trial and earn points toward her Field Champion title. You can see what Wikipedia
says about it but the short version is it's dogs chasing a fake lure (rabbit) around a field and they are scored on different details
of how they chase. You can see some examples on YouTube if you're interested. The high scoring dog wins and if there were enough dogs present the win is scored as a "Major" win. A dog needs a total of 2 majors and fifteen points to become a Field Champion. There was a
trial locally this weekend so we brought Stella to complete her JC and if she was successful to enter her in the trial. She passed her JC without any trouble and competed well in the trial, so well in fact that she won her first
major and earned 4 points! Considering there are many dogs that do this all the time that have never won a major, it's a pretty big accomplishment to win one your first time out! She did all that on the first day and we
went back again today for the second trial. She placed 4th this time out of 11 total Ridgebacks, which isn't bad considering what she did yesterday and that she isn't in as good a shape as most of the other dogs there.
With the weather so bad and me unable to ride my bike at all, she hasn't been doing much more than lay around the house. One of the other dog owners is into action photography and took lots of great pictures of all the dogs on
Saturday and had prints for sale today. We picked up a few and scanned them when we got home, they are posted on Stella's page to the left. We aren't quite as tired as she is but it's close. Tonight we have to try
to get the chores done that we didn't get to all weekend long while we were out playing in a field with a bunch of dogs. We haven't made it over to see the puppies in a few days but we're told they are all doing well and putting
on 2 to 3 ounces of weight every day, hopefully one of us will make it over sometime this week. If we do I'll be sure to post some pictures, have a good week, we'll chat again soon.
December 10, 2009: Hello gang, sorry again about the huge lapse in updates, same story, different month. This is going to have to be a quick update but I'll try to
cover what's been going on. Lisa's dad has been home from the hospital for a week or so and is feeling a lot better, he just needs time to build up his strength again and he'll be as good as new.
My leg is healed up to at least where it was just before my surgery, the incision looks great, maybe better than the first time, and the muscle soreness has mostly gone away. Lisa has been working lots
and lots of hours with the flu season in full swing and all. Stella is doing well, her skin issues had cleared up until this week when a couple of them started to come back. Hopefully a new
medication she's on will hopefully clear that up soon. Some good news is that Stella's mom Lottie had puppies last week and she beat the size of Stella's litter by one more, a whopping 14 puppies!
Keep watch for more pictures, we've been over there a bunch and I'm sure we will continue before one comes home with us. I need to run for now but I'll try to be better going forward.