Ticket and our wonderful weekend 

Ticket and I went to an agility trial this weekend.  It's our first since May (with any of the dogs).  Ticket had this horrible experience in June that scared the daylights out of her and she couldn't stand to be out somewhere when anyone looked at her (afraid that someone was going to come after her with a stick).  It's been a truly awful thing to deal with and I spent the summer driving into the city every day so we could walk around shopping centers (well, I walked, she crawled).  I honestly wasn't sure I could bring her back to normal out in public.  As a result, I didn't go to any trials but took a bunch of classes and seminars and basically threw so many experiences at her that it was going to work... or not.  

I had noticed quite an improvement (since she was always perfectly normal at home, it was kind of hard to judge how far we'd come) and thought it was time to take the show on the road to see where we stood.  My objective for the weekend was simply to have a happy dog in the ring.  No other expectations but even setting that as our criteria was optimistic.  Turns out we met those objectives and then some.

Although there were a few awkward moments in the crush of people outside the rings, once we were on course, she just flew.  Tail wagging and then spiral jumps at the end when we celebrated the run.  In all, we got 5 Q's, and two new titles (a Regular Standard one and a Jumpers).  We even came in 3rd in one of the Regular runs which was quite exciting.  It was a class of 26 and the two dogs that beat her were Border Collies which I figure are usually going to be in the lead.  Two of the runs we didn't qualify in were due to missed contacts (which was a result of me making the decision not to try to slow her down while she was having so much fun) and the other one we didn't qualify for was a tunnelers run we missed by one second.  

All in all, I'm so happy to have my girl back again.  I know that she's still looking over her shoulder expecting bad things to happen but she's having fun again and that's all that matters.

So, three cheers for Ticket, now Drumdaroch SuresHot, AgNJ, NAC, NAJ.