Hot, hot, hot. We’re not used to so much hot.

Gustavo just did 1 run each day. This is just how it goes now for him. It was way too hot for Gustavo. He made a lot of trips to dip into the water, and got to hang out with the kids in the shade. Gustavo liked that part a lot. His runs were awesome, he ran his fastest, and did many if not all the weave poles. UKI has a thing called Speedstakes which is Gustavo’s new best thing, maybe we will have to travel around and find UKI trials that offer Speedstakes just for Gustavo. He thinks it’s called Speed Steaks, he runs as if there’s meat for him at the end. Which there isn’t, poor guy, but it’s the kind of course that makes him very happy.

Of course because it’s hot, and there is so much traffic driving home, we have to stop for a swim. We pulled off here, because in the slow moving traffic, a huge hawk flew out of the brush on the side of the highway and deliberately nearly bashed into the truck in front of me. The guy driving looked at me in the rear view mirror, waving his arms, like, did you see that? I waved my arms back, that was crazy, man. It flew off across the traffic jam. It hated that truck, it hated that traffic, and I did too, and I knew it meant, get off here, get the dogs in the water.

Me and Banksy had a harder time at the trial. The first day, the courses were exactly not the kind of courses either me or Banksy would like to run. There were too many approaches and lines that I worried I’d crash her through things. We survived, but barely. Her rdw, not looking so hot.

The second day, we loved the courses. They were fantastic. Lines and approaches that neither one of us were worried about. Having different judges each day really makes you think about how people approach agility and what the heck they’re designing courses for. Banksy’s rdw, though, looked worse. She had so many slips while running, and I think only hit 3 of 7 dogwalks she did all weekend. This is, of course, bad news. Today I’ll walk around sighing a lot. Will we ever get this to stick?

We had some nice runs, we had some runs where I made some mistakes. It was that kind of weekend, sort of like the last trial we went to. My learning curve is a very slow curve with Banksy, it’s taking a while to remember to do all the things, while running. My thought is, she doesn’t care a whole lot when I screw up. So far, anyways, I don’t think screwing up is a good idea, overall. She did screw herself up, popping out of weave pole number eleven, and she’s well aware that there are twelve of them. I did tell her then, HEY, let’s go do that again. So we did.

She was the happiest to get in the water at the end of the day. Agility needs more ponds and swimming holes, that would be as good as improvement as no weird crashy lines for dogs. We like UKI, the trials are small, Banksy can be near the rings and not freak out. Everybody helps out, most people there are people who want to get home before too late, so the trials move quick and we get a lot of runs in. We’ll keep going, as much as we can, and hope for happy courses.