An Ear-y feeling and AKC fun

Skye and I ran the 3 day AKC trial this past weekend, more on that in a moment.

As I usually do, I brought Rip along to the trial - he gets to meet & greet and socialize. On Sunday, about noon, Rip and I had just come in from a potty trip and when we got up in the bleachers, he was in obvious distress, crying and shaking his head. He was really upset with whatever was in his ear - a bug or something - couldn't tell. As Liz (a vet) was sitting with us, I asked her to see if she could find anything, and she couldn't, but its not like she had a scope or anything with her. Rip settled a little bit, but still kept shaking his head and kept his left ear kind-of pinned back. I put him in his crate so he would just rest. After a while I checked on him and he seemed to feel better but still tilted his head and kept shaking trying to get out whatever went in there. I thought it maybe could be one of those spikey grass seed things, as some of the grass was overly tall due to all the rain lately. So at the end of the day, about 3pm, we decided we would take him over to the emergency vet near the trial site.
Here is what they took out:


Ouch! Poor guy. They had to sedate him to get this piece of evil nature out of his ear. He's OK now. It did not pierce his eardrum.

So, for the trial results.
Skye and I had a very good showing. On Friday, we Q'd our JWW and almost Q'd STD except I gave an inappropriate collection/wrap signal causing him to knock the triple before the weaves. But for that one bar, we almost had a QQ.

On Saturday, we ran Open FAST and got our last Q so we could move to Excellent. Then we ran JWW and got the Q with a nice run. We then ran STD and Q'd that one too, so Yea QQQ day! Two more to go to qualify for Nationals.

Sunday, we ran JWW and three obstacles from the end was a tunnel - should have been an obvious entry for Skye but the bugger cut behind me to take the offcourse entry. Ugh! Then we had STD and Skye was running pretty fast. I gave an early cue to weave while he was still jumping (to avoid an offcourse jump) but that caused him to knock that bar. We finished it out again a bar away from a nice STD Q. We need 1 more STD for MX now, and the next shot is the two trials I have in July.

So, no missed dogwalk contacts again this weekend, and no weave entry or pop-out issues!!