Oh my, it has been a week since I wrote anything here. Chico and Lucy and I have been so busy, and I make daily updates to Lucy’s mom, so this blog and its readers have been deprived of information.

Lucy is learning how to be shaped into a new activity, which means she needs to try taking the initiative and that is not her first reaction to a confusing situation. Her first reaction to confusion is to freeze and look pretty. Looking pretty is her first job, but when she retires from breed and starts agility, initiative is going to be a good thing. She’s meeting different agility obstacles in class and workshops and the back yard. She’s refining her “come” and we’re adding value to handy things like collar-over-the-head and go-to-mat. She’s learning to go between two uprights, that will teach her to look for jumps, and also is the very beginning of weave poles. She’s done some ramps too.

Chico is learning to be tolerant of Lucy’s presence, he’s eating better, he’s running faster in the agility ring, and he’s still the one who gets to sleep on my bed.

In a few days we’ll all pack up and go to Springfield, MA for the Thanksgiving Cluster. I’ve talked about it before, it’s the east’s largest dog event with breed, obedience, and agility. There’s four rings of agility and our group, the dogs that jump 16 inches is about 100 strong. Of that most will not be in the preferred group (dogs that are tall enough to be jumping 20 inches but are excused to a lower height due to their age), but we’re still not likely to be the fastest, even when we can run clean. But those qualifying runs count even if we don’t get a colored ribbon. Chico needs to more qualifying runs in Standard at the Excellent level to move to masters, the highest level. The courses don’t change, but it’s a goal. We’ve been in Master’s Jumpers for quite a while, and it would be nice to reach that in Standard as well. After that, the next big achievement is a PACH, which means qualifying in both Standard and Jumpers on the same day – twenty times. I don’t trial enough to reach that goal, and I think at this point, neither Chico or I wants to step it up and go on a strenuous, both classes, both days, every weekend campaign for a PACH. We’d rather go hiking most of the time, and trial when it is convenient.

The house is finally getting close to completion. After weeks of searching and calling and getting samples of things that were out of stock for the next eight weeks, I located my cork flooring and it has been delivered. Doing the downstairs in cork eats up my entire flooring budget, so upstairs flooring is painted plywood; clearly I am willing to compromise. The painters are doing final coats, the cabinetry is almost finished, there will be toilets and sinks in the bathrooms this week; I could be moving in by the middle of December.