Surviving the 4th.

We survived. Gustavo barely survived, but every year, he's still alive in the morning. We have a system, it's not a surprise, the bombs go off all around us, we crank up fans and the stereo, and then later on, episodes of House Hunter International as loud as our tv goes, and he lays under a blanket on my lap all night. At some point he got ran away under the bed, miserable as could be, but in the morning he got out and life goes on.

We like the dog show part of Fourth of July. Three days, 22 runs. Big, crazy dog show. Some of those runs were Gooey's, he had zero Qs but a great deal of running as fast as he could, too fast to not do first tunnel he saw and too fast to stop for some weave poles in steeplechase. Gooey can do no wrong. Too many for me and Banksy! Us as a team can do a lot of wrong. We had some greatness in little bits. She won 3 team classes, got a team Q, won MC Standard, earned a SuperQ. She was the highest scoring team dog in her height, and a couple runs had some of the fastest times of all the heights. A lot of those 19 runs had handling errors where I sent her off the wrong place, and in 2 of them, she tried to bite my pants and she got yelled at and marched out of the ring.

If I make a turn at the last minute and she has crazy eyes on, she hates me and tries to bite my pants! She started this at one of her first trials, and then stopped after I marched her out of the ring. But decided to start again apparently, I am hoping the last time I made it VERY clear NO WAY! I yelled at her in front of everybody and stuck her leash on her head and marched her to the car and told her to sit in the corner til I came back.

That's how I cured Otterpop of barking at the judge from on top of the aframe, 100 years ago. I am not sure if this will work with Banksy, but this is what I'm trying.

When I tell people that not at agility, she is a normal, dog park going, playing at the beach, laying around on the couch at home dog, they don't believe me. Look at me like I have 3 heads. No way, they say, eyeing me curiously. That dog is nuts.

But it's true. She's a jekyl-hyde. A Sybil. A 2 faces of Eve. Her floppy weirdo muffin self at home becomes a terror beast at the dog show. If I look at her face coming off of a contact, and I see crazy eyes, I freeze up and panic and don't know what to do.

One of my friends said, "Oh yeah, I just never look at his eyes," about her terror beast. I try to watch her feet but those crazy eyes, really crazy! And team relay, yikes, 3 dogs and a baton hand off. We will have to go through that again in a couple of weeks...too crazy.

So I made a greatest hit movie again, so I could watch the not crazy parts and the nice handling and the good listening.  The good turns and the correct tunnels and the parts of running Banksy. Every run we came out of, even with mistakes, where there was listening and no pants biting, I told her she was amazing.

She really is.