We had it all at this trial today – sun, rain, wind (that blew over my EZ-Up, luckily no damage), a bunch of great people and (mostly) great dogs.

Quigley was very sniffy today, so in the coming weeks we’ll work on a refresher course of “no sniffing in the ring”. Nonetheless, we did well, getting placements in all 4 runs.

A major deduction in our first run of the day (trial 1, level 2) was solely my fault, doing a figure 8 around the two wrong bowls. This is not the first time I’ve done this, and I wish UKC would use 2 cones and 2 bowls like AKC for this. On the other hand, we had a beautiful backup 3 steps in level 3. Ever since Quigley learned to do this properly, I always hope it appears on the course!

Long story short, Trial 1: 4th place in Level 2 and 2nd place in Level 3. Trial 2: 2nd place in level 2 and 3rd place in Level 3. Also URX legs #11 and #12 (this is UKC’s RAE equivalent)!

We tried a run in Open A as well, but it was pretty dismal. We’ll go back to the drawing board on that for a while before trying again.

I haven’t posted about this so far because it’s not official yet, but since UKC was so kind to retroactively count 2010 double Q’s even though the title was added for 2011, we actually earned the URX at the trial in January. Unfortunately UKC’s record keeping was incorrect and they showed us 2 legs short, so I had to send in my notes and they are currently investigating and straightening things out. Our certificate should arrive in the mail soon.

I’m not upset about this because I didn’t know they would retroactively count legs, so I was already a bit sad we wouldn’t have enough UKC trials to enter this year to finish it.

Still struggling on the UROC championship points though. We’ve got 33 out of 100, so 67 to go…

Sad: looks like this might be our last UKC trial for 2011. The club in Santa Maria will not have theirs in September this year as they couldn’t find anyone to volunteer as a trial chair.