Working back to Ups, not Downs, Sunday

SUMMARY: Things looked up in several areas.

When I was able to read my email last thing before bed Saturday night, found that my dad had been safely transported, post-op, to a rehab facility and was already working on walking (with a walker), sitting up, and other positive things. And my mom seemed to be doing OK on her own.

Back at the trial site in the morning, Pairs Relay was up first. Tika had a lovely run with her frequent partner, Brenn, and they placed 2nd out of 11 teams with a clean Q. Oh--and, right, we did the same thing in Pairs the day before. So that actually was good.

Then Boost, whom I took off the pairs course the day before in disgust, had a gorgeous fast clean run, and she and her partner Qed and placed 2nd out of 27 teams. Cold and hot. Down and up.

Gamblers, Boost again popped out of her weaves in the opening and I made her fix them even though it wasted time and didn't give us any points, so now we were among the lowest-point openings and I mishandled the gamble, so no Q, either. Compared to yesterday, where we were hot in the gamble. Hot and cold, up and down.

But Tika nailed the gamble opening and closing, and we took 1st by a wide margin--and, oh, yeah, we did the same thing the day before, too. So that actually was good.

In Standard, both dogs Qed! Boost's run was quite smooth all the way through. I held her on the contacts, so our time wasn't blazing, but the run was very nice. With Tika, she almost went off course into a tunnel when I didn't call enough, and then we ended up taking 2nd instead of 1st by--ack!--.01 of a second! But a Q and 2nd are pretty good. I'll take them.

In Jumpers, oh, my, Boost's run was fantastic. What a lovely, lovely run, showing almost her full potential. She knocked one bar, but her time was very close to the winning dogs, who are top-class national competitors. Oh, if only we could run like this every time!

And Tika's run was smooth and clean, for a Q and a first--oh, yeah, and she did the same thing the day before, too. So that was good.

Boost's grand prix was SO close to being excellent. One refusal at a jump that required a wrap/front-cross, and then off course at the end where I said "go hup!" and she did, when it should've been a "come". But SO smooth.

And remember 2 weeks ago where I exulted about Tika winning Grand Prix and earning a bye for the regionals round 2 for the first time ever with any of my dogs? Well, she did it again this weekend.

So my down view and the things that went wrong had completely clouded my view of how well tika had really done: For the weekend, Qs in 10 out 11 classes, absolutely fantastic in USDAA. Won both Jumpers, both Gamblers, and Grand Prix, second in both Relays and one Standard.

And some of Boost's runs were really lovely SUnday, giving me hope (once again) that maybe we'll get this figured out eventually, and she even Qed twice Sunday (none on Saturday, but her gamblers was very nice). She popped out of the weaves twice but got ALL her entries and didn't skip poles after that, woo hoo! Did ALL her contacts correctly, woo hoo! Left the start line early only once, did both her tables in Standard perfectly. These are all good things that have sometimes given us problems.

For the weekend, Tika completed her Performance Gamblers Silver (25 Qs)--took her 4.5 years to get her Champion Gamblers Silver, and only 2 years to do it all over again in Performance.

She's now only 9 Qs away from her Lifetime Achievement Award (LAA) Gold--which would be 350 lifetime Masters, P3, and Tournament Qs. Very achievable this year, then, maybe even within the next couple of trials. That would be super.

And I got home, tried my computer disk utility again, and it got a lot farther than it had before, without saying that the disk was unrepairable. I'm running it yet again, and we'll see--I'm starting to hope that in fact I will recover my whole disk.

One can only hope. Ups and downs, downs and ups.