Humble pumpkin pie.

I really had no intentions of taking Banksy, who is two, toddler age in people years, surly teenager or maybe twenty-something millennial on a pokeman quest in dog, to a National event. She qualified herself, just by having her good runs, for which there are always equal amounts of bad ones, but always with moments of shimmering brilliance. A quick moment into the wrong side of the tunnel or the backside of jump seven or wherever it happens wipes down the shine a little, but I always think, we'll do better the next time. Learn from the mistakes.

Then someone needed a team mate and it really is within driving distance, to go to Arizona. Banksy is not a dog I'd ever feel comfortable sticking in a crate in the underneath storage guts of an airplane, just to go to a dog show. So who knows when the chance would arise again to run her in such a Thing?

Then all of a sudden my friends and I've rented a house with a pool and wifi just down the road from the dog show and a Whole Foods and off we go in early November. Banksy will be running in the World Cynosport Games. Me and Banksy, with Otterpop coming along as an anti-support team and not a cheerleader. Otterpop can play the part of purse dog and will have to stay in a house full of many border collies who just want to swim in the pool.


So Banksy can be crazy. She can be hard to deal with around agility, although she's made tremendous improvements this year of learning dog showing. While I can put her almost anywhere else and get her to stay until I yell the freedom word, FREE means to her to run free with abandonment, as fast as you can, to where we're going next, at dog shows the stress and excitement of other dogs doing agility causes her to push the limits, push her rules, push on whatever she can push on. She likes to just GO and GO FAST.

Banksy's dream day would be to follow another dog around the course, doubles style. Not pairs. That's one dog at a time, please, there are manners and rules. Banksy has to work hard to follow rules, her brain frequently tells her to push them aside. So she can be first. And second. And next. And again. And the most.

We had our last dog show before heading to Arizona over the weekend. Local USDAA trial, a nice place to get some last minute practicing, have some awesome, confidence building runs. Except Banksy said no more of this staying and waiting for her turn. Almost every run she tried to call the FREE. Free to be, you and me. Use your freedom of choice. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

Nothing, ain't worth nothing if it ain't free. Humbling and disastrous was how it looked from my end. We only ran a bit, and on most of those runs I made big enough mistakes. On all of the others, when she decided to play by her new, personal, customized rules, I didn't let her run. So we had a lot of not fun not running at the dog show.

Eating humble pie. Humble pumpkin pie. Humble pumpkin spice latte pie. A lot of it. That's what we are doing and trying everything in the book right now to make stays way more exciting, way stronger when life is incredibly exciting, and remove the stressfulness of just laying there, waiting.

We have exactly two weeks for this project. That is quite a feat. But what we'll be working on, all the time. A lot! The most. First. Second. And next. Here we go.