wow, i missed a lot!

well, we've been on a whirlwind these past few weeks - as a follow up to our trial my club hosted in july where rah earned his first utility leg, the following weekend we traveled down to NC where the working dobermans of the carolinas had their UDC show - rah finished his D-CD with typical rah antics such as trying to bite the leash and being just silly in the ring (a 193 and 193.5 - consistent and have i mentioned i hate novice??)- berlin also got her ATT with flying colors, alerting the minute the aggressor came out from the van (did we have any doubt?) - maybe a bit too early but nothing is too early for berlin! berlin also took best altered (ha ha) in a field of one. a show dog she is not, thank you to the crowd for double handling!

this past few days we've been in PA for the all star tournament - ill give the play by play for each run and hopefully have video soon.

it was such a thrill to be there - truly an honor to have qualified, a great few days doing what i love best, and so much fun hanging out with my friends, my trainers (whom i am blessed to have as friends!) and other dog people. it's a surreal experience - 6 huge rings, people all over the place, running from one ring to the next (in rally i was in three rings at once!), great shopping, tons of fun events!

we had ups and downs - i did a total of 12 runs that weekend and we were ALL tired - rah was ranked for the first two rounds of open, but he had a few mishaps - truly not mistakes on his part, but he showed a tremendous amount of recovery and that meant more to me than anything - he has a fear of male judges and he showed to not one, but TWO male judges, and worked his butt off in both classes even though the first male judge almost knocked a ring gate on him during our first set up. rah freaked, but recovered enough to work the class, but had a heartbreaker of a db throw by me over the high where it landed at just 8 feet - when he went to pick it up, he dropped it and it fell next to the jump - when he picked it up, he truly had no way to get over the jump safely and he came around.

the last run in open, we had something that almost broke MY heart - again with the high jump (guess who will be doing jump grids???) - rah took off from 12 feet back and didn't clear the jump. thank god for breakaway high jumps, but he crashed INTO the jump, took out the first two boards, and landed on the other side of the jump on his chest and his face - however, true to form he never looked at anything else and got up, picked up his DB and came back over the jump to me with it!!!! and then went to complete the next exercise without blinking an eye, like he hadn't just stopped the entire 6 ring show!!!!!!!!!!!

rah was knocked out of the placings and came in 16th, but the fact that he shook off the two spooky things that happened to him and kept working meant more to me than anything (ok, i would have loved to have been top 10 and he could have been, ill admit that!) - he's a wonderful dog and did everything i asked of him that weekend and i think that while scary things happened, it gave me some more confidence that we CAN do this and he IS a good dog. his fronts with the db were spot on, he never once thought about not coming back with it and he REALLY focused on me and gave it his all (excluding his spook events that were NQ's he worked three open rings and lost a total of 17 points!) and was rock solid on his stays despite the other dogs around him breaking.

rally came up next - what was i thinking! poor berlin got the short end of the stick because she never got the proper warm up she deserved and never got the walk throughs - she ended up in 15th place in rally novice and of the 29 points total she lost, 20 of them were MY fault (i misread the signs in a nested course and in another section i touched her!)- again, i knocked her out of the placings!

rah, here was my super star! after already working open and working his heart out, rah had to show 6 more times in super rally - and came in 7th!!! this was a hard class - many of these dogs were fresh dogs that hadn't done obedience, at least a few of these dogs in all rally levels were OTCH dogs already, and heck some of these dogs actually train in rally but he worked hard (backed up three steps in EVERY TRIAL!!!) and even humored me when i was running back and forth between three rings trying to remember courses at the same time - i ran 9 different rally courses in about 24 hours!!!!

rah's rally "team" placed third in the entire tournament - so that was awesome - it was "mixed nuts" - a frenchie, a corgi, and rah - which one doesn't belong? our obedience team, "loose cannons", didn't place but the other two teammates did (my trainer and her BC secret took second in open and another one of our friends who trains with us took second in super star with her aussie, luna).

then, berlin was on a db relay team and our team (BAZINGA!) won that too! that was tons of fun and berlin tried to chase everyone's db out and i barely managed to restrain her...

shopping was good, im exhausted today and im so pleased with my dogs who did everything i asked of them and more. now to focus back on utility...