- So far, two people have written to request that I post photos of my rash. Ummm, no. You’d barf. And most of us take far too many trips to Three Mile Island already these days, Web discussion being what it is.
- And no, I’m not getting better. In fact, I may still be getting worse. But I do think it’s time to dump what’s in the Odd Lots file:
- While I wait patiently for more sunspots (and thus better ionospheric conditions for long skip) scientists tell me that I may have to do without them for awhile. (This from a link in a post with more graphs and links at WUWT.) The last time I had a really good antenna during a really good solar maximum was 1980.
- Intel is doing with its CPUs what IBM did with its mainframe processors in the 1960s: Disabling CPU features (in IBM’s case, it may have been as simple as inserting NOPs into the microcode) and then offering to turn them back on for a fee. (In this case, $50.) This is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but may not work well, and will certainly not make them any friends. (Odds on how long it takes the hardware hacker community to provide a crack?)
- PVC pipe fittings are wonderful big-boy tinkertoys, and come in any color you want as long as it’s black or white. If you want to broaden your spectrum a little, here’s how to permanently stain white PVC pipe any color you want.
- The battle between portrait mode and landscape mode in the online magazine world may come down to simple economics: It costs more to lay out (or somehow code up) a digital file that reads well both ways. Between the lines, however, I sense an attempt to twist Apple’s arm to cut their 33% cut of subscription revenue. Obnoxious question arises: How are iPad-targeted mags different from ambitious ad-supported bloggish Web-article sites like Wired, Slate, or Io9?
- While driving to our HMO’s Urgent Care facility the other day, I counted three MMDs (Medical Marijuana Dispensaries) on the eight-mile trip. Which means that Colorado Springs has a marijuana store every 2.7 miles. I guess we’re not so conservative here after all.
- One of the MMDs had a big banner across the storefront reading, “ICE CREAM!” Somehow I don’t think it’s French Vanilla.
- Pertinent to both of the above: The kettle is trying hard to prevent legalization of…the pot.
- It’s not the fat. It really is the fructose. (Thanks to David Stafford for the link.)
- Last Tuesday night we spent a little dusk-and-evening time at Cottonwood Hot Springs in Buena Vista, Colorado, and I highly recommend it. Not as slick as Mt. Princeton Hot Springs, but for looking up at the stars while immersed in hot water, you can’t beat it. (They keep lighting around the springs pools to an absolute minimum. Walk carefully if you value your toes.)
- Do you still smoke? If cancer doesn’t scare you enough, consider what it will do to your looks.
- I moderate comments on Contra pretty harshly, but I have to say, a recent spam comment from an IP in Vietnam is a testament to something. Maybe automated translation: “The content on this publish is really a single of the top material that I’ve ever occur across. I love your article, I’ll appear back to verify for new posts.” Heh. No, you won’t.
travel
Odd Lots
Daywander
I put Carol on a plane Thursday morning for Chicago, after her mom was taken to the hospital late Tuesday night. Delores is doing a lot better now, but for a few days it was unclear just what was going on. We were both planning on flying out there on the 16th, so this wasn’t an immense change in our summer plans–it just means I’m here by myself for a bit, trying not to eat like a bachelor nor dress like a college student.
I didn’t get the whole story yesterday when I cited the YouTube video of Carol’s sister talking about her experiences at her local Ford dealership. It’s actually a clever piece of marketing, though I’m also sure it’s not viral: The dealership will award a gift certificate to the customer garnering the most clicks on their YouTube video by July 15. So do us a favor and go look at the video. Thanks! (I will admit I’m curious to see how many clicks a citation on Contra can generate, and this is a rare opportunity to find out, with real numbers.)
When Carol’s gone, I generally drown my sorrows by writing, but I ran into an interesting problem yesterday. I finished Chapter 7 of Old Catholics last week. I won’t know how good it is until I get a month’s emotional distance from it, but in the meantime there’s Chapter 8. The problem came in when I sat down to write, me in my shorts with an iced tea on the coaster, the sun beating down on the oaks outside my window, only to realize that Chapter 8 is the Christmas chapter. It’s about the quirky Polish Christmas vigil supper at St. JJ’s, and draws heavily on my own experiences with Polish Christmas vigil suppers, both quirky and ordinary. It was 86 degrees out yesterday afternoon, and no matter what I did, I just could not get my interior state to feel like Christmas. It may be the mark of a true hack to be able to write convincingly about Christmas during the second week of July, but I may need to go back to hack school. I just can’t do it.
