RCC Day 5

I didn't post anything about yesterday's final day of the RCC because there wasn't a whole lot to really update on. Agility was more of the same. Conformation actually went pretty well, though no points. She was pulled for consideration in the Winners Bitch ring, which is still something at a show this size with the competition that we had. Kennedy was awesome and came ring side and took some pictures and video that I wanted to share.:)



I did a MUCH better job dressing myself on Sunday than on Saturday. I kind of shudder a bit when I look at what I sort of threw together. Sheesh! Here are the videos.:)

I'm still pretty beat from the long show weekend and formulating a more coherent post is beyond me right now. I'll have a post later in the week where I'm going to ask for feedback from everyone. I've got a lot of tweaking to do and I noticed a few more things with Bess on Sunday. Thanks again for the great pictures and video Kennedy!!

Happy Birthday Heffner!!!

Today is Heffner's 5th birthday!! It feels weird that it's already been almost five years that he's been in our lives. Through all the ups and downs that we've had, I wouldn't trade any of that time. He's my boo, my baby, and love doesn't adequately describe how I feel about my boy. With everything going on this weekend and getting it all wrapped up I am only now getting around to posting about it. Since he's still not technically allowed to run around off leash, I took him out on a special long walk and snapped some pictures.



And what's a birthday without presents? Kennedy made him a special birthday collar (which totally choked me up when she handed it to me). And since he finally killed his favorite pink ball after a year and a half, he got a new one!
I also put together a little slide show of pictures from the first couple years that we've had him, which includes a bunch of the pictures that I found and scanned in this week. It's long, but I hope you enjoy.:)

RCC Day 4

I am starting to feel very sleep deprived at this point. Today was our busiest day and it was hard to catch much rest while trying to stay up on everything. Which I apparently didn't do a very good job of!


First up in the morning (or so I thought) was conformation. Our ring time was 8am and we were the first breed in. For some reason I was confident that over in agility, they were running JWW in the order of Excellent, Open, and then Novice. Not sure why I thought that, but oh well. Because I was so convinced that I wouldn't be running Bess in agility until later, I didn't even both to go over and get my number and course maps first thing. I was planning on waiting until after conformation was over to take care of that stuff. So conformation got under way and it was fun to watch who the judge was picking. Then Bess' turn came around. I made sure that I worked it for all I was worth. We were thankfully the first dog into the ring, so for the final line up I was able to chuck bait out of the ring and really get her ears forward and have her at attention. And we won our class! Woot! We went back in for Winners Bitch and I really wanted it! I did a decent job, but there were a few areas where I could have done a little better. The judge pulled Bess and a few other bitches out for her cut. She picked the bitch ahead of us for WB and I was really hoping that she'd at least pick us for reserve. And she did! Bess got a major reserve! No points, but it's exactly the kind of encouragement that we need right now. I get many comments from conformation people about how she should finish, she's sound, blah, blah, blah. That's great to hear and all, but it doesn't mean a whole lot when you get dumped time after time.


