Ole and his big nose

Yesterday was pretty uneventful Ole-wise. He did get to go to Daycare and play with his buddies, but Abner and I spent most of the day working on the bedroom. We got the painting finished except for the inevitable touch ups that will come later. Ole and Elmo had lots of quality play time and OH, I noticed that he has a couple of more new front teeth! I think that Elmo is his chewy.
Shelly lets Ole sniff her now but she is more than willing to give him the ughly face if he even hints of unapproved activity. There isn't much activity that he does that she does approve of for that matter.
I started a new beginning obedience class LA JOLLA last night. Ole stayed home with Abner and they went for a neighborhood walk and met a lot of tourists staying in the area on vacation. Ole charms everyone with his tippy coney ears. Donna and I had 6 students and their dogs in class. It seems to be a really nice and motivated group. There are 6 dogs , a lab named Dudley, a golden retriever named Kai, a mini Aussie named Teddy, an Aussie X named Kira, Willow the border collie labX and Fiona a lab & maybe Shar Pei- ish X??? All of them could already do a sit and a down so we were favorably impressed with them. Elmo demoed leash work for the group and Shelly came out after class to work a bit with Teddy who needed a bit of the Shelly no nonsense instruction. Ole was real happy to see us when we got home , seemed like he thought he missed out on all the fun.

Wednesday: We were up and att'um early today. Got everyone pottied and walked and fed and walked again all before 8:00...I'm including Abner and myself in that everyone list. I had an appointment to get a therapeutic massage for myself early and boy did I need it. Painting ceilings really is not my idea of fun and my neck was attesting to it. After an excruciating 60 minutes of body work, I felt 100% better and drove home. I was now ready to face removing the 20 year old carpet and pad from the bedroom. We also needed to remove all the tape and paper from the windows doors and beams. Ole proved himself to be a complete detriment to getting anything done so he got to spend some quality time in his crate while Abner and I got to work. We got all of the carpet and pad removed but then the hard part started , the removal of all the staples and the tack boards that held the carpet in place. I was able to get about half of the gazillion staples that there were up but then had to take a break , feed Ole lunch and get his dinner meal ready as i thought I was going to leave him with Abner as Shelly and Elmo and I had nosework class at 4:00 in Tustin. I reminded Abner about the class which he had forgotten about and he said he would just take Ole with him to go and do some work on the apartments. He thought Ole could just sit in the car while he did some plumbing. Picturing Ole chewing up Dog knows what in Abner's work van, I wisely decided to take Ole with us to nosework class. It's an hour and a half drive to class, so I packed Ole's dinner up to feed him there as I knew he would get very distressed if he had to wait until we got home at 7:30 to eat. Donna was as usual a good sport about the whole thing as she was driving and boy did we have a whole passel of dogs in her smallish car. Class was really fun tonight. All the dogs got to do 3 box drills each and then they did chair searches where odor (in a magnitized scent can) was attached to the underneath area of a metal chair. There were about 10 chairs lined up in a row and the dog had to go down the row and find the scent and then alert to it. The odor was moved to a different chair and the search repeated 3 times for each dog. Ginger's alert was to scratch at the chair, Elmo's was to freeze and then stare directly at me and sit, and Shelly's was to freeze and the stare directly at me and hold the stare until I got a clue. She always looks like she is saying" What's wrong with your nose? It's RIGHT HERE!!!" The big surprise was that Ole got invited at the end of class to do 3 intro box drills. HE loved it! Desiree and Julie who teach the class put out a bunch of empty boxes and then one of them came up to Ole with some food and a box and showed him that they were putting it in the box. I kept him on leash and let him watch them put the box down among all the other boxes and move boxes around so that he couldn't tell which box had the food in it. I told him to" find it", and then let him go and stick his head in each box until he found the one with food in it. he did great and found the box with the food pretty quickly. He was excited about it and was raging and ready for the next. He got to do it 2 more times and didn't want to quit. It's always best to leave with your dog successful and wanting to do more, so we stopped it there and I went over to the office and signed him up for the class. So Ole will be going to class each week just like his big little brother and grumpy older sister. I told Donna she will have to buy a bigger car the way Ole is growing to keep up her end of the carpool.