No Ups, Downs through Saturday

SUMMARY: A rough week, and a bipolar USDAA agility weekend--first, Saturday and leading in to it.

Last Sunday night and Monday, something I ate (most likely) had much disagreement with my system. (When you "call in sick" when working at home, you know it's pretty uncomfortable.) I did spend time at the computer, working and the usual, off and on. So I knew, from her facebook posts, that my sister had had a rough encounter with a hedge trimmer and had been in the emergency room that day.

When I was finally able to fall asleep midafternoon, the same sister called to say that apparently in the emergency room she'd just missed my dad being brought in, from falling and breaking his hip.

The rest of the week involved considerable amount of research on the subject, updating people and being updated, and mostly worrying about my dad's hip and my mom being without my dad around.

Wednesday, my friend with cancer talked with her doctor and agreed it's time for her to start working with hospice. Hospice, from what I've heard, is a godsend of services, support, and advice for end-of-life planning and management, but it's that last phrase that makes it sad. You always hope for a miracle, especially from a real fighter.

Thursday, my disk drive with all my photos seemed to have died, and of course my last full backup had been the previous thursday. Probably not lots of stuff missing, but all the hours of photo editing that I had done in the past week would be gone. (It's soooo stupid--I try to just hit the backup button every day, but then I get into the mindset of "oh, I haven't finished going through all the photos from the last 4 days--I'll wait to do the backup until I've sorted, labele,d & processed all of them. Doh.) Wouldn't have lost the originals--I never erase them from my cameras until I have at least 2 copies of them on different disks. Still, that's a lot of hours of processing.

I can't tell you how many times I restarted & restarted my system and tried various things obsessively. A sys admin friend stayed here saturday evening and looked at it a bit and it was looking pretty sad. The only hopeful thing was that there seemed to be a couple of steps forward, a step back, like that.

So maybe my mindset had already gone into "life sucks" mode for the USDAA trial this weekend. Saturday, it felt like nothing went right:

• Tika's Standard, lovely, except that while she was waiting on the table, I moved out of position for the next jump and she backjumped it. Why, how? Dunno, I did it right with boost before that.
• Except in boost's standard, she had an assortment of bars knocked, refusals, and off courses other than that.
• Tika's snooker, well, a Q, but I couldn't get to a front cross in time and pushed her off the #6 in the closing, so we didn't even place.
• Boost's Snooker, a really nice, smooth opening, but she knocked bar #4 in the closing. So again no super-Q--but even had we gotten all through it, my flowing course wouldn't have been enough for a super-Q.
• Tika Qed in steeplechase round 1 although she hit the broad jump for a fault. In round 2, everything was perfect and fast EXCEPT that she abruptly left the right to go sniff at something in the lawn for about 10 seconds. We were SOOO far out of the money on a very tika-like course.
• Boost's gamble, great opening, as in 4th highest of all masters dogs, AND did the gamble, but knocked the last bar. Might have been my fault, maybe I was slowing down. 
• Boost's Jumpers, bars and refusals.
• As we got towards the end of the day, I noted to a couple of people that at least, after 5 classes, boost's start line had been rock solid and all of her weaves had been perfect. So, in pairs, she didn't stick her startline, resulting in a refusal, then she popped out of her weaves, so I was out of position to get a front x that I really needed, and she went right off course.

I was pretty discouraged by Saturday evening. Didn't even collect the ribbons that I had earned, didn't gather most of my results.  Once again, not having that much fun most of the day, thinking about all the other things I could've been doing other than agility.

I always enjoy the people I spend time with at trials, though.

And I was glad to be able to let an agility friend stay in the guest room here overnight so she didn't have to drive anohter hour home or spend the $ for a motel room, and that was a pleasant way to spend the evening, sharing a pizza, even though we were both pretty beat. The down side was coming home and seeing that the disk repair util that had been running for the last day said that my disk was unrepairable and my friend was a bit puzzled by its behavior, too.

And that was Saturday.