Meet Riot, our golden retriever puppy. I was lucky enough to get one of the Comedians from Gaylan's Comedy Litter. Our little comedian was Mr. Green and he is a doll. When Riot grows up he'll do agility and obedience with Kelly, hopefully some pet therapy, and who knows what else. Chris is hoping he'll have a buddy to watch TV with too.
I drove to New York last weekend to pick him up. Everyone is settling in nicely, it was a rough couple of days but every day we're all getting a little more adjusted.
The weekend before Riot came home, Cisco had a fun filled weekend of agility and probably the most consistent he's been at a trial in a long time. We qualified in 5 of 7 runs for the weekend, and the other two we missed qualifying for by two weave poles and my handling mistake causing a refusal.
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.
Last weekend was Blue Ridge Dog Training Club's spring trial. Friday I took off of work to play. It was the worst day of our weekend. I made lots of mistakes and didn't do a good job of telling Cisco what to do.
We seemed to get that all out of our system because by Saturday things were falling into place. We started the day with a great Open Standard run where we got third place after getting a refusal called (it was a bad front cross, but I don't think it should have been a refusal). Saturday afternoon, we had a perfect Jumpers run. It was our third Excellent A Jumpers leg which got us our AXJ -- our first excellent title! Berkley came with us on Saturday and Sunday (it's been about 6 months since he's done any agility). Saturday he forgot he actually had to get on the contact obstacles and ran right past the dog walk and a-frame with me.
Sunday Cisco turned in two great runs. Neither was qualifying, but they were still good runs (we had a missed a-frame contact in open standard and one refusal in our first Excellent B jumpers run). Berkley did better on Sunday. We did knock a bar and run across the broad jump, but we did our contact obstacles and our weave poles.
I'm still on an agility high from last weekend and wish we had signed up for something before mid-April.
This past weekend was TAG's August trial at the Dulles Sportsplex in Sterling. It was a long weekend that started Friday night with set-up. We couldn't get into one of the rings until 10:45 for set-up which meant we didn't get done until 11:30 or so. I got home shortly after midnight and crashed.
Saturday was an early morning with the alarm going off about 5:30. Cisco and I headed out early that morning and didn't get back until close to midnight again. TAG had around 1100 runs on Saturday between the two rings with the last dog running around 9pm. Cisco was supposed to run in 5 classes, but I pulled him from his last run. He didn't qualify in any of his runs, but I can't complain. He was clean in steeplechase, but over time. I still need to figure out what makes him pokey at times. Cisco did get a massage towards the end of the day. Kim didn't find any soreness or tenderness and she said he has killer hamstrings.
We were back at it 6am Sunday. Sunday's standard run started out slow with Cisco barely getting on the dog walk and blowing off the teeter. After that things picked up. We qualified in advanced gamblers our first time out. And completed our last leg towards on starters jumpers title with probably our faster run of the weekend. I also had my first taste of running a border collie in agility when I got to run a very sweet girl Jossie. Turns out my run with Jossie got her a very pretty green ribbon (her Agility Dog title). Yay! Jossie! We finished clean up about 8pm Sunday night. It was a long, but rewarding weekend. But I'm so glad I don't have to work another trial until May.
This was the first show we used MAD agility equipment for. Major props to Jen and Mark for their hardwork and help this weekend. They were a pleasure to work with.
