Sunny Is Still Going to School

I just realized I left my audience hanging after the February 12 post about Sunny Bunny, so now on Easter Sunday let me bring us all up to date.

Sunny did recover from his flare-up and was happy to go back to school.

Then about 6 weeks later he got up one morning and was obviously in some kind of pain. For a week he was in a lot of pain. The vet eventually identified his hips as the area of concern. Might have been the weather. Dunno. Sure was tough to watch - he cried when he had to walk, so mostly he just laid on his bed. I added more piles of soft stuff on his bed till he looked like the Prince and the Pea. Poor little baby.

Then after a week of that, his eyes flared again. Sheesh. I know the vet doesn't believe it, but I gotta go with stress as the trigger. After about 10 days from the start of it all, he had turned the corner, and now 16 days later, he's tapering back off the meds and holding his own. He missed school one week and then it was spring break. He should be good to go back this week.

While he was in the midst of that, I got to stay home all weekend. I was supposed to be working on my audit research project but I never really got around to it. Completely blew off the whole weekend watching my agility coach at Nationals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7jcevStf1A. How inspiring is that?

The following weekend was much more productive on the report front, and when I finished my work on that for the day, Star and I got to play a little bit. We call it Rockin' the Weave Poles:

Yup, there's 12 of them there. Competing at the novice level, we're only running 6 in competition right now, but she knows how to do all of them. And at the 9 Mile Trial coming up in 5 weeks we'll be playing the new Time 2 Beat game, where we have to do all 12 and do 'em fast.

Next challenge - being as aggressive in competition as we are at home.

Moses Lake AKC Trial 3/25/2012

Good thing we threw that Ridgefield trial in at the last minute in February. Little did we know that our life of leisure was quickly coming to an end. I added a 3rd class at Gonzaga during the 3rd week of the semester and then a week later I took a new temp job. They wanted 55-60 hours a week but were satisfied with 38, which was pushing the limits for me, but having just written the big check for tuition, income was good.

I immediately decided that Moses Lake wasn't going to happen (for me anyway - they weren't gonna cancel the whole event just 'cause I couldn't be there), which made me very sad, because I had been looking forward to it for a year. But then a couple weeks later I realized that I could go for one day, and that made me very happy, because I had been looking forward to it for a year.

I had a cooking frenzy on Friday night as I prepared my food for the weekend, spent a leisurely Saturday morning getting everything all packed up, and then made the short 2 hour drive over, arriving in time to watch the end of the FAST novice runs, which was perfect as I was going to attempt it for the first time the next day. I also got to join the Spokane/MT BBQ, thanks to Carolyn and Betty and Chuck**2. (That's Chuck Squared in English.)

And then on Sunday we had our 3 runs.

Novice JWW

Novice STD


Novice FAST


No ribbons, but nicer runs than the first event where we got all those silly ribbons. Well, maybe not that STD one, although we did fix the broad jump and A-frame problems that we had at the last event.

Thank you to Dave and Heather for the great videos. I hope to return the favor at future trials.