A great weekend

Clancy and I had a great agility weekend! No ribbons but he showed so much improvement from his trials of last year I have great hopes for the future. More details and the first of what I hope are many videos below. But first stitching updates. :-)

I'm half way along with It's Berry Time and I'd love to have this piece finished this week. Not sure what I'll start on next - but I do have a ton to pick from. Something with some color I think.

House #10 of HoHRH is moving right along. I should finish up the house tonight and move on the cow and monkey and then it's done. This house has been one of the most boring to stitch so far and I'll be glad when it's over. I'm not sure which block to start on next but that big empty hole to the left of this one is going to drive me crazy so I bet I put in #9 before going back up to #7. :-)

Here is Aoife and Clancy at the trial. Aoife comes to everything that has to do with agility so she can get used to the noise and being in her crate/pen all day. She does very well and this weekend I even took her out and played on the practice jumps.

As for the man himself, Clancy did really good. On Saturday we had three runs, Standard, Weaves and something called FAST which is a game that AKC started a couple of years ago. Our first run was FAST and I got overly ambitious with my plan. In FAST the handler sets the course rather than the judge so you can do the obstacles in any order. However to qualify you must complete a challenge set by the judge. The challenge on this course was one I knew Clancy would have trouble with so I figured I would just use the run as practice for the rest of the day. He was great but we ran out of time (there is a 35 second time limit).

His second run of the day was Jumpers with Weaves. Jumpers are courses with only jumps, weave poles and the occasional tunnel. This was Clancy's best run of the weekend and the only reason we didn't qualify was I pulled him off a tunnel too early. I hate it when I'm the reason we don't Q. I should know better at this point what he likes and what he doesn't like while we are on a course.

The video below is unfortunately of our worst run of the weekend (third on Saturday) but it will give people who read this blog a sense of what I'm talking about when I mention agility. This was Saturday's standard run. Standard is the course with all the equipment. When I took Clancy out on the course, he was very distracted. I don't know what spooked him but I never really had him with me during the run. In fact you can see me at the start line making him look at me. Usually he never takes his eyes from me. I knew things were not going to go well. The video is also short. My camera can only take 60 seconds of video and we ran longer than that. :-) He is slow and distracted during the entire run taking really wide turns and generally not paying any attention at all to me. A friend who was there much of the weekend took a video of our great jumpers run so I'll post that Wednesday or so when she gives me a copy. He never did complete his weave poles but he made his entry which was one of the many things we took time off to work on. So I do see much hope for us. :-) We have an indoor trial this coming weekend so maybe a few more things will line up for us.

Click for YouTube Video

On Sunday we had two runs, Jumpers and Standard. In a switch Jumpers was his worst run that day with him dropping a couple of bars (very unusual for him which results in an automatic NQ) but he did his weaves! His Standard run was great but he got a little distracted by an oddly placed cone on the course about half way through and I never did get his full attention back. He also made his weave pole entry here but popped out after several. He might have been tired from the weekend and the weave poles where spaced at the maximum 24 inches apart and he is used to 20/21 inch poles.

But I feel like this is the start of good things. :-) Yeah Clancy-boy!