A Special Day and Sheltiepalooza

Two weekends ago on 8 Feb, Beckett ran in his first trial of 2015; it was also his first trial as a Special. In the AAC, you can drop your dog from Regulars to Special at anytime for whatever reason, so now Beckett only has to jump 10 inches and will no longer have to jump the double jump that he often crashed. We had four runs,two Master Standards and two Snooker. Unfortunately, we were not very fortunate in the Q department and went home Qless. I had a friend video Beckett's first run as a Special; it was so smooth except for that spinning when I pulled him in off the tunnel.  Watch the judge in the video, spin,arm down, I move forward, spin, arm down, I move forward, spin, arm goes up. If only I had stopped and sent him on to the dog walk, we would have been fine. The rest of the run felt wonderful, we were totally in sync except the handling of the dog walk.

Video of Beckett's First Run as a Special

The next run was another Master Std with the same discrimination of tunnel and dog walk; I decided to trust Beckett. I guess we have some discrimination work to do as he took the tunnel. Off course, which is an elimination in Masters.  The next two runs were Snookers, we did just fine but faulted in the closing of both runs before we had enough points. 

Beckett will still jump 16" in some events but no longer in AAC events. We do them the most and I want to give him a break as it's the jumping I think that causes repetitive strain injuries.   

This past weekend on Sunday, we went to Sheltiepalooza. It was a fund raiser for the Southern Ontario Sheltie Rescue.  We had had quite a bit of snow on Saturday, certainly more than forecast but not near what they got in parts of New England and the Maritimes. The forecast for Sunday, though was for high winds and blowing snow which can cause roads to be icy and visibility rather poor so as a result many people decided not to brave the cold and stayed home.  We decided to take the chance and it turned out that the roads were pretty good. It was terribly cold out in the wind but,in the arena, which is insulated, it wasn't too bad.

Each dog got two runs on an agility course and each time you could have up to two minutes in the ring so you could go back and fix parts of the course or try different things. On our second run, I did a blind cross at the end of the dog walk, it worked with Beckett who has good running contacts but Keltic, being less experienced and a tendency to fly off contacts, came off the side of the down ramp before hitting the yellow when he saw me cross in front of him.

There also was a photo booth where you could have your dogs pictures taken for a donation to the rescue.  The pictures turned out pretty good. As you can see it was cold; look at Beckett's breathe.

I call them the "hoping for spring" pictures since they had all the flowers and birdhouses in the set up. 

After all the agility equipment was put away, there was a free play session, the Sheltiepalooza. It's funny, they do interact somewhat with the other Shelties but they all tend to play mostly with their own siblings. Of course, there was lots of barking, spinning and herding to be done. Beckett kept bringing his Frisbee back to me so that made videoing the fun hard to do.  

Sheltiepalooza Video

For the people there was a pot luck lunch. We had quite a bit of food, soup, meatballs, sandwiches, chips, veggies, fruit, dessert squares and chocolate cookies filled with peanut butter. 

Hopefully, the next time the weather will be better and more people and their dogs will come out. Sheltiepalooza is not just for Shelties either, friends of Shelties are most welcome.