Photos, Weather, and Jump Bar Miracle

SUMMARY: Photos from previous weekend, weather variations, and Tika might have achieved a first--

Every day brings new doggie data. And weather, too, apparently.

Weather

Amazing San Jose weather. This past weekend was idyllic agility weather. On Saturday it might have made it to the low 70s; probably only high 60s on Saturday, with a slight cool breeze in the morning that got fairly chilly but not killingly so in the late afternoon. Sun was out most of the time, with just a few light clouds and morning overcast on Sunday.

Thank goodness for that--yesterday it rained most of the day here, and today it is cold COLD COLD!!! An icy wind all day that just won't quit, and it's supposed to be back down around freezing overnight.

Photos

Tika's standard jumping form. Every jump photo I have of her shows her tucked like this, I'm pretty sure. She gets around at a good speed, but her whole body has that upright Aussie thing going.	All three photos by topflightphotography.com
Boost's jumping form? Everything is directed forward for speed--head is lowered, neck stretched, legs straight out behind. I don't know whether this is typical; don't have that many photos yet and she moves too fast for me to see with my naked eyes.
Boost riding the teeter to the ground at full speed. I've seen photos of other dogs riding it with this kind of skidding-to-a-halt right at the very tippy end of the board, so if she always does it here, she's missing a fraction of the momentum that they'll have. But she's got super teeters, much better than any of my other dogs have ever had. Sometimes even skids to the end/bottom. Exciting.

And Then A Miracle Occurred

OK, here's one for you--and you'd think I'd have noticed before driving home this evening for once at the speed limit most of the way: I don't think that Tika knocked any bars this weekend. I know for sure that she didn't in 9 of her 10 classes, but the last one was the chaotic Jackpot round where she was grabbing my feet and I was panicking about getting her around the ring and it's POSSIBLE that a bar came down, but I didn't see it or notice it if it did. If so--(drum roll please)--I believe that this would be the first time in history that Tika made it through a weekend without knocking a bar. That would be absolutely FABULOUS, no other word for it!

Of course, she jumps 24" in CPE, and 26" in USDAA, where she knocked plenty of bars the previous weekend, thank you very much. I've debating before whether I should jump her regularly in practice at 28", but most jumps nowadays stop at 26"; we're so far beyond the days when USDAA's top height was 30" and not a few jumps went up in 2" increments.

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