After packing up our stuff and putting Bess out in the truck to relax and chill, I went over the agility ring to see how things were going. I got our number and was able to find our Standard map, but didn't see the Open JWW map out. I thought that maybe it was just one of those things where they weren't going to put the maps out until right before they started letting people walk the course. I've had that before and didn't think too much of it. Excellent was in the ring and I just went off on my merry way. I headed back out to the truck to hang with Bess and catch a few z's. A few hours later I went back inside to see where things were at. It was getting close to our time to walk the course in Standard. Cool beans! I walked it and wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do since I had already banked on using JWW as our "test" class. I figured I'd just go for it and see what happened. At this point, there were a ridiculous amount of spectators. The bleachers were quite full and the ring side seating was totally full. I have never felt so exposed before in agility! I seriously felt like I had showed up for the event in my underwear and everyone was staring. It was the weirdest sensation. Anywho, the Open and Novice classes are so much smaller than the Excellent classes that I planned on just going and grabbing Bess once I finished walking so that I could bring her inside and figure out where I could manage to get a little space for us to hang out amidst the throngs of spectators and competitors.
The course was decent enough, that I just decided to go for it with Bess and try to work through whatever. After the ridiculous crowds, I realized that this weekend especially, literally anything that we do in those rings is going to be essentially useless for what we want to accomplish right now. The spectators around the rings and in the stands are doing all sorts of things that they most likely don't realize are negatively reinforcing the dogs out there and I saw a lot of handlers who were struggling with things that I haven't seen them struggle with before. I also saw other handlers who were handling the courses far more conservatively than is usual due to having to manage how the crowd was affecting their runs. Oh yes, and even with multiple signs posted and many announcements NOT to use flash photography, it happened a fair amount. It was a pretty spectacular crap shoot. I will say this though, Bess did the last half of the course beautifully and I was really pleased with that. She also enjoyed herself, but kept that part in control and was jumping correctly. Good sign there. However, she over shot the table coming off the dog walk (mostly a lack of deceleration cue from me that I usually give before she hits the table) and headed towards the ring barrier where a group of lovely spectators thought it was absolutely adorable that she was coming towards them. They said something in her direction, though I didn't catch exactly what, and that pretty well pissed me off. Do NOT encourage my dog to come off the course and move towards you! That is so not cool! These people seriously don't seem to realize that this is a TRIAL. This is not some fun run where we don't care what our dogs do. We're paying good money for these runs to try and accomplish whatever our individual goals are. Screwing with the dogs in the process is beyond not helpful.

After the dog walk we had a jump and then the weaves. She missed her first entry, which is fine. It's something that we don't have 100% in practice, so I don't expect it 100% in this type of setting. The second time around she got it and she started making her way methodically through the weaves. It wasn't fast, but right now I much prefer her doing her weaves correctly than getting overly excited about speed and blowing through them as she sometimes does. As we're going through the weaves the crowd around the ring and in the bleachers starts laughing like it's the funniest thing that this big dog is carefully picking her way through the weaves. Well it's not. They're laughter and negative encouragement was causing some problems. I could see the tension building in Bess as she was nearing the end and her speed was picking up. I thought she would make it through, but she popped out at the last weave and I opted to just go on and not deal with that whole scenario again. Pretty awesome. The rest of the course went well, I was just highly annoyed with the crowd at that point. She got lots of praise at the end of the run because she finished beautifully.


From there I put her in her crate ring side and went to check on our JWW runs. There were some 24" Excellent runs left and I watched that. Once those were over I went to check Bess in for our run and saw the sheet for the ISC Excellent class. What??? There happened to be a woman standing next to me checking out the line up and I asked her if they were going to run Novice and Open after the ISC classes. She kind of looked at me a little weird and told me that they had already run Novice and Open first thing in the morning. My jaw dropped. I had completely missed Bess' run because I didn't bother to verify the running order! ARG! Oh well.

I was so frazzled from realizing that I missed our run, that I was about ready to pack things up and head home when I got a call from Andrea. She was calling to let me know roughly when we would be doing our rally team run. D'oh! So not only did I completely miss an agility run, but I almost forgot about rally altogether! Wow. Seriously sleep deprived here.
Our rally team consisted of two great danes, a bullmastif, and a husky. Yes, we were the non traditional rally team.;) I thought our team did quite well as a whole considering that all four handlers have been involved in a variety of events at this show over the past few days. I think we're all a little tired. Sadly, out of four teams, we placed fourth, but at least we enjoyed ourselves!

And now that I'm caught up with the day, I'm starting to plan for tomorrow. I am honestly incredibly tempted to not run Bess in agility at all. I think the crowds will be slightly less, but still to a point where it's not necessarily beneficial to us. And I'm tired and would like to leave after our conformation ring time.;) We'll see how it goes. At least I have some great ideas on what I need to work with Bess on in our practices now. I'll probably have an entire post about that alone so that I can also get some feed back from people and see what they think.

I hope everyone is having a great weekend!