No matter. I’ve been working on Old Catholics since 2005; what’s another five or six months’ delay? In the meantime, there’s “Drumlin Circus” to work on. It’s still at the notes-and-outline stage, but that doesn’t mean progress isn’t being made. Imagine a line of circus wagons pulled by woolly mammoths, and a show with an acrobat who performs in a cage with two live smilodons. (I may even work in a giant beaver.) And every artifact the circus owns; wagons, props, steam calliope, everything, is made out of drumlins. The Bitspace Institute kidnaps the circus master’s wife, who supposedly has a private drumlin that compels wild animals to obey her. After two years without her, the circus master finds out where the Institute is keeping her, and let’s say that he has a grudge. When the circus comes to a nearby town, it mounts a show that no one in town–especially the Institute–will ever forget. Pleistocene megafauna, scary clowns, calliope music, secret drumlins, the legendary Function Controller–we’re gonna have a real good time!
It may be as much as 35,000 words long. Jim Strickland is doing a Drumlins novella as well, and we may try to put the two stories together as the first Copperwood Double. I’m not an ace at tete-beche, but I intend to learn. Stay tuned.
Daywander
Well, as a fair number of people have told me, the logo Carol and I saw the other day was the “hatchet man” icon of Insane Clown Posse, a hip-hop duo from Detroit that I’ve never heard and probably won’t. Key to finding the figure online is knowing that what he’s holding isn’t a map or a piece of paper but a hatchet. (In fact, it looks a lot more like a meat cleaver.) There’s also a girl-version of the icon, with a ponytail, but what we saw on the gate of a pickup truck was almost precisely what I show above left.
We had a relatively small gathering last night, but that was all right, as there were few enough of us to all sit on the two couches and talk about everything from dogs to SF to classic aircraft of the Strategic Air Command. We spoke of that lunatic Lt. Col. Bud Holland, whose lifelong ambition appears to have been to roll a B-52. (Detailed discussion here.) He tried, he failed, and you can see a video of the results here. Eric Bowersox and Sabrina Hoyt brought some Mountain Dew Throwback, made with real sugar instead of corn leavins’, and the original product artwork on the cans. There were intermittent thunderstorms all afternoon, but we had enough time between microcells to grill a batch of smoked brats and Ranch Food Direct burgers. By sheer coincidence both Mike Reith and Peggy Sargent brought cream puffs, and it had been so long since I’d had one that I’d mostly forgotten what cream puffs were. That memory came back in a big hurry, heh.
Alas, the thunderstorms prevented me from getting any Field Day time in yesterday, and with less than an hour remaining in the contest and yet another thunderboomer passing overhead as I write, I doubt I’ll get any time in this year at all. I created what I had hoped to be a low-profile inverted vee, and in truth, when I told people I had antenna off the back deck, several people looked and just didn’t see it, when when I was pointing right at it. It’s designed to be portable, and is attached to the deck railing with bungee cords. I’ll try to get a couple of days’ contacts with it, then roll it up and put it back in the garage.
There was more bear action yesterday. Late afternoon, our doorbell rang, and it was our new neighbors from across the street. Heather and Glen had gone for a walk with their two small boys, aged two and four, and left their garage door open. When they returned, sho’nuff, a bear was in their garage ransacking their garbage can. Heather asked to bring her boys inside, but about then Glen came back and said he’d driven the bear off by throwing rocks at it, after which it vanished up the street and ran between two other houses. (Glen’s an Army officer. Spend some time in Iraq and bears lose a lot of their mystique.) I’m guessing it was the same bear I saw yesterday about lunchtime, eating dog food down in our gully near our back door. It seems a little too comfortable with people and a little too willing to be out and around during the day to stay here, and if it comes back too much we’re going to have to put a call in and see if it can be relocated.
Lots of leftovers from last night, and I’ll be grilling Ranch Food Direct burgers again this evening if the rain will just stop for half an hour. The West is getting soaked this year. Our local reservoirs are full, and western Nebraska’s massive Lake McConaughy is refilling (after a 9-year drought that the doomsayers warned would be permanent) at a rate of two feet per week. When we first saw it we marveled at the broad sand beaches, which were not in fact beaches at all but recently exposed lake bottom. It was about 30% full when we first saw it several years ago. It’s now over 80% full and the water level is rising fast. (Note the end of the curve on the graph, and then see this graph to get a sense for the insane amount of water flowing into it this year.) We hope to take a long weekend up there before the summer’s over.
This coming week should be fairly peaceful. I intend to do some fiction writing and perhaps even finish an experiment I have on the bench downstairs, concerning how well IN23A microwave diodes serve as AM BCB detectors. What I know of detector theory tells me that such detectors should be socko. We’ll find out–that’s what science is for.
