Well, I was hoping to come home with Bandit's first ribbon, but we didn't qualify in either of our events this weekend. He did well, though, and I think over all it wasn't bad for our first show.
We got there at 7:30 in the morning, to get him measured for height. It turns out he's only 21 1/2" tall, which is a half inch under the cutoff for jumping 24". So in the future, he'll be jumping 20", which makes life a little easier.
Marc and I then grabbed breakfast, I studied the course maps a little, and then we went back at 11 am to set up our chairs and Bandit's portable crate. Our first course was the jumpers course, and I made a mistake from the beginning. Bandit broke his stay and wandered around the side of the first jump - I didn't realize this meant that we were officially starting. So I called him back and put him back in a sit-stay. Well, since we'd started, I wasn't supposed to touch him again, which I did. So that automatically got us disqualified. But the judge was nice enough to let us run anyways (and I didn't find out about my mistake until afterwards). Bandit did most of the course pretty well, although he did try to go say hi to one judge, and knocked over a bar or two. But he stayed with me for the most part and came back when I called him.
The next course we ran was the standard course, which includes jumps and all the contact obstacles (A-frame, dog walk, teeter). He did this GREAT, except for the table, which I knew was going to be a problem because he's been refusing to do it lately. I think he doesn't care for the fact that he has to stay still on it for 5 seconds, and why should we interrupt the fun? So I got him to get on it for one second before he hopped off, and then he wouldn't get back on. So that refusal meant another disqualification. But the rest of the course went pretty smoothly, and I was pretty proud of him.
Kenny even came by to watch us, as did some friends of ours from herding. It was pretty cool. I had a lot of fun, and I think Bandit did too. Marc got some video, which I'll have to try to get online.
The rest of our weekend was pretty busy too. I took Friday off to go help Marc start cleaning out his parents' house in Elk Grove. Marc rented a ginormous dumpster, and we managed to fill most of it that day.
On Saturday, Marc went up with Steve to do some more cleaning in the house and to take care of some paperwork for the sale, and I took Bandit herding. After that, I went to a frag swap for the reefing club we belong to - basically, people take fragments of their corals and swap them to other members, which helps to keep corals propogated, and helps to lesson the number of corals that are cultured from the wild. There was a raffle too, and I managed to win a gift certificate and a big rock of zoanthid corals.
In the evening, we had dinner with my parents (sushi!), and then I spent the rest of the night worrying about competing the next day. :)
Congrats on going through your first competition!!
Yay Bonnie and Bandit. :)