One step closer..

It was a pretty good weekend. A little windy abut the sun was out for most of the weekend. We were in Millersville, MD at the Artful Dodgers USDAA agility trial. Sassy and Tracey had a really good weekend, with two highlights worth mentioning. First, after 19 tries they finally got their third qualifier for Performance II Gamblers. Now they are in all Performance III classes. The other good news was that they got a qualifier for the Perfomance National Standard. This means that they qualify to go to a Regional competition and try to get a qualifier into the Nationals in Arizona this November. It didn't come easy, of course. We had to wait around for about 3 hours for Sassy's turn. A lot of dogs usually run in this class and she was near the end. They ran first thing in the morning, so Tracey took off her cleats and put her sneakers back on. When they ran, the course was 4 jumps into a curved tunnel. As Sassy went into the tunnel, Tracey put on the brakes in order to pick her up at the other end. Tracey slid and her feet went up in the air. She landed flat on her ass, but was able to scramble up before Sassy came out of the tunnel. Luckily it went down like this. Sassy can get very weirded out by something like that, and she didn't even notice. Tracey was careful, but finished the run just fine, and Sassy made it to the end with 3 seconds to spare. Thank God, the next qualifier would have been 5 hours away.

Unfortunately, Princess' weekend wasn't as good. She has been running really slow and can't make time in USDAA. She does fine when she runs NADAQ (another agility organization), vut USDAA is just too fast for her. I guess it's probably retirement time for the old lady. She is 9 this year.

Gotta go
Steve