RCC Day 3

I am very pleased to say that today was a much better day for us. It was another day of agility only, which was probably a good thing. Before I get into that though, check out the pin I scored! It was hard for me to get a picture of the pin without the camera washing it out, but it's a merle dane that is practically a mantle merle. Minus the cropped ears, it's a Heffner pin! The significance of this pin at a show that is predominantly driven by conformation was huge enough for me to buy it. Merle is not an acceptable color in the conformation ring, therefore vendors at dog shows usually only carry the six recognised colors and Heffner gets totally gypped (Jennifer, I know you can totally relate!). Anyhow, the shopping at RCC is great!
Now on to the day. First up was JWW because Standard takes hours longer to get through. After my little tantrum that I threw yesterday I had much to think about and many options to try with Bess for the day. I talked a lot with Marta this morning (she does a LOT of performance sports with her danes and has for decades, in addition to conformation) about what happened yesterday and compared to things that she's worked through with her dogs. I had already decided that crating Bess inside was probably helping lead to her stress. Things are really tight and there's so much going on around her, that I'm sure it's not helpful. So I decided to keep her in the truck for the day and see how that worked out. I also decided that JWW was for sure going to be a throw away class. The plan was to do the first two jumps in a very controlled manner with no lead out and then pull her from the course and have a party. It worked beautifully! She stayed controlled and was super excited once we got off the course. I had told the judge what we were going to do once I got her on the line and had also warned the person behind us so that they could be ready. I also bought Bess a tug toy that I plan on slowly conditioning her to tug with. She enjoys tugging on her leash at the end of runs, but that can sometimes get you into trouble depending on the venue and the judge. What surprised me most about the "run" was that I actually felt really good about it afterwards. I thought that I would still possibly feel a little frustrated that I was purposefully throwing the run away. But it felt good! A welcome relief.
After many hours of waiting and hanging out in the truck with Bess to relax (it was DEFINITELY more relaxing in there than inside the expo center!), it was our turn for Standard. The course was simple enough and she seemed to quite calm, that I had two plans. If it seemed like she was at all starting to ramp herself up, she'd get to end on the #4 tunnel and we'd have a party. If she looked like she was still holding on, I wanted to try the dog walk and see where we went from there. Well, she was doing so well that we ended up doing the full course, which I'm not entirely sure I should have done. The end result was a positive one, with a dog that was pretty well in control. I'm just hoping that I didn't set us back. She basically stuck everything. I didn't get her slowed down in time when she hit the table after the chute and she over balanced and had to step off the table, so there was a fault there. I also pulled her a little hard on a jump and pulled her off it, so we got a refusal there. Otherwise she did well including sticking her down contact on the a frame. And you know what? It was a qualifying run.:o) Little Bessy got her last novice standard Q!:)

However, like I mentioned, I'm a little concerned that I may have set us back by doing the full course. Kind of kicking myself now for that. Tomorrow we're still going to throw away JWW since that'll be the first class that we do. I'm shooting for four obstacles and then have a party. Standard, we'll see. I did move her up to Open, but Saturday and Sunday are the busiest and most hectic days of the show. I may just want more "practice runs" for both classes. We'll see.

Regardless of what we do in agility, it's going to be a very hectic day that I am now kicking myself about. We've got conformation first thing in the morning at 8am. Then we've got the two agility runs. And we're doing Rally Novice team with friends. Conformation won't conflict, but I have a feeling there's potentially going to be a problem between JWW and Rally. We'll see. Wish us luck! I'm off to shave Bess' face and try to get rid of as many white hairs in her mask as possible.

RCC Day 2

I'm in a pretty foul mood right now and should probably wait until I'm less steamed to write this post, but then it wouldn't have the same angst behind it. So bear with me, cause this bitch is feeling pretty pissy!

Today was the first all breed day of competition at the Rose City Classic (RCC). I had Bess entered only in agility. I have never competed in any performance event at this show, only conformation. There's a lot going on and I wanted to make sure that at least my first day of running her in agility, I didn't have any possible ring conflicts. Good thing too, because there would have been one. The conditions are very tight at this show. There's a whole lot going on. Lots of dogs, lots of handlers, lots of hustle and bustle. Unfortunately there's not a lot of room to move around or crate your dog. I already knew what a pain crating was from previous years of having to fight for crating space around the conformation rings and seeing what it was like over in the performance areas while visiting friends. Seeing is one thing, but being stuck in it is another. It's hard to fully describe the set up without visually showing it (and I didn't take any pictures), but there isn't a whole lot of walking space around the perimeters of the rings due to crating and bleachers. It's tight. Warming up around the ring is difficult because you are inevitably in someone's way or have your dog in a position immediately next to the gates that serve as ring perimeters. To say this can be very distracting to the dogs competing is an understatement. At any rate, pissy mood aside, it is highly unlikely that I will do any performance events at this show again. It's already an absolute no for Heffner and even with Bess, I'm just not thrilled about the lack of space to move about. Anyhow, on to the runs, or more appropriately, the reasons why I'm in such a piss poor mood.

First up was Open JWW. We've had this judge before and I like him and his courses. I was also very happy to see that he didn't include a single tunnel. Not as big of a deal for Bess, but something that I'm always very happy to see for Heffner. Bess started to lose control after about the second or third jump. Her jumping was absolute shit (should probably also warn you that there might be a fair amount of cursing in this post, cause there was a fair amount of cursing when I called my husband to let him know how things went). She got into that bat shit crazy mode where all thinking and training went completely out the window. Instead of using her rear for jumping, she essentially tried swimming through the jumps by crazily pulling with her front legs. There were at least two knocked bars through the first half of the course. I'm pretty sure that the only reason she kept any bars up is because 24" is the highest I will jump the dogs and relative to their actual height, it doesn't take as much effort to clear them. It wasn't really until about jump 14 that she completely lost it, though. Along that side of the ring were the bleachers. Unfortunately, three people with their dogs had picked that spot to stop and gab, with their dogs' butts facing towards the ring and close enough for the dog competing to come up and easily sniff their butts. And that's just exactly what Bess did. I did get her back and she did nail her weaves, but it went completely to shit after that. She just basically took off and started to zoom. I called her back and she came back at me. Then decided to leap up and sock me in the nose. Yeah, not cool. I thanked the judge, grabbed her around the neck and we left the ring. It was ridiculous.

The final straw of the day was our Novice Standard run. Yes, that's right, we're still in bloody novice, where we will probably be for all of perpetuity. She needs ONE MORE RUN to get out of novice. Is it really too much to ask that she keep her shit together for one f***ing run???? Apparently it is, because she couldn't.
It's a very nice and simple course. There's nothing tricky, mean, or overly unfun about it. It's a course that Bess could do any day of the week. She is fully capable of completing this run in one try. Things again broke down after the third jump. She's been such a teeter sucker lately that I was shocked when she decided to loop all the way around the teeter and try to start zooming. I called her back and she completed the teeter. Then hauled ass into the tunnel and up the a frame. I slowed her down on her decent because she notoriously leaps over the contact zone when she's in one of these brainless moods. And that's exactly what she did. Jumped over the damn contact zone like it was bloody hot lava. After which she proceeded to run right out of the f***ing ring. I was pissed at that point. I'd had enough. This kind of behavior is completely unacceptable and it sure as hell is beyond the point of being even remotely cute. I called her back in the pissed off tone that represented my mood. She came back after doing a bit more sniffing. I made her sit and we left the ring.

Pissed. I have never been so pissed at this dog in my life. The "funny" thing is that a little while before our Standard run I was thinking to myself how weird it was that I hadn't actually gotten pissed off at Bess lately for the crap that she's been pulling. I've seen others get pissed off at their dogs for a lot less and the crap that she's been pulling is totally bogus. And I really haven't gotten mad. I've made up excuses or said things like "at least she's having a good time." Well, that's bogus too. She's knows this stuff and it's not like I'm asking a whole hell of a lot from her. The girl has skills and she is able use them. Apparently though, she only wants to use them when and how she chooses.

Oh yeah, and my mood got even better after we headed home. As I'm stewing about her "performances," I still had a little bit of me that was thinking, "maybe she just needed more exercise and maybe I should just really tire her out for the next few days." Then I also thought that's kind of bullshit. There are plenty of people who have dogs with way higher energy levels and drive than Bess has and they're not out there hours before their runs trying to wear their dogs out so that they listen in the ring. They do their warm ups, they run, and then they cool down. That's it. Not "enough" exercise beforehand is not a good enough reason for her to decide she's going to play her own game in the ring. Regardless, I thought that maybe I would stop by one of the parks near our house that have some nice fields to just let her off leash to burn off some steam and maybe I could cool off as well. Ha! I get there and everything is bloody soggy and flooded! And I'm wearing sneakers, so I can't really walk any where. I just loaded Bess up and we headed for home.

I haven't even really been able to look at her since we got home because I'm still steamed. Which I realize is rather ridiculous at this point because it's so far after the events that pissed me off that there is no connection to them in her mind. Not to mention she didn't even see the connection in the first place while she was doing it! So now I'm sitting here, venting my frustrations on the blog (Kennedy and Adam have already had an ear full from me), wondering what in the hell to do. I've got a variety of options, but I just don't know what to try or what might actually have an effect on her. We'll see how tomorrow goes. If you don't hear anything from me until Saturday, it's not necessarily because I've flipped my shit and have been jailed in a crate by the AKC. There's a shin dig at some of the motor homes tomorrow night after Group and I'll be there for a while. Drinking my frustrations away! Wish us luck for tomorrow and keep your fingers crossed that Bess starts using her brains lest I curl up into the fetal position and cry uncle!

Long Day

It was a long, but nice day. I think I forgot to mention, but the local great dane breed club hosts a double specialty the day before the all breed shows start. What's a double specialty? Aside from a really long day, it just means that there are two separate shows held on one day. Different judges for everything, but the same order and the same optional classes that are held at specialties. Because of this (and because we didn't have any other options), I only had Bess entered in conformation in the American Bred Bitches class.


The first show of the day didn't go all that well for us. I took Bess out to potty and walked her around a little bit before it was our turn. Once we were in the class and the judge asked us to go around as a group for the first time, I thought that maybe there was a hint of a limp on her front left leg. Hmmmm.....maybe it was just a combination of moving on the carpet and the way that I took the corner. So I set her up, the judge went over her, we did our down and back, and then we went around the ring. And there was most definitely an obvious limp on that leg. What????? We ended up placing third out of three, and rightfully so since I apparently had a lame dog. Okay, so I walked her a little more and then put her back in her crate to rest up.


For the second show I did the same routine. Took her outside so that she could potty if need be and I also watched her movement like a freaking hawk. There was nothing off. Okay. I decided to keep her out of her crate until it was our turn to make sure that nothing miraculously stiffened up. We went in for our class and there were no problems. No lameness what so ever. And even better, she actually won her class! With actually competition!:) I know it's corny, but I was so excited about that class win. Things have not been going so well in conformation and the thought of retirement is definitely on my mind. Even though we're literally half way there, we still have quite a bit of ground to cover.


Outside of the conformation portion of things, there was a great raffle! So much great stuff!! And I would have lots of pictures and videos of the days events for you if I had remembered to actually charge my camera battery. D'oh! It went dead the first time I turned it on. So I got nada. But I did come away with some nice prizes (which I had to take the battery off the charger in order to get).:)


Obviously I'm not color prejudiced.;0) My craft room is very definitely turning into a dane stuff repository. And I love it!! The collar is made by none other than Kennedy. She made a few and donated them to the raffle. Naturally I put tickets into all of the cups. The red collar just happened to be the only one that I won. I tried taking an adequate picture of it to better show off the detail, but the picture above is about as good as I got. The fabric is just gorgeous though! The picture doesn't do it any justice. Heffner is excited that he has a pretty new collar.;0)

And now I'm pretty much beat. It's amazing how tiring this day is when I don't really feel like I did all that much. Tomorrow will be a little lighter as it is strictly an agility day with Bess. I do plan on heading over to the dane ring and watching as much as I can. Fingers crossed that we have some nice runs tomorrow!

Blogger Tuesday

Oh boy, oh boy! Tomorrow the big Rose City Classic officially starts!! Wednesday is normally the day of specialties and then the next four days are all breed shows. It's kind of nice to start the week off with a lower key day to ease into the chaos that then ensues. I'm looking forward to the shows more than I was last year and I'm not entirely sure why. I've got more on my plate this time around and it's still the same ole chaos, and yet, I'm rather excited.:0) I will try to update and post pictures as I have time, but I'm not entirely sure how much time at home I will have.

In the spirit of all things dog show, my pick for Blog of the Week is entirely about just that! I have appropriately picked Dog Show Poop for this week's featured blog! While you don't get the details of all the individual breed results, you do get to hear about the group winners and who got what at which show. I love it when I start recognising the top dogs in the nation! So if dog shows are your thing and you want to better keep up on the tops rankings, this blog is for you!