ON BASE

That's where we were — on base. More correctly, on THE base. CFB Esquimalt that is. Island Dog Sports was once again asked to participate in the Military Family Fun Day, and to provide two runs of our demo. It's always been our pleasure to provide this support to the men and women in the military and to their families, by providing a little bit of entertainment for them to enjoy.

This was the 20th anniversary of the Military Family Resource Centre, so a bigger event was planned and the whole thing was moved over to Naden. There were certainly a lot more activities that the families could take part in at this location, but because the activities were so spread out over different squares, buildings and fields, it was tough to get a very big audience for our performances. So it was a lot of hard work for a demo that actually very few people saw. There were just too many things going on at once. And announcements about our demo didn't seem to have been made (or the times publicized in their event guide). We'll provide some feedback to the organizers. This is an event we really like doing, but we'd really like to have a bigger audience.

On the up side, we're getting very efficient at putting up (and taking down) our new screen tents. We had two of them this time, and Peni is looking for a third. We put the dogs in one, that was additionally screened with shade cloth to keep it cooler for them. We set up the second for ourselves. It was quite pleasant, with a nice breeze wafting in from the ocean.

On the challenging side, the entire field where we were set up was toe-deep in goose poop. We weren't sure how distracting this would be for the dogs when they were running the course. Thankfully, the sheer abundance of it seems to have created the net effect of it not being that distracting at all!

On the plus side, nobody peed on the course. Not Abby. Not Betty. Way to go, gals! In fact, most of the dogs were very business-like and ran through the course like pros, despite the heat. The big dogs even got to have a hose-dance when we finished. The event organizers had nicely provided a water hose for us, that we then took advantage of to cool off some of the gang.

Many thanks to Carina for stepping in to not only manage the music, but to also take on the announcer's duties as hubby Jared was indisposed. Her handling of the music was doubly impressive, as I managed to forget to bring Brianna's IPod with our new demo music on it. Thankfully, we still had the old CDs with the music from previous demos, so she was able to make it all work out. Carina also brought along some munchies, which were much appreciated.

To see some pictures from the demo, go to my Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26205675@N07/

Air Cadets Band strikes up the music to get the Fun Day off to a great start.