Some People Are Never Satisfied

After last weekend's disaster, you'd think I'd be delighted with Tika earning 4 Qs in a single weekend. OK, I guess I'm glad, but two of them are, at the moment, essentially useless Qs because I don't need them for any title.

Tika did Qualify in the Grand Prix, which makes 2 for the '06 season, so we can go to next years' nationals in that event if we want to and if it's somewhere that I can get to with my dogs. Still need to Q in Team and Steeplechase.

Tika and her partner Qualified in Pairs Relay, which earned her Relay Master title, which I'm pleased about.

And she earned Qs in 2 Snooker runs. Considering that for several previous my brain had simply frozen and I had done idiotic things that are probably stranger than fiction, I'm pleased that I was able to function like a normal human agility competitor on the Snooker course again. Of course, I don't need regular Snooker Qs; I need Super-Qs (top 15% of competitors). In both runs, I mishandled the entry to the final 7-point obstacle, which cost us a Super-Q on Saturday and on Sunday although we'd have had enough points, I think we were a couple seconds slower than another dog who got that same number of points. So I'm not being perfect, but I'm much better than I was.

Tika had absolutely no clean runs all weekend, which is quite discouraging, and I think that's the main reason I'm feeling dissatisifed. (So we qualified only where it's possible to have some kind of error and still Q--but don't place as high.)

• Pairs relay: Knocked a bar
• Standard saturday: knocked a bar.
• Snooker Saturday: Mishandled dogwalk/tunnel discrimination on final obstacle
• Gamble Saturday: Let her get ahead of me on the gamble and she pulled away from the final obstacle--I probably also wasn't yelling "out!" or "left!" which is what I should've been yelling.
• Grand Prix: Refusal on a long series of jumps where she got ahead of me and spun back to tell me to hurry up
• Snooker Sunday: Mishandled weave entry on final obstacle
• Standard Sunday: A beautiful run and then when I called her on a sharp turn I thought she wasnt going to make it so I called again--and pulled her off the correct obstacle that she was heading for
• Gamble Sunday: Thought she was turning the right way but she wasn't and backjumped when I moved
• Jumpers: Knocked a bar.

And she is running SO nicely. She's SO fast. Sighhhhh.

Jake Qed in his Snooker run and then, interestingly, just barely cracked into a run in his Jumpers run on Sunday; he was so slow that I found myself running past him in weird places and then trying to figure out how to get back on track. We were clean, but he was half a second over time, which is extremely unusual for him. Oh--we did compete in Performance (veterans) Relay on Saturday, which is not a qualifying class, it's just for fun, and we and our partner took 2nd place, so that was fun.

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