First Place, Woohoo!!!

The trial was up in Dixon again, and I was worried about how it was going to go, since we hadn't practiced at all for two weeks because of the rain. I tried to do a little training with him while we were waiting, but he wasn't into it at all, so that worried me even more.

Marc and I ended up having to buy a canopy for the trial, because we thought it might rain that day (it ended up only sprinkling a little). We originally found a 10'x10' shade, which we thought was way too big, and I found an 8'x8' shade that Sports Chalet and Sports Authority both sold. Sports Chalet was closer to us, but they were selling it for $75 online, while Sports Authority had it for $60.

We took the Sports Authority online ad to Sports Chalet (which had it marked in store at $80), but they couldn't match the online ad. We left, bummed that we now had to go all the way to Sports Authority. I called them first though, and it turned out they didn't have it in stock.

So we decided to suck it up, and went back to Sports Chalet, and when the cashier rang it up, it turned out to be only $55! Nice!

Anyways, upon getting to the trial, we realized that everyone else had the 10'x10' canopies, and ours looked a bit teeny next to the rest. Marc had a good laugh about it.

So back to the trial. This time I remembered to take off Bandit's tags, and I actually did that the minute we got in the car. Our first course was, as usual, the jumpers course. The course is new every time, and this one had a pretty good flow to it. I was so nervous though, my heart was beating a mile a minute.

I had Bandit with me, and as soon as he saw the other dogs running the course, he seemed to pick up some energy and excitement. When it was finally our turn, he ran fast. We had problems with our weave pole entry, but in Novice you're allowed to mess up on the weaves and still qualify. Bandit actually ran a lot faster than I was expecting him to, and there were times in both courses where I couldn't get into my planned position in time, and I made things a bit awkward for both of us. He still ran it clean though, despite my errors, thank goodness!

Afterwards, I went to find out if we managed to qualify in either course. Not only did we qualify in both, but we were listed as 1st in both! Now granted, there were only 3 dogs in our class, but it was still pretty exciting! (The novice classes are the smallest by far, so we may have to savor the 1st place finishes while we can, hehe.)

So we got both a green (qualifying) and a blue (1st place) ribbon for each course, and Bandit got to pick out a toy for each one.

I was pretty giddy for the rest of the day - it was so great just to qualify! I also made videos of the two runs:

Jumpers With Weaves

Standard

The Rest

Friday night we took my parents and Kenny out to dinner at On the Border. They told us it would be a 5-minute wait (even though they weren't crowded at all), but after we waited 20 minutes and my mom complained a little (in typical Chinese mom style), we were finally seated and they gave us an appetizer sampler for free.

Marc and I woke up early Saturday morning and drove to Stanford to buy an 60 gallon acrylic tank that I plan to use as a sump for the next tank. It cost us $40 - new, it would've cost me around $200 to have it made. The sale started at 9, and we got there around 8:45. There were a few people milling around, but they didn't seem to know where to go (the sale was being held by the Stanford fish lab).

I found some workers, and asked them about it - when they pointed me to where the sale was going to be, the other people that had been milling around started heading off in that direction. Fortunately, Marc was on top of things, and he darted off too, and got there before anyone else did. :)

They had all the tanks stacked on each other, and I knew there were only 2 of the one I wanted. We quickly found both, and Marc and I planted ourselves in front of one of them, as the girl running the sale said they'd start at 9. There was another guy there who was asking the girl there where this particular tank was - it turned out he was looking for the same one we were. She came over and measured the tank we were standing in front of. I told him there was another one on the ground. So right when she said it was 9, and that we could start buying, Marc tapped the tank we were next to, and pulled out $40.

Just as she was about to take it, the other guy said, "That's the one I'm interested in too."

The girl said, "Well...he had his money out first."

The guy said, "Well can we flip for it?"

Marc said, "Why? We were here first."

The guy said, "I don't know that that's necessarily true." (I'm not sure how it wasn't, but whatever.)

I told the guy that there was another one, SAME THING, over there. He said the one we had was in better condition (I didn't really notice this).

The girl hesitatingly asked if we wanted to flip for it, and when Marc said no (I said I didn't care), she said, "Well, he did have his money out first" and took our $40.

Marc snatched up the tank, and we went on our way. In the car, Marc said, "I'm an ass, aren't I?" I said yeah, he probably could've handled it with a little more finesse. But in the end I think we were in the right.

It turns out, however, that the guy were were arguing with may be the same person that I'm planning on buying a piece of tank equipment from on Tuesday (I've never met the person before). We'll find out on Tuesday - that'll be awkward if true!