I think Miller must read my blogs. I had been going back and forth about what to do with miller. I had been thinking everything from retiring him to dropping him down to 16 inches. Well, Mr. Miller went out this weekend and showed me he had no intentions of slowing down or retiring any time soon. He laid down some smoking runs and held his own with dogs half his age! Now, granted it was on soccer turf and he LOVES that type of surface but WOW! We had a standard run that had several tough front crosses and he kept all of his bars up and had great contacts. I was just shocked as he collected 14 points in JWW!!!! He never gets more than 10 or so points and he got 14! I think this was a big bold statement on his part. He did pick up the final double Q he needs for AKC nationals, but still needs almost 200 points and I am not planning on going to nationals next year so I am not going to push it. I still like just running him two days a weekend and keeping it to two shows a month. I am going to stick to my plan of focusing on USDAA after this next weekends AKC trial and maybe even do some ASCA trials. He is close to his top titles in both so I would like to finish those out. I may also start being selective in entering him in trials that only are on artificial turf as he seems to like those the most. That may be more of the st. louis trials or the columbia trials but he just never has done well at outdoor trials ( go figure, we train outside). If I am only going to do two shows a month, maybe I can afford it. I am going to see how it goes but man, did he make a liar out of me this weekend!
I also got to run Harley this weekend and am so proud of my red rocket! He was smoking fast and had some awesome runs! We didn't qualify but he showed me that he is listening and paying attention to my commands. His contacts were, well, lets just leave it at non-existent but I kind of expected that. Tony is still trying to shape a running contact with him and while i think he is for sure going to have a nice running a-frame, I really don't think he will ever have a good running dog walk. Tony thinks otherwise so I am just going to keep my mouth shut. Great weekend, great friends and food and great new facility!!!!!
