Invitational

I got to run under 2 of the 3 judges for this year's invitational this weekend, and the concensus seems to be thanks, but no thanks. Several people who were definintely going, are pulling their dogs. The calls were completely inconsistent and all over the place and the courses just ridiculous! Ex Standard had 8 qualifying runs, in total for all heights and just about every one of the NQs came from the weave pole entry. Dogs that *always* hit their entries couldn't get it, the only dogs with maybe 2 exceptions that got it, were slow dogs.

Kittie's doing some major bar knocking again, this has been the routine for her whole career. Just when I think I have things figured out, bars start crashing again. She's just the best dog, great drive, focus and a nice variety of skills. She's so easy and fun to run, but this is so hard on both of us. She's mainly hitting the double and triple, not a little tick either, she's jumping *way* too early and literally landing on top of the jump. About the only reason for this that I can come up with, is I've been doing a lot of work with Abby over the past week, just rewarding her for offering jumps, so my jumps are set at 12" & 14". Kittie of course has been doing them too, and lazy me hasn't changed the height for her (she used to jumnp 12" before AKC changed the heights), she jumps 12" just fine, but her arc is totally different, much more rounded, so maybe that's a part of it. It's so frustrating, Kittie would have a Q rate around 90% if she didn't knock bars!

Abby had some wild standard runs this weekend, even got that evil weave poles entry, but couldn't hang on to stay in the poles. She had a beautiful JWW weaves run on Sunday, but missed a weave pole.....it's always something!