We had a pretty terrible trial on 2/19 – rain (first time ever we actually had the bad luck and it poured at an outdoor trial), freezing cold (for So Cal anyway!), show ground distractions including a petting zoo full of interesting critters. Everything just came together to form perfect disaster. In the obedience ring my dog looked like he was transplanted to a foreign planet. We didn’t even Q in Excellent, and obedience was a total disaster. The only highlights of the day were 1. seeing a fellow exhibitor get 1st place in Rally Excellent with her PRT and 2. getting into the nice, warm car for the drive home.

But anyway… about this weekend:

The best thing: we were spared the rain, since it was an indoor show. We have very few of them. Not so good: the flooring was asphalt and there was no ring matting at all, and we shared a building with a bunch of conformation rings, so it was very, very busy and noisy.

As far as Rally is concerned, things went ok. We got 4th place out of a group of 11 or so dogs in Excellent on Friday. Had to eat some points on imperfect moving downs (cold, hard floor) and I was a bit distracted, so we got one IP (Improper Performance, minus 10 points) in our Advanced run on Friday and our Excellent run on Saturday, but those were my fault and not Quigley’s.

Thought of the day: we are halfway to RAE4 – yay!

We also tried for our last Graduate Novice leg again in obedience, but Quigley didn’t do his drop on recall both days, so no success. I’m happy to say that his heeling and figure 8 were ok, which were the things where we had issues on our previous 2 attempts. We ran into a new problem though, he anticipated almost all the finishes. This makes 5 NQ’s since we got our 2nd leg, so I’m going to hold off on trying again for a while and go back to training.