The Pack at the Flatirons Kennel Club Show
We spent this past weekend at the Flatirons Kennel Club Dog Show up in Longmont, Colorado, about 100 miles north on I-25 past Denver. It was not a huge show for bichons, and there were only three entered, all males. We entered Jack and Dash, and our new friends Maggy and Steve Lamp entered their 19-month-old Tucker. QBit and Aero were with us, which complicated logistics considerably, but we got a little behind on their vaccination schedules and kennel rules are strict at good kennels. Aero is now a champion, and while he could be entered as a “special,” Carol felt she would be better off putting her effort into whipping Dash’s coat into shape.
She did. Alas, good coat or not, about the best we can say about Dash himself is that he didn’t try to jump up on the judges and lick their noses, as he did at the last Denver show. He has this thing about leashes, and shakes his head while walking to try and get free of them. He also pulls badly when he should be walking around the show ring at a stately prance. “Stately” isn’t in his vocabulary yet. (Aero seemed born to the manner.)
It was a hot day, with humidity shoveled into the barns by ginormous county fairgrounds swamp coolers, and we saw a lot of dog tongues. (Above, left to right: Jack, Carol, Dash, Maggy, and Tucker.) Tucker is a great little dog who is just starting out on the show circuit but still gave Dash a serious run for his money. Dash stayed true to his rowdy nature but evidently his coat carried the day, and when it was over, Dash scored Best in Breed both Saturday and Sunday. (At weekend dog shows, each day is usually a separate competition.)
This may have been due to the small field, and (more likely) the lack of past-champion specials and bitches at the show. Female bichons are a lot less rowdy than males (especially young males) and tend to show better generally. By winning, Dash thus earned four points and made it out of bichon competition entirely. For the first time ever, Carol got to field a dog in the group competition, where the best entrants from each breed in the non-sporting group compete against all the other best-of-breeds. Alas, we got whupped by the same Boston Terrier both days. (Don’t ask me why Boston Terriers aren’t in the Terrier group. Nobody said the dog show business makes sense, least of all Carol or me.)
Still, it was great good fun, and as aerobic as dog shows can get, I managed some quiet time in our hotel room to research ePub tools and get ideas. I’m fleshing out a new novella, Drumlin Circus, and took some good notes. Jim Strickland asked me last week what would happen if somebody drummed up the Big Ball of Plutonium–and I couldn’t answer. It doesn’t take much plutonium to go critical, and I admit I was a little shocked at just how little when Jim looked it up. So there’s plenty of conceptual work still to be done on the Thingmakers, and I’m glad Jim is noodging me to do it. He and I are considering an all-Drumlin Copperwood Double, with two 25,000-35,000 word novellas back to back, in tete-beche format.
The Colorado Springs show is next weekend, and after that it gets quiet for awhile on the dog show front. That’s ok; it’s summer and there’s a lot to do, like hanging an Elfa shelving system along the entire 20-foot rear wall of the garage. There’s software to test and Field Day to work and many words to be written. Snow season is (finally!) over. Time to put my winter coat away and get at it.
Tripwander
Back in Colorado Springs (finally!) after five weeks away. Most of the trip was about family things that are not of general interest, and I’ve discovered that writing long trip reports on a netbook makes my eyes cross. So here’s the report in retrospect.
We didn’t get away from the Chicago area until 4 PM, so our first day on the road was short and we only made it to Davenport, Iowa. Quick tip: Avoid the Davenport Clarion. It was very un-Clarion like; old, grungy, basically worn-out, with lots of broken things and pillows that felt like they were stuffed with leftover pantyhose.
To make up the foreshortened day we grit our teeth and drove for ten hours the day following, making just short of 600 miles, from Davenport to North Platte, Nebraska. It was a dull haul across some pretty country that we now know reasonably well, and we didn’t take time to do any sightseeing, with one exception. While I was gassing up the 4Runner in Stuart, Iowa, Carol saw a copper dome off in the direction of the town center, just past the inevitable grain elevator. We followed our noses to the dome and saw a remarkable thing: A large Byzantine-style stone church in the midst of a very small (population 1,700) town. (See above.)
It’s a sad story: The beautiful 1908 All Saints church was torched in 1995 by a psychopathic arsonist who said he wanted to destroy the Roman Catholic Church. (I know someone who might say, “He should have become a liturgist instead.” Religion geek joke, sorry.) The interior decoration was ruined, and, lacking the funds to restore it, the local Roman diocese gave the building to the town. Stuart did some savvy fundraising, and is close to completion on a $3.2 million restoration project that will see the building become a secular community center. Stuart itself is a grid of nice old houses with a reasonably functional downtown retail strip and a Victorian gingerbread town hall built in 1884. It’s the smallest town I’ve ever seen that I’d be willing to live in, even though it doesn’t have a museum full of bombers close by.
