More Agility, Coming Right Up!

SUMMARY: USDAA, then CPE.

Lots of agility in July: Three days the first weekend, one weekend off, then two more weekends--like a huge multicourse agility feast, the food keeps coming with barely time to clear one's palate.

USDAA

This weekend, another 2 days of USDAA (I didn't sign up for the bonus classes this evening). Down in Monterey (isn't there a song like that?), 80-minute drive from here. That's another early morning two days in a row.

Title Chase

Let's see--titles?

Boost STILL needs 3 super-Qs and 3 Jumpers Qs for her ADCH. Coming up on four years and counting since we moved into Masters, and only 2 Jumpers Qs and no Super-Qs to show for it. Just the same 5 Qs standing in our way FOR. EVER.

Tika? Two Snooker Qs for her performance silver (25 Qs--took 4.5 years to do it in Masters, now not even 2.5 years later she's almost there in Performance). Two Jumpers for her performance silver, too (5 years to do it in Masters, now not even 2 years and she's almost there again).

In the bigger Tika picture: 79 Qs until her lifetime platinum (500 Qs)! We might actually get there before she retires! It would be nice. But I'm guessing that will be another year, and if she's slowing down--well--I'll call it as we go.

Also, only 2 DAMs and 7 any additional tournaments to her Performance Tournament Platinum (50 Qs), which was the only thing she also went Platinum in Championship. We could actually do that this year, I think--or, wait, do we have two more DAMs this year? One at the regional--huh, not sure.

Attitude

As I was preparing for this weekend, i found that I wasn't actually looking forward to it. You've heard this all before. Maybe it's the early mornings, or the drive, or the whole weekend vanishing again. Or maybe it's because I'm just tired--haven't been sleeping well this week, not sure why--Maybe I have so much to do in general, maybe because yet another friend's dog died suddenly of hemangiosarcoma, and I'm scared all over again. Or maybe it's possibly tied to:

CPE

Charining next weekend's CPE. We went through a couple or 3 weeks where entries were so low we were afraid for our [financial] lives, but now we have more than we had expected (this is a very good thing). So we put off some things because we didn't know what our finances would look like, now it's rush rush rush to fill in the gaps. Thank Dog I have a co-chair who's doing a lot of stuff, too. I keep thinking I'm forgetting something REALLY IMPORTANT even though I've been over the checklists and have been trying to keep the whole committee involved.

I wasn't ever going to do this again--chaired a few CPE trials early on--except that I found that I really wanted one close to home, and we didn't have other people ready to do it yet.

I'll be very glad when it's done. And next year, maybe, hopefully, there'll be a crew happy enough to put it on and I can go back into chairperson retirement.

But I'm definitely looking forward to the CPE trial itself. Maybe it's because (a) it's only 20 minutes from my house and (b) Boost can still earn Qs and titles with faults. And both dogs usually come home with some nice ego-boosting (or ego-tikaing) wins as well.

Back to Attitude

I dunno, I like the agility when I'm there. Most of the time. But I've been so enjoying the weekends when I'm not doing agility. And then, like the other weekend, when Tika was so slow (for tika) on so many runs, is she getting "old" finally? At 10 and a half, she's entitled to do that, it's just that she's done so well for so long. And in USDAA, even in Performance, ya gotta be fast to do well (by my own warped definition of "well").

Anyway, this weekend: I'm doing it, I'll be there, I'll have a good time, visit with friends (when not at the score table, which is somewhat easier to do with the new computer scoring we've been doing with our own Karey-Made Software), play with my dogs, be outside in lovely weather. Really, sounds perfect, doesn't it?

Hope you all have a great weekend doing what you love.