pocket -- where it promptly exploded! Yikes!
And things went downhill from there. Bill was left to decide which was best: to change the garb that Jack was used to because it had been worn in every training session for the past six months or to try a quick cleanup and hope for the best.
Bill elected to try the cleanup. Bad decision. Jack got out on the field and clearly wanted nothing more than to stay away -- very, very far away -- from the stinky vest. His lack of focus freaked Bill out, and as Bill became more freaked and more stressed, Jack got worse . . . and worse . . . and worse.
This rattled Bill sooooo completely that he lost his objectivity and later said that as bad as things might have looked to onlookers, they seemed 10 times worse from his vantage point on the field. And faced with that, he started making every error that a novice handler could possibly make.
By then, the train wreck was well under way -- and the long down was still ahead. Jack's long down has actually been pretty secure for months, but less than a minute into it, he responded to Bill's stress by rolling over, sticking his legs in the air, and giving himself a nice, satisfying back rub on the grass. Then he stood up and walked a few paces over to the nearby scrub, where he lifted his leg and took a stress pee. Aaaargh! This sealed his fate.
But once the whole gawdawful thing was over, nice stuff started happening. The number of experienced SchH folk who sought me and Bill out to offer encouraging words and reassuring (and sometimes very funny) stories about their own spectacular failures was amazing. One is even giving us a DVD chronicling her own early disasters.
So the whole thing turned out to be a huge learning experience, in a way that it wouldn't have been if Jack had held the long down and squeaked through with a pass. In fact, Bill is now grateful that this didn't happen -- because it has given him and Jack an opportunity to go back to basics and really solidify their foundation work, something we had talked about doing, anyway. And in the long run, we think that this will be a very good thing.
So the moral of the story is . . . never, ever, ever put a poop bag in your pocket. LOL.