Pardon our tardiness!

Blogs can be a bit difficult to keep up with. As is apparent since it's been since October that we last wrote in this one. Fall is the show season and all of us have been hectically busy. It's very odd because I am currently working at home after being laid off yet I still seem to be frantically busy. Why is that? But I promise to do better and to poke the owners more often to get submissions.

As I said, fall is show season. I concentrated on agility this fall with Zipper. I'm starting to learn a bit more about what works and what doesn't. The arenas in Lawrence Kansas have livestock fence barriers that are see through (and runnable-through if you have a little dog). I've realized that right now that's not the best place for Zipper, it's just too visually distracting. At our facility, where he's comfortable and knows where everything is, he shines. He managed a 100% Q weekend at our trial, finishing his Open Jumpers title and getting two Open Standard legs. I moved him up to Excellent A Jumpers for the special show I got to go to in Springfield MA but he didn't do that well there, only to come back and finish his Open Standard title and get his first Excellent Jumpers leg in St. Louis the following weekend. The arena in Lake St Louis has white walls around 3 sides, and he tends to do very well there. So my plan is to keep him in those types of arenas until he's a bit less green.

Now a bit more on Springfield MA. What an experience. I was sent up there to man a booth for the OFA, as they work on trying to get more agility people to screen their dogs (and that's another blog at another time). Since I could fly Zipper under the seat, I decided to enter. This agility trial, done in conjunction with a set of all-breed shows and obedience/Rally, is the largest agility trial in the U.S. Entry limits per day were 2,000. As a comparison, the great majority of shows are either 330 or 660 entries. This is a big, big show. The only thing near it is the AKC Nationals. I was especially boggled to find that there were over 60 Excellent A 8" dogs (around here there are generally 2 or 3 A dogs). My Excellent A 12" class was about 130 dogs. They had to split us into two walkthroughs. The two clubs who put it on are phenomenol. It's amazingly well organized, and though I was definitely the small-town hick come to the big city, everyone was extremely friendly. And the vendors. Oh, the vendors. Clean Run was there in force, with a HUGE inventory. Max 200, other equipment makers, jewelers, it went on and on. The agility arena was definitely the vendor hall of fame and I spent far too much money.

As for Zipper's runs, only two were captured which is too bad, because his final Open Standard run on Sunday was pretty decent. I didn't get to run him in Excellent Sunday because even with running two different rings of Excellent jumpers simultaneously, we wouldn't have run till about 3:00 p.m. and my flight left at 3:30. But if you want to see Mr. Distraction at work, go here!

http://www.hycalibervideo.com/dog-agility-videos-08-10-18-19?filter0=Zipper

After doing agility all fall tracking was a change, and we had a fabulous tracking seminar with Linda Baschnagel this past weekend. Any of you who thought about it and decided not to attend really missed out. Tremendous information in a fun format. I hear she's coming back to do a VST seminar and I can't wait.