And our brain finally caught up with us...

As I've told you in the previous post there was a double show in Hrušica for the first time this year. On Saturday my two favourite boy took me and Živa to the show and took me for short a walk with them near the show area. I was working as a ring steward with the first FCI group both days and I have to say that quite a few very nice and interesting dogs came to the Serbian judge Sunčica Lazić the first day. After work we stopped for a walk with Ivana and her numerous pack on the way to the hotel and Sambo and I took the opportunity to pose together after a long while; the fact that I was wearing some decent clothes was worth the session anyway…



Gravity doesn't really work on Belgians...



A big smile during the walk :)



On Sunday I worked with the shepherds again, this time the judge was Kenneth Edh from Sweden. Towards the end the rain tried to give us some trouble, but we still came to the end successfully as the last ring working (it was a tie with Živa's ring). So we came to the end of another successful weekend but had no time to rest because new obligations came with the new week – studying, arranging the house, agility trainings and more.

On Friday I finally managed to get some sleep and gather my stenght for the busy weekend that was ahead of me. On Saturday I had to get up early and go to the agility traning (Thursday's training was cancelled because of the rain, so we had a substitute trainig). After agility training we rushed home to help with the preparations for my dad's birthday picnic. Of course the preparations weren't the only tiresome thing, the picnic itself was quite tiresome too – so I escaped from it, to another picnic, this one in Gregor's honour. And yes, my pants still fit :).

Sunday came with another opportunity for new RO successes and Sambo and I joined the battle full of optimism. The trial was a very pleasant one despite of the raindrops here and there. There were 6 competitors in RO II and Sambo and I were the last to perform. We did very well, the only evident mistakes were a crooked Sit in one task and a less than perfect side step in another. I was pleased with our performance as we did much better than in Ljubljana, but I know we can do even better. Well, the judge was obviously less critical than me, he gave us 164 out of 170 points, which meant we were second! Here's our performance in RO II.

Since there was only one competitor in the RO III category I volunteered to double – you have to work in pairs in categories III and IV. i wanted to take the opportunity to train because I never practice with signs and I never do whole courses, I only train individual tasks as tricks. Furthermore, we'll probably compete in this category on the next trial as we have all the necessary requirements to advance into a higher level. I predicted our performance in III to be better than in II and so it was. Despite three not exactly shiny moments – the first one was my fault, I got lost in the course, again!, I have big problems with orientation between the signs (I would probably do better if I ran through the course, like in agility), especially if there's a 270 degrees turn in the course, so ¾ of a circle. I usually forget to stop, make a full circle and after two steps I realize that the next sign isn't ahead of me. That was the case here too. The second moment was fate or better said bad luck, I actually started training the table on our club's training field since I had problems with this obstacle, but this trainings don't help me at all in trials because our table is considerably larger than the one prescribed for RO and Sambo apparently doesn't perceive this as a table at all. It seems that we'll have to make a smaller table in order to train it effectively. The third moment was contributed by Sambo only, while performing one of the tasks he remembered he's a reincarnation of a Friesian and got in between my legs. Pure Sambo! I though that the least appropriate moment for such a move was when I'm walking down the stairs, now I see I can fear such an episode on RO trials too… Nevertheless, I'm very content with his performance – here's our RO III.

Enough for today. The weekend tempo hasn't calmed down yet, this Saturday I'm working on CACIB Portorož and we have agility trials the next four consecutive weekends. I hope they'll be more successful than the last ones, I'm certainly optimistic about it (as always) – apparently our brain finally caught up with us, at least in rally, so we're not only pretty anymore ;).

Greetings from the second place, type you next time!