Well, first off, Tracey fussed at me for never finishing the story about Sniper's pain.  There isn't really mush to tell.  Everyone agrees that Sniper's rads were fine.  He hasn't been painful at all, so I've just been letting him do whatever he wants.  I'm going to get him some joint supplements soon. 

This weekend was a trial in Sulphur, LA which was offering AKC agility AND obedience.  That was really great for me and Red because if he messed up one event there was something else we could do well in. I didn't feel like the whole day was ruined by a bad run, which tends to happen to me at AKC trials.  Red was entered in four runs on Satureday and four on Sunday.

Novice A obedience was our first event on Saturday morning.  I had checked at the obedience rings and only saw gate sheets for the utility classes and figured that I had a while before Novice, so I went to check on the agility rings.  When I wandered back to the obedience they had set everything up and it was Red's turn.  Yikes!  Poor Tracey had to run and get Red and find his treats and show collar while the judge showed me the heeling pattern.  I just had to grab Red and run into the ring.  He did great!  He forget the whole sit when we stop thing and moved a foot as I was leaving for the stand for exam, but those are just small deductions.  His recall was awesome.  He raced across the ring and almost smacked into me (actually he did make contact).  He used to stop about three feet away and sit, but apparently I managed to fix that.  Red almost gave me a heart attack during the stays.  He doesn't lay comfortably on his side during the down stay like most dogs.  He was crouched in a sphinx down looking around for three minutes.  I think everyone watching was just waiting for him to spring up.  But he stayed!  Our score was 186 out of 200 (170 is qualifying).  That got us second place.  But guess what score the first place dog got.  186 and 1/2. Ugh.  Our first obedience leg ever!  Now he's 1/3 CD!  I don't think I thought it would ever actualy happen. 

Red also did Rally Adavanced A.  It was made more interesting by the fact that the wind was blowing the signs around during the course and I had to do part of it from memory.  I thought our run was pretty bad.  It felt bad to me.  He wasn't heeling very nicely and I thought it was questionable whether or not we actually did well enough on some of the signs.  So I was surprised when we got a 96 out of 100 and first place. 

Agility was bad bad on Saturday.  Red was scared and wouldn't run, so I excused us on both runs when Red did his freak out "I'm scared" thing. 

Sunday Novice obedience was good on the individual exercises.  On the off lead heeling Red got lost when I did an about turn and ended up on my right side.  I had to give another heel command, which I'm sure is a pretty big point deduction.  But he was still qualifying and was actually in first place going into the stays.  We put the dogs in the sit stay and walked off.  When I reached the other end of the ring and turned around I saw that Red's eyes were huge and his ears where back.  He then got up and walked across the ring to me.  Big baby.  I don't know why he was so worried when he had done so well the day before.  He stayed for a while on the down stay, but then a lady in the other ring gave a high pitched happy jump command to her dog.  Red either recognized the command or just thought it sounded fun, but he got up.

Rally was the same as on Saturday.  I wasn't very pleased with our run, but we qualified and got first place.  That was Red's third leg, so he got the title.  Red Rover RA!