Happy Birthday Tia!

Today is Tia's 7th birthday! She is now officially a veteran. Tia loves birthdays, and feels that she should be treated specially every day. According to tradition, she will get to choose a toy - as you can see from the photo, Tia takes her toys very seriously!

This past Saturday Mom drove down and we both attended the Breeders' Symposium held at the Baker Institute by Cornell. It was an enjoyable and informative day, with talks covering all things canine health and reproduction. I had to laugh during the Canine Health Information Center presentation when the speaker mentioned how many hits their website has gotten recently - their data is probably inflated from me looking up potential stud dogs! Mom had brought Queezle along. She was perfectly happy hanging out in the car during the talks and was thrilled to see me. Her undercoat is starting to come back, but we don't have any conformation shows planned for a while.

Happy Birthday Queezle!

On March 4th, Queezle celebrated her 5th birthday. She has come a long way from the little ball of fluff I brought home from Oregon in a Sherpa bag! On their birthdays, our dogs always get a special treat of some sort (a turkey melt this time) and then get to choose a new toy. Needless to say they think birthdays are pretty cool!

On Saturday I drove up to Syracuse for the last weekend of the Syracuse Obedience Training Club's agility league, which Queezle and I have been participating in. We had some really nice runs on very tough and twisty courses, though I did have to make her re-do the a-frame once when she cheated and jumped over the contact zone. After the official festivities were over, I ran Flash through the course just for fun and we practiced some contact obstacles.

In other news, the Cornell women's hockey team won its first ever ECAC Championship this past Sunday! We have also had four straight days of sun and temperatures reaching 40 in Ithaca, which has many of us wondering if the world has ended and we've all gone to heaven. I am really looking forward to spring, though hopefully we can go straight from snow to grass, and skip the mud stage - even though in the dorm I don't have to worry about keeping dogs clean, I have a bad habit of going cross-country when the paved walkways aren't the most efficient path. The one sad thing about the coming spring is that it will be the end of the snow igloo in front of my building.

Lots of Good Things

I know, I know - I've been slacking again. But I've been busy! Firstoff, on February 25th Queezle's puppies turned one year old. They've come a long way from the little munchkins that could eat out of a muffin tin!

Second, this past weekend I met my mom in Syracuse for an agility trial after watching the Cornell hockey team beat Union 4-1 Friday night (Go Red!). I gave a couple other pep band members a ride to the game, which was good because the guys dug the car out a three foot drift that night as opposed to me doing it at 5:30 the next morning!

As always, I had a great time at the trial. Flash was her usual wild self, and although she didn't qualify in any of her runs, for the most part they were really nice. At this point in her career I'm just glad she's still active and having a good time - qualifying runs are icing on the cake. Tia started out with some very lackluster runs, but rose to the occasion for our last class of the weekend and had a nice run with only one error.

Queezle decided to celebrate her puppies' birthday and her own approaching birthday by earning her second Excellent Jumpers with Weaves leg with a first place! She was the only 20" Excellent A dog to qualify. Her weaving is really coming together, and she was very good about following my cues. She has also figured out that I often appear when Mom takes her to Syracuse - Mom said she went nuts as soon as they arrived Saturday. I'm sure right now she is mad at me for having disappeared again. That said, I know that she got a hamburger on the way home for her clean run, which must have made her very happy.

So Happy Belated Birthday to Lexi, Rebel, Joy, Mozart, Demi and Tenor and congrats to everyone else who did well at the trial!