a Taj MuttHall Dog Diary: More Details About the Past Sunday

Thursday, October 20, 2005

More Details About the Past Sunday

(From email to a friend:)
Even though they got the snooker and jumpers started around 1:30 (nearly simultaneously, in same running order, which was quite a controversy in itself), lots of people packed it in early and headed home. The whole thing was done just after 3, I think.

Jake had one of his slow days Sunday. I don't know whether he tweaked something playing frisbee first thing in the morning or whether I didn't give him enough warm-up or what, but he barely moved during his Jumpers run and I found myself nearly doing scully handling (running around the outside of the dog's path instead of the inside) because I was expecting him to carry out while I moved off in another direction but he wasn't moving fast enough. Last weekend he was 10 seconds under SCT on his jumpers run; this weekend he was half a second over. I don't know whether he's ever been over time on a USDAA jumpers before. Tika wasn't all that fast in her Jumpers run, either, but then she had just run a full snooker course less than 5 minutes before and the weather and she were both pretty warm. We continued the tradition of knocking a single bar.

After about 5 snooker classes in a row where Tika was the last or next-to-last dog so I could know exactly how many points I needed for a Super-Q, and then proceeded to do totally stupid brain-hiccup things, I realized that I needed to go back to ignoring everyone else and not watching the snooker class and not checking the scores and just running. Although now I believe it's 8 snookers in a row where we've been last or next-to-last dog! Wouldn't some people just die for that? And I can't seem to make use of it without choking! So we've done much better in these last 3, Qing in 2 of 3, although missing hard but not impossible entries to #7 in the closing on both of them. One would've been a superQ; the other would've been enough points but probably slower on time than another dog so not a superQ anyway. But much closer than, say, 0 points because I forgot the first red!

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