A bit of fun

Wednesday night I took the dogs up to Salem to My Dog's Gym. We practice flyball there every Thursday night, and every year they have a Halloween party, and we go. My goal this year was to win the costume contest, but there was a lot of fun stuff going on there as well.

I played around with the dogs some. Before too many people got there, I spent some time trying to teach Koira to "strut" and she was doing really well. I was getting 3-4 steps of strutting by the time we stopped. Since we had never tried it before, I thought that was pretty good for a first session, especially with all the craziness around us of other dogs, people arriving, etc.

As the party got started more, I switched out dogs and brought Pallo in. I ended up having him on the other end of the leash when they announced we were going to play Musical Chairs. The dog version is to do musical platforms, with each dog needing to stop on a platform (be it whole body, 2 feet, or even just one foot) whenever the music stopped. I've never done platform work with Pallo before.

We did a few warm up rounds of walking around during the music, then stopping on a platform when the music stopped. There were plenty of platforms for everyone who wanted to play, so that we could get the idea of it. Pallo figured out pretty quickly that being on the platform got him treats (though at first he thought he needed to be on the platform, laying down, and being "ashamed"). Turns out there is a big edge toward winning when your dog is super gung-ho on jumping up onto any platform within leash reach. We managed to take the game in the end, after a really fun time playing with a ton of other people and dogs. Pallo really won it for us, as in the last one, with two dogs and one platform, all I had to do was get him headed toward the platform and he simply bolted up onto it.

After the game was over, I got Koira back out and costumed up both the dogs. There were some other really great costumes as well, with one owner-and-dog pair dressed up as flying monkeys, a few dressed as pumpkins, and some other great ones. But, me, Koira, and Pallo ended up taking the Best Overall prize (there was also Scariest, Cutest, and Best Duo). No pictures, though, because I was a bad blogger and forgot my camera...

Hope everyone else had a great Halloween with lots of fun. And that your November starts off amazing. And good luck to everyone participating in NaNoWriMo this year! I totally forgot it was coming up, so when I remembered yesterday, I registered and got something started, but I have zero confidence of getting it finished with no planning, no solid ideas, and a really busy schedule ahead of me.