Thank you for all of the nice comments, prayers and well wishes.  We appreciate each and every one.

Thunder took his last pain pills yesterday morning.  Two less pills is a good thing, because although he is a good patient, he is not fond of pill taking.  Making sure he understands “no pills” = “no dinner” has helped.  He seems to understand that the quicker he takes the medication, the quicker his bowl of food will be put down.

So far, so good, with his recovery.  He seems to be feeling more himself and is sleeping curled up in a little ball as I write this, (actually both Thunder and Storm are curled up in little sleeping balls).  There are also times when he wants to play, but we have to hold him back from that for now.

He is now confident enough to walk around with the cone on his head.  Unfortunately it cuts off his vision, so he is constantly bumping into things, like the couch, a table, the wall.  It is kind of comical to watch, but he will not deterred from doing it.  🙂  Of course since he is moving around more with it on, he will also be spending more time with it in his crate because we don’t want to risk an injury.

We have been taking him for short walks (no cone), down 2-3 houses, turn around and walk back.  He seems to enjoy the change of scenery.  He will take the last of his medications tomorrow and the staples will be removed Thursday.  Then we suspect it will be a long couple of weeks until he can start running simple marks and blinds again.

As Thunder continues to recuperate, I hope to still post some about Storm’s field training.  She has had the last week off (unfortunately), while we devoted our time to Thunder, but we hope to get her back into the swing of training.  Of course the weather is going to turn hot and stormy this week.  Last week was perfect training weather, cool and low humidity, but we were a bit preoccupied.

Flashback to last Monday and our last training session.  As I said, the temperatures had turned cooler.  We wanted to check out a park closer to home to see if there was a spot to train.  Sure enough there was a nice open field where we decided to run some marking drills.  We started close (about 20-25 yards), and tossed a dokken (which is a training dummy that looks like a duck).  Then we walked off 25 paces and tossed one to the opposite side.  This helps the dogs learn to look closer and farther for the marks.  Then we reversed, starting farther and coming closer.  We run this drill every now and again.  Both dawgs did a nice job with this.

The white line is an imaginary line and the marks (the “X’s”) are tossed right and left.

Some pictures of the 2 brown dawg’s work.