Four weeks and counting to the Collie Club of America National Specialty!  I’m very excited, it will be my first trip to a national specialty.  Well, not my first National, but my first Collie National.  I attended the Cardigan Welsh Corgi National Specialty in 2006.  At the time I had my first Cardigan called Magee and Magee and I had a great time.  We showed in rally and obedience.  We didn’t qualify, but we did have a terrific time showing. 

Collies will always be “my breed”.  I love them—it’s just the way Collies are, the temperament, personality, activity level and that something special, are a perfect fit for me.  However, I do like many other breeds of dogs and the Cardigans have appealed to me for a long, long time.  So I played “let’s make a deal” years ago, bought into two cardis and the end result was supposed to be the pick puppy from a breeding of one of the two dogs.  I got Magee, not the pick puppy, not a show puppy, but otherwise a good dog.  Circumstances forced me to find him a new home and he went into service dog work and then into a wonderful companion home.  Several revelations came out from the Magee era.  One, I learned never to play “let’s make a deal” again when it comes to dogs.  I own all but one of my dogs outright now, no funky contracts, no co-owns.  The other is to never let anyone take what they could from me and then turn around and treat me with disrespect.  Life is a learning experience, but I know now  how the old saying of “once bitten, twice shy” came about.  Actually those were good things that came from the Magee times, the bad thing is that I missed having a Cardigan around. 

I put the thoughts of having another Cardi on the backburner for a long time.  There was too much going on.  I moved, took a promotion at work, started working on my BA, had to buy a new van, and on and on.  Time passed, I renewed old friendships, made some new ones, found out that showing dogs was once again FUN when you show with the right kind of people.   I started looking again for a new Cardi.  I talked to a handful of quality breeders, ones that have been in the breed for a long time, have produced good quality dogs and are people that I respect.  I vowed that I was going to get a quality show dog this time around, because as much as I loved Magee, he really wasn’t all that I wanted in a dog.  Hindsight is such a wonderful tool isn’t it?  Too bad we have to use hindsight to see clearly now, it would be really much more useful then.

Tune in next time for more on the search for THE ONE….