Bordering on obedience

I find myself in the midst of my corporate budget season right now.  A grim time where we arrive to work anywhere from 7am-8am and get frowned at if we leave before 6:30pm each night.  Never mind that you eat lunch at your desk, it is the fact that it is crunch time and everyone is burning through hours.

Added to the chaos is indecisiveness at the corporate level about what type of targets to communicate and it becomes a three-ring circus at work.

I would normally never choose to add anything to my private life that would create more work right now.

However, sometimes you have to roll with things as they come up.

I wanted to add a puppy within the next 9 months but the opportunity to add Ghilley to my household presented itself in mid-September.

I have not regretted it.

It is certainly stressful.  I have added an extra visit with a dog walker to come by twice a day.  I actually might stick with that permanently, especially for my ageing boys.

Amidst the chaos from work, though, can be some regularly scheduled fun activities like dog agility class.  The problem this year, however, is that for the 3 weeks following when I brought Ghilley home, my agility class is cancelled as our instructor competes at the Montgomery trials in PA and then heads West to spend two weeks with her hubby, dogs and their RV.

The impact to me is a great opportunity to utilize class as an opportunity to work with Ghilley beforehand with attention work and such is temporarily on hiatis.

Instead it has fallen a bit to me to try to tackle this at home at night.  I find myself running a bit out of time with dinner, swimming MacDuff in his pool, walking the gang for Robbie's exercise, my own workouts (lost 33 lbs. since April so far) and then playtime for ALL doggies.

Trying to partition out time for each dog seems to be something that is next to impossible during the week.

Last night, my pals with their dog store's training area (http://www.dogsinthering.com/) decided that for the next two Wednesday nights, they'll have open training for the agility gang.  It is a place to go to try to work some of the equipment.

I showed up, worked Duff a bit and also Robbie.  Robbie was very enthusiastic about running agility again.  He has been away from all agility since injuring himself on July 13th.

During times when I was not working the boys, I had Ghilley out and we were working on attention, sits and downs.  We also worked a bit on recalls.

My anxiety comes from the fact that it seems we are a long way from anything acceptable as far as attention goes.

Some of it is her age, when I got her and the fact she is a girl.  I do believe she will pose more of a challenge.  I look forward to it but still cannot help but feel I have done her a disservice.

She will learn and has already picked up quite a bit (e.g., Mommy is not a chew toy), but I still feel some angst.