January 15th, 2005
What a day! Stamp was back to normal, wild and ready to run. His standard run was
brilliant, he unbelievably came in 12th out of 60 dogs in a very competitive 8 inch class! I was absolutely
thrilled.
In JWW he inexplicably went around the far side of a jump instead of taking it, then back-jumped
it, then took it correctly. At the time I thought I must have accidentally given him an odd signal, but everyone watching
(and me, when I watched the video after) agreed that I was fine, he was lined up with the jump, and for some reason he abruptly
turned away from me at the last minute. It was disapointing, but not really heartbreaking since the rest of his run
was really great. I was so proud to be his handler!
I was really grateful to the friends and family members who came out to see us run here and
cheered us on. Carlynn and Liz were here from Texas, Jan came from Michigan, Beth from DC, Ursula from Florida, my sister
from Virginia. It's great to have such a cheering section.
An interesting note - the announcer is reading your bio over the PA, and commenting on
your run. Before experiencing it I assumed that I would be too stressed while I was running to even notice, but I actually
did hear it every time. It wasn't at all distracting, it actually seemed to serve as a focus away from the huge hoard
of spectators watching the run.
The whole experience is amazing. Today, in addition to agility, it was the first
day of breed competition and the first day of obedience competition. There were hundreds (it felt like thousands) of
spectators in addition the the thousands of dogs. WOW! It's quite an experience to be here. There are billboards
all over town welcoming us, the dogshow is on the front page of the paper, the local television news, radio, etc.
Every breed has a 'meet the breed' booth in the exhibition hall. We lent Fleet to the
Norwich and Norfolk Terrier booth for a couple of hours to be petted and played with. He came back exhausted.
In the evening Stamp and I were interviewed on a radio program called Talkin' Pets with Jon
Patch. That was fun.
We're all exhausted now, but tomorrow we run late in the morning so we can sleep in.
