Weight Off My Shoulders

Video from December-January, as promised.

Today we went back to Hamden again for what I was afraid might be one of our last AKC trials for a very long time. With the "budget cuts" and all, I have some UKI and USDAA along with a few seminars planned through April, but that was going to be it. Mary's officially moving out this Friday. Yesterday I heard from one of the incoming interns who seems very interested in the house, and today I heard from a second one, so if the first backs out soon, I have a back up. When I got those two emails I really felt a huge weight lifted, I can still do agility and all the things I had planned for this year.

Don't know if I was preoccupied with all of that, but today was a terrible day at the trial. Might have also been on my first run of the day, Marron skidded onto the table on her side. You probably wouldn't have been able to tell watching, since once she stopped skidding, she wound up in a down and while I stared at her, checking to see if she was hurt, she just gazed back at me as if saying, "What? Nothing wrong here, the judge is counting, why don't you scurry off so you're ready to release me when he's done!" If you didn't know that she DOESN'T auto down, it would have looked pretty cool. I saw which way her legs were pointing and it was not normal. I spent both of Spy and Kraft's runs worried that she would come gimping out of her crate for JWW. I don't want to break her again :( Turns out she was fine, and she wound up my only dog to QQ. I was not on my game handling wise all day either. None of my dogs looked confident about what I was doing, which was probably a reflection of my lack of confidence. What the heck? AKC courses aren't that hard, why am I finding them so difficult lately? It's not like they are particularly hard in and of themselves, *I* just feel like I don't have the tools to cue them properly. I can obviously get through them "clean", but not with the dog driving confidently exactly where I want them to go, which is really my definition of a good run. Spy had a bar in both runs, one of which was totally my fault now that I watch the video as I cued a little deceleration going into the chute, then had to push her back out to a jump. Kraft I over handled a discrimination off the dog walk, just to save a Q, then at the next point I was unsure on, I totally sent him in the wrong end of a tunnel. JWW I got through clean, but only by luck, he had no clue where he was going and didn't even place, and this is a one ring trial. Both our Masters JWW Q's have been like that, ones where I didn't feel like I did a good job showing him the course. He and Marron got the same number of MACH points on that run, 13, and Marron was slower than normal since the course started out jump-weave which isn't her favorite. I did manage to get all the runs on video, and pieced together the good bits. I'll add that to this post once it's finished uploading.

And yesterday's video: