The New England Agility Team is an agility club, and even though the meetings and practices are far away from us, I’m a member, mostly because the club holds a trial every May in a great location, and I want to support that so there will continue to be a trial there for everyone to enjoy.

The practices are on a field at a tree farm, and every fall when days get short, and evening practice becomes impossible, the club holds what amounts to Run Throughs, and then at the end of the day, club members pack the equipment into trailers and it is stored for the winter.

Chico and I got in a couple runs, DeDe kindly recorded one of them, the better one actually. It was a rocky start, but I got in a front cross that allowed Chico to get the tunnel not the A-frame, and he did a nice set of weaves, got ’em on the first entry, and I was able to reward in the ring in a trial setting. What a great dog he is.

I was able to take both dogs out independent of each other, and also together. They were very well behaved while I chatted with human friends; Lucy was greatly admired for her beauty and brains; Chico was complimented by humans who’ve known him for ages and understand the effort he is making to allow Lucy into our house, car, and lives; and I took Lucy into the ring for the puppy run. At home she’s been doing four cavaletti, at class she’s been through a short straight tunnel, she uses a box to get into the car, so I spent a minute and a half or so and lots of cookies doing a few jumps with a couple front crosses, hop up on the table, try the (cloth-less) chute a couple times. She was great. She never wandered to explore the ring (she loves everyone so much that I wonder if she’ll be the sort that wants to visit ring crew), she was happy, she actually jumped over the 8″ bars (at home she’s been so fixed on the hand with the treat that she sometimes just plows right through the bars), and we came out of the ring to a friend saying “Looks like you’ve got an agility dog there.”

I helped with the packing up until there were more people standing around than actually moving things, then went over to American K9 Country where Kathryn was trialing with some of the other collies, so she could fix Lucy’s ears* which had come unstuck. I took the dogs to the dog park, and there were some nice folks there with their one year old rescue, Penny, who was a bundle of energy. Chico and I stayed in the ‘small dogs’ section of the park, and I let Lucy in with Penny and her people and the two pups ran and ran, and tussled in a healthy-dog-play way. I’ve been wanting to find a dog like that for her since she came to stay with us, so that gave me a very happy feeling, and left both dogs in better shape to sit out the zillion errands I had to do on the way home.

I think the dogs had dinner at 9, I had mine at 9:30, then we all went to bed with a bone (well, maybe not me), and slept well and happily.

Now, I really have to do something about getting ready to move house. I have a feeling that even though no one will give me an exact date, moving day is coming right up. Open a cabinet, decide if I want to move what’s in there, give away or toss what I’m not keeping or haven’t used in years, or, in the pantry, has fallen to the back and is five years past the sell-by date.

* To encourage the shape of ear that is the breed standard, the hair on the tip of the ear gets attached (with I presume non-toxic) glue, to the hair just below the ear. It kind of creases the cartilage. Who knew. I’m all about my purebred Chico, for whom there is no breed standard, so he’s perfect just the way he is. Even smelling like dead things, which is happening a lot at this time of year.