Tuesday evening I attended my first in a series of Hatha yoga classes offered by a local community education program.  It is taught by a man who has a PhD in pharmacology!  He’s given up that career and now teaches yoga full time.  He was very accommodating to all of us newbies, telling us (appropriately) that it was all about the breath and not about how we did the poses.  Good thing.  However I often found myself holding my breath, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what was supposed to be happening!  I’ll work on it.  I didn’t think we had exerted ourselves too much, but two days later I could hardly move.  And I still can’t sit up after reclining on the sofa without pain.  Guess that’s the “core” he kept talking about!

Wednesday night Katie and I as well as her dad went to Agility class.  We’ve been working all week on “walk it walk it walk it!” across her board, first flat on the driveway, then elevated a bit on bricks and finally sloping down from our front porch.  She runs across her board, then turns and runs right back, looking for a treat, as long as it’s level.  And she’ll run down the sloping board all day, but wants nothing to do with walking up it!  At school this week they didn’t have the dog walk set up.  DRAT!  They did have the A-frame the and teeter set up, neither of which she initially wanted to deal with.  We did get her to “touch!” them and get a treat.  Eventually we used Marie’s idea of bringing the tall table over to the A-frame.  Katie jumped right up on the table,  and with a treat to entice her, stepped onto the A-frame and walked down half of it!  Later I got her to put all four feet on the bottom of the A-frame and streeeetch up to reach a treat.  But she didn’t like it. She likes to keep her back feet safely on the floor!   Finally at the end of the class her dad could pick her up and place her just below the tip of the A-Frame and, with me at the bottom holding chicken, she’d run down the slant.

Katie does everything fast.  Jumps, tunnel…and this week, the chute!  Who knew!  Last week we ran the chute with someone holding open the end, and to Katie it was just another tunnel.  This week they dropped the chute fabric on the dogs as they went through.  But Katie was always through the chute before the girl let go.  So after the second time like that they just left the fabric on the ground.  Katie never hesitated, bursting through the chute fabric looking for me and her treat.  I was so surprised, because she’s always balked at chute before.  But I was also very very proud of her.  One of the instructors asked if I had brought the same dog, because she was coming along so well.  This week the tunnel was set up at a 90 degree turn, but when we tried it the first time Katie was running so fast I don’t think she noticed the corner, and had no trouble with it all evening.   Until we did a series of 3 jumps then tire, THEN  had to turn 90 degrees, right at the ring fence, to  go into the tunnel.  I didn’t have enough room to get her going, and she walked into it, then turned around and walked out each time.  A couple of things might have caused that, the slowness of her entry, and the fact that it was the end of class and she had pretty much shut down.  So I didn’t worry about it.  Everything is fun in agility, and that’s the way I want to keep it for her.

Yesterday morning was our Obedience/Rally class.  This week the course was much more difficult, filled with things I had never seen before.  The instructor had thrown in a lot of excellent level stations.  We bumbled our way through it, but I’m not worried as I’m a long way from competing in excellent!  Katie did really well on most of her heeling and of course she was perfect on her sits and stays.  She was also perfect on her stand for exam, so I’m happy.  I need to get her registered to do a rally trial.

Last night I went to my first Spanish for Adults class.  I’ve always wanted to try to learn another language; I took 2 years of French in high school and was terrible at it.  Maybe it will work better as an adult, and with no grade!  But I don’t know.  Most of the other 7 adults in the class had someone in their family that spoke Spanish and they heard it spoken a lot.  I don’t, though I heard it at work quite a bit.  And it’s clear that I have to think about things a lot longer than they do.  And that I’ll probably have to work harder to get it.  But that’s not unusual, after going back to grad school at 50 I am used to being slightly behind and working harder to keep up.  Which means I need to get offline and start on my Spanish homework.  Can’t blame the dog for errors in this class!

My favorite sentence from last night?  “El perro es inteligente.”  The dog is intelligent.   Well…she is… but how did they know?