Murphy, The Police and Heartbreak...

Well, well, well... Shall we do this in chronological order for once?

I don't like Murphy... in fact I f****** hate Murphy and his stupid law. I only judge two shows in our province a year, since I prefer competing... so that is roughly 2 shows out of the 62 we have in a year.  Of the 62 shows we have in a year, about 15 shows are on Saturdays (as opposed to our normal Sunday shows).  This year I judged one show on a Sunday.... this past weekend I judged my only Saturday show of the year... so out of 52 Saturdays this year, I was at a show on 1 Saturday... that is 1.92%.  Ants works over weekends relatively often, 99.99% of the time he does this is from home, however last week he encountered a problem with his remote log in... so he had to go into the office.  When I compete my video camera is ALWAYS with me... as you all know from the insane amount of videos on my blog.  In fact on the other day this year that I judged in Jo'burg, I took my video camera with and asked a friend to record some rounds.  But on this ONE Saturday of the year, that both me and the hub were out and the ONE show this year that my video camera did not attend...  Some f*****s decided to burgle our house.  Now I am not remotely surprised by this fact... we live in South Africa... you kind of wait for it to happen.



Of course the biggest concern are my DOGS... it is a catch 22 of the worst kind.  Around here, burglars simply poison dogs to commit which ever crime they wish to commit in your property.  So my dogs are left in the house when we go out... more comfortable for them, they can lounge around and they won't have access to any Ratexed steaks that the morons chuck over the wall.  BUT what if some moron criminal gets trapped in the house with my dogs???  Anyhow, to make a long story short and get you to stop worrying, my dogs are fine, didn't even seem traumatised at all (although I am still quietly hoping they took a big chunk out of the guy that broke in).  Thanks to very diligent builders that were working down the street, alerting the owner of the house, who in turn pressed her panic button, alerting her alarm company and the police.  Our alarm system was triggered by the way, but the bright spark that responded left us a little note with the 'all okay' box ticked... what a friggin moron.  But the F*****S that broke in still managed to get away with ONE thing... of everything we have in the house, just ONE thing.  And that ONE thing was my video camera.  My beloved (if aged) video camera which I am severely addicted to.  What is up with that?  The police caught one of the guys and found my video camera though!  But now it is stuck in evidence and I am wandering around like a little lost lamb without my video camera... *wipes away a tear*

So back to judging...  I ran my own courses too, unofficially of course, so that was a bonus... I did manage a clear round on both... it was fun.  Unfortunately I had a VERY small entry, due to the insanely high entry fees.  A lot of people let me know before hand that it was nothing personal, but they were not prepared to go bankrupt to enter one show.  Which I completely understand... now for what they charged, you would expect 9 carat gold trophies, but no such luck.  Anyhow, I am not going to moan about the neglect of agility at this particular show, might do that in a later post...  My courses, were as always severely debated with varying opinions... the biggest problem it appears, is that people dislike the fact that my courses tend to test independent obstacle performance...  Here are the grade 3 courses, please feel free to comment, criticise, b!tch, moan, compliment... I always like feed back.

10 is from the other side... I am too lazy to go and edit and re-upload.

On Sunday we had another show, competing this time around.  It was not as bad as the Saturday show, but also pricey, so I only entered Chaos.  Now the of course since I have no video camera at this stage, I have NO VIDEO... /cry.  arg, I am going to be moaning about it after every paragraph by the way...  Anyhow, the first round, non-contact I screwed up (by standing there watching Chaos, giving him no command, no signal no STUFF ALL)... poor dog.  He was running like a little demon, well a big demon, he is not a small dog.



The contact round... okay I am going to cry now... for the first time in a very long time... Chaos leapt of his contact, as in leapt.  No self release, not even a hint of trying to get his 2o2o, just a huge jump.  I was so disappointed, I really thought I had my contacts down 100%.  But I guess Chaos felt he needed to serve me some humble pie.  Needless to say I put him back and had a big fat E.  We will see what happens at this coming weekend's show but I am going to run with confidence, I am pretty sure it was a once off event.  However I have been doing some proofing and A-Frame games with him this week, just to be sure.  But that one moment kind of broke my heart, if only temporarily.

In the dog jumping, Chaos had a serious brainfart, he just did not take the turn cue I gave him very clearly and with perfect timing, realised his brainfart in mid-air, flailed all four legs around in the air, damn near taking the bar and both wings with him... oh well, the rest of his round was very nice, so not going to complain.

I cannot believe my little Stein Sheltie dog will be turning a year next week.  Time really flies when you are having fun... The one thing though, that I honestly do not consider great fun, is teaching weave poles.  I have been doing agility for a long time and weave pole training is the part I enjoy least.  But alas, the time has arrived... now of course AGAIN there is no video, but Volt is loving his poles training and picking up on it pretty quickly (as he does with everything else)... he has definitely 'gotten it' more quickly than my BC's, but then I have also learnt a lot since I last trained weave poles (can you believe it FIVE years ago).  Hopefully I will my camera back soon and then I am going to flood the blog with videos :)