Off To Another Agility Trial

We're off to Turlock for the weekend. Carpooling with a friend and our five dogs. Makes the minivan mighty cozy, but oh! so much better than driving by myself at 4:30 in the morning, in the dark and the tule fog, barely awake. Now we can both be barely awake together. Fortunately her two dogs put together aren't even as big as Jake's head. Or, OK, maybe a little bigger than his head.

Here's what we're doing this weekend:

Jake:

• Two jumpers runs, one each day--last thing of the day, of course, so he gets to sit and wait all day. Poor little guy.

Tika:

• Two Standards: If we get even one of them, that will give us our Standard Master title, which would be very cool.


• Two Snookers: If we could Super-Q in both, that would give us our Snooker Master title, which would be VERY cool. But there will be only 3 Super-Qs out of 18 dogs competing, and we've had a history of either knocking a key bar on the last obstacle that we need for the super-Q or mom does something totally stupid like I did the other weekend at SMART that I'm still kicking myself for.


• Two Jumpers: If we could get even one of them, that would be our MAD (Master Agility Dog) title, which would be extremely cool. It would be our first master Jumpers leg after 2 (?) years of trying. Argh. Maybe only 1 year. A long time anyway.


• One pairs relay: No title possible here, as we need 2 more legs. We've had a history of either us or our partner going offcourse. Hate when that happens. But the nice thing is that other faults don't matter much because it's time plus faults scoring, so if you're fast, you can make up for a knocked bar. (Unlike in Standard and Jumpers.)


• One gamblers: Always nice to get these. I'm a lonnng way from earning a title here.


• One Grand Prix qualifier for THIS year's nationals at some ridiculous entry fee. We're already qualified. I just thought that (a) maybe we could finally repeat our success of her first USDAA trial ever, where she actually earned a GP ribbon, and (b) we need the practice on GP courses before the nationals.

Another random factoid:

Vet says that a dog's 4-month weight is almost always half of what they'll weigh full grown. Boost was about 22 pounds. That would make her as big as Tika when she's done growing, which I was hoping wouldn't happen. We'll see--