Since Halloween is this week, I thought I would post a picture of my poodle pumpkin that I carved a couple of years ago. It's one of those fake pumpkins, which I love because I only have to carve it once. I freehanded the design, but I based it off of a poodle on a t-shirt that I have. And here is Teddy's costume this year:
Who needs Dalmatians? :) We entered a costume contest at the conformation/obedience show that we went to this weekend. It was a tough show- an open air horse arena on dirt and the weather was very cool. The distractions were too many to count. We were going for Rally Advanced Excellent legs number 7 and 8. I knew it would not be easy, but I thought it was doable, and I wanted to practice some control in situations like this.
On Saturday the courses were difficult with the signs I hate the most: the offset figure 8, the back up 3 steps, and the call front 3 steps back. And to top it all off the start sign was all the way on the opposite side of the ring, so we were disconnected from the beginning. I don't think I have tell you that we did not qualify in the Excellent class. We had a judge who was heavy with her pen, who took 10 points off where I would normally only use 3 points. I'm not going to say that we should have qualified, but I did feel that we were not exactly judged fairly. But I'm not one to argue with a judge. We went on to qualify with a 92 in Advanced, but the goal of getting my RAE in 10 straight trials went out the window. Easy come, easy go. They can't all be good days.
Back to the costume contest- you know you are having a bad day when you can't even win a costume contest and you get beat out by a man in a Scooby Do costume. Yes, you read that right.
Sunday went a little better. We did pretty well in Excellent, but Teddy was very tired from the long day before so he was distracted in the Advanced class. Thankfully, though, we qualified in both classes for our 7th RAE leg, so the weekend wasn't a total wash. We also stuck around late Saturday for the match, which was really good for us. That about sums up the weekend- just so-so. We're hoping for a better next couple of weeks.
