It's Been a Good Day!

Before I get into the details for today, I've been meaning to send out a big thank you to Murphy for our blog award!! We are supposed to pass this award on to 12 blogs that we like. Picking specific blogs is always hard for me because there are so many great blogs out there and I don't want anyone to feel left out. So if you're following this blog, this award is for all of you!

With regards to Heffner, things are going much better than they were yesterday. His whole "man region" is still swollen, but not as much as yesterday and it's now more of a pink color than an angry red. He's also more himself, which is a relief. We got a call on the answering machine from the vets office and they didn't find anything abnormal in his urine. There are white blood cells there, but we kind of already expected that considering the discharge that was coming out. Otherwise, nothing to be alarmed about. It's still unclear as to what the heck happened or what specifically was injured. All I know is that he appears to be on the mend. Yay!!

And I have a brag for Bessy today!!! Things were really tight with ring times between conformation and rally. Pretty much just like I was afraid that they were going to be. For whatever reason, the advanced class took a while longer than everything else. And then they decided to split the novice walk throughs between A and B. Thankfully, when I checked in earlier in the day and told the ring stewards that I was going to have a ring conflict, they put us going first for novice A. I was a little rattled having to walk the course and then run over to the conformation area where I had Bess crated and snatch her out of her crate. I've mentioned before that she is pretty much a grab and go dog for conformation, which makes things quite easy. I had planned on doing some warming up with her, but I ended up not having much. Thankfully, she was raring to go! She was paying SUCH good attention to me during pretty much the whole course! And this was a more involved course than Heffner had the first time around (I really should try scanning the course maps in at some point). There was one station that I messed us up a bit on. It's the one where you call the dog to front without halting and then finish left. The trick is that there's a sign that's similar to this that requires a finish left with a halt. Guess which one I did. Yep, we had a lovely left finish with a prompt sit. ARG! However, the rest of the course went off without a hitch!

As soon as we crossed the finish station, we literally ran over to the conformation ring and got there just before they started on dogs. Phew! Unfortunately, I totally missed the ribbon handing out portion for novice A and didn't find out our score until after the ring stewards were gone and everything was put away. Our score was a 97, which put us in second place overall!!! Woo hooo!!!! Bess did soooooo good!!! I was so incredibly proud of her!:o)

In conformation, it was more of the same. We won our class, but we were the only one entered in it. And then we got completely dumped in the WB ring. On the up side, Bess' half sister Serena went Winners Bitch today to finish and is now an American champion from the 9-12 puppy class!

Then I got to come home, relax with the dogs a bit, do some carpet cleaning, and now we're getting ready for tomorrow's onslaught. Hopefully we'll have good results for tomorrow as well. Bess' breeder will be handling her tomorrow and hopefully that'll help to get her up a bit more.