Last weekend I went to a two day obedience show. I'd only entered Solei - Pre-Beginners and Beginners both days - as Elton is being too much of a swine for me to want to try atm!

Saturday was an "if only..." day. It was a disaster from the start! Judging started at 9:30am, Solei was drawn first. Got him all in the zone, eventually asked why they weren't starting and the judge had got held up on the M5 so they had to start that ring at 10am. Put Solei away for 15 minutes and then had to get his concentration back again! Heelwork pattern was incredibly long for pre-beginners which doesn't suit Solei at all due to him worrying about the chair bumping and thus the longer we go on the worse it gets - but he was fantastic...so proud of him.

Then I went to set him up for the recall and a train went by (the field is RIGHT next to a railway track), so we waited (him sitting beside me ready) til it had passed. Then I was told to leave him, so I did.....at just the point another train came past. I was told by three people he literally jumped out of his skin, then came running to catch me up - she let me do it again just so he did it, but marked the first attempt so docked him every mark possible. It was just very unfortunate everything - timing/circumstances - (the recall was from the side of the ring nearest the track, with the dog's back to it) because I never had any worries about the trains with Solei, he didn't bother about them last year and hadn't bothered about them this year up until that point. Nor did he bother after that!

In stays a GSD decided to break it's sit stay and run chaos round the ring. Dogs were breaking left right and centre, the dogs either side of Solei broke and he stayed....until it pounced on him!! Thankfully he was faster, leapt out to the side and then came charging to me in the middle of the ring and threw himself straight up on my lap! Down stay was ok, they decided to repeat the sit stay but only half the time for all the dogs that broke due to it....and the Collie next to Solei broke it, and was prancing all around him...owner went after it, that came within an inch of pouncing on my poor boy too!

After that fiasco the stays for his next class were only 15 minutes away, so we did those and he was not happy at all...as the steward was counting down to last command, he got to 3 and Solei went down, so I put my hand under his chest and picked him back up - must've had about -.5 of a second to spare! Other than that they were fairly uneventful.

He needed a rest after that so I went to the tent about 12:15/12:20 to work him in his second class, and they'd gone to lunch! Lunch wasn't til 12:30! I couldn't stay until they came back (2pm!) because Ria wasn't quite right so I'd left her at home with dad - so I came home not at all impressed that I'd done two sets of stays - the second of which in particular he hated - for no reason (the first set I had to do because for some reason the judge hadn't put the first three scores on the board and I wasn't sure exactly what she'd docked him for recall, had I known I wouldn't have done them.) after he'd been such a good boy and worked so well for me.

You couldn't make that up could you? lol On the plus(?) side - his heelwork marks were some of the best of the day and he'd definitely have been placed were it not for that b****y train!!


Sunday I was able to arrive a bit later as we had no running order. Ria was much better so came this time, which made things easier - removed all time pressures!

Solei's Pre-Beginner round was pretty crappy, he was quite laggy/wide - but we had a clear recall lol. Combine the heelwork of Saturday with the recall of Sunday and we'd have been good to go!

His Beginners was a little better but still not brilliant - think he'd had enough after Saturday! We got through the whole weekend without anything untoward happening, but he still isn't quite right today.

So that was that! Not our weekend...hopefully the next show will be more successful. Next "big" one isn't for two months, so ages away yet!