AGILITY DOG

Zack has his very first AAC title: Agility Dog of Canada. At the AVID agility trial at the Saanich Fairgrounds this weekend, he completed his third clean run of a Standard agility course, giving him his first "Starters" title. Now he has to work his way up through "Advanced" to "Masters". But he has plenty of time to do that. His qualifying Standard run on Sunday was, in fact, the only Q he got all weekend—but the only one he really needed!

Abby continues to improve; she completed most of her runs—slowly, and sometimes with detours of her own making—but in general she managed to cross both the start and finish lines. That's really all I can ask of her at this point. She even nailed a 16-point mini-gamble in her Gamblers run...but then went walkabout just before she would have hit an easy-as-pie main gamble. Ah well. There's a bright side to her slower progress. By not advancing as fast as Zack, she also gives me a breather in that I don't have to run the two of them one right after the other. They are now increasingly separated in what levels they're running at. This will be even more the case when I move Abby from "Regular" classification to "Special", which will allow us to drop the height of the jumps to 6 inches for her. She continues to get more focused, and to come back from her out-of-focus moments more easily. She's got heart; she just needs some speed!

On the home front, Martha and Joe took Sami in as a 'day boarder' for the weekend. Sami got to spend Saturday and Sunday underfoot next door. He made himself right to home, I hear (and as the photo below, taken by Joe, shows). He's a very social little guy, and was also a hit at dinner-and-a-movie night at Ann's on Saturday night.