This weekend Cisco, Berkley and spent at the Blue Ridge Dog Training Club's Agility trial. Cisco qualified in Jumpers on Friday getting his first leg towards his MXJ title and his first three MACH points. Saturday he Q'd in Open Standard finally getting that third leg and getting his OA title. Sunday his very first Excellent Standard run was met with the first time we've seen the zoomies in about 3 years and blowing all of our contacts. Sunday afternoon jumpers was a bit better, but we missed our weave poles and took a off-course jump. But I'm not complaining.

This weekend marked a few significant events for Cisco. As mentioned above there was a bit of zoomies taking place that hasn't been seen in years. He had six runs in three days and not one of them would I describe as pokey -- for the last year or so typically at least one run a day could be described as pokey. I also had a bunch of people come up to me and tell me how good he looked. All of this on the heels of a week that he practically drove us nuts nightly with his wanting to play with toys or be outside.

I think he's feeling better. And we didn't even know he wasn't feeling well. I really thought that my 6½ year old retriever was finally starting to slow down. Apparently not.

We kind of came to the conclusion this past April that maybe he was allergic to something in the food he had been on since September (he had been having hot spot after hot spot -- which even for my allergic dog was not that common). We switched his food and went to the vet where we got medicine to treat the ear infections. A month later, the ears still looked bad and the doses were upped on the medication for the ears. A month after that the ears still looked bad. At this point I decided to call the allergist and see if we could go see him again or we needed another referral from the vet. So off we went to the allergist who put us on different medication and had us restrict his diet (including treats -- no rawhides or even chicken flavored nylabones (the dogs are really missing those I think)). A month later the ears are looking tons better (not quite perfect yet) and we have a different dog.