We spent the night at the Holiday Inn Express in North Platte, and that may well be our favorite hotel along the Springs-Chicago path that we’ve pounded so regularly for the last several years. It’s everything the Davenport Clarion wasn’t: clean, comfortable, and completely functional–plus perfectly willing to let us keep four rowdy bichons in the room with us.
Our last day on the road was gray and wet, and although we stopped at Lake McConaughy, we didn’t stay long. What we saw there was startling: The lake was about 18 feet higher than it was when we were last there, in August 2009. The water’s now higher than it’s been since 2001, and the enormous sand beaches are mostly gone…because they were just exposed lakebed to begin with. There are still beaches, of course, but they are narrower now, and have young trees protruding from the water. The seven-year drought has passed, and the lake has grown from inflows of as much as 2500 cubic feet of water per second from the Platte river.
It’s funny how QBit seemed to know he was within a few miles of his house, as he began seriously agitating from his kennel in the back seat as soon as we got off I-25 in Colorado Springs. (He didn’t make any fuss at all when we got off I-76 at Fort Morgan earlier to pick up a snack wrap.) We emptied the car and collapsed into bed. I’m thinking that we may have to make more trips there but shorter ones, and let United Airlines do the driving. The dogs kennel better than I handle Interstates, especially over 1100-mile routes crawling with 18-wheelers and oversized loads.
At this point I’m going to rest. Just rest. Everything else will gracefully wait.
Bichonicon 2010
Hard to believe it’s been a full year since the Bichon Frise National Specialty (which I call Bichonicon) but here we are, down in Indianapolis at the same hotel where, at the 2005 Nationals (also in Indianapolis), we picked up the 12-week-old QBit. QBit had no particular desire to be stuck in a crate for four days, so we handed him off (along with packmate Jack) to a cozy kennel in Wauconda until we get back. We’re showing Aero again this year, and Dash is making his first ring appearance at the nationals.
It’s a smaller show than last year for some reason, but there are still well over a hundred white dogs here, all of which (especially after show grooming) look pretty much alike. Carol spent a good part of today washing, drying, brushing, and tipping Dash (trimming loose ends, which are legion) while listening to the critique of seasoned bichon groomers like Lorrie Carlton of Belle Creek Bichons. (Above, with Carol and Dash.) Dash came out of the process looking pretty damned good, and when he hit the ring for 10-12 month Puppy Dog Sweepstakes mid-afternoon, he took fourth place in his category. That sounds so-so, but these are the nationals–and the handlers who placed first through third in the category are among the superstars in the bichon world: Lorrie Carlton, Lisa Bettis, and Paul Flores. For an amateur handler like Carol to take fourth place against competition like that was something of a coup, especially since Dash was a little tired after all the preparations and didn’t hold his head up as proudly as he usually does.
It’s now 7 PM here, and Carol is down in the grooming area brushing the recently bathed Aero, who sat out today’s events but will be competing in the Amateur Owner/Handler category tomorrow morning. Dash is sacked out in his cushy crate and I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep myself. Dog shows are a lot more aerobic than I would have expected–but then again, so were silk screening and telescope making. More tomorrow.
Odd Lots
- Pete Albrecht sent the above image, and challenged me to characterize it. What would you call it? (Answer at the end of this entry.)
- The people who created the indie WWII film The Downfall have had enough, and persuaded YouTube to pull hundreds of parodies of the well-known scene in which Hitler freaks out when he learns that the Soviets are closing in on Berlin and the war is lost. The film is in German, with English subtitles. People were swapping in their own subtitles, and whereas the first one (or maybe two) were funny in a painful way, after I watched three or four I had had enough myself. On the flipside, it was a fortune in free publicity for a film I’d never even heard of before people started sending me links to various parodies.
- Another Web site (following the example of Ars Technica) started banning people for even mentioning AdBlock on their forums. They retreated, defending their position all the way. The problem here is that ads can be malware injectors, and unless Web sites can guarantee clean ads (which isn’t easy, given how current ad systems work) I’m with the blockers here.
- Assuming that this is legit, it may be our best hope yet for fighting cancer after metastasis.
- Ditto a new broad-spectrum mechanism for knocking out viruses. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- For people who hadn’t read my earlier entries about it, Fat Dogs (see the photo of their sign in my April 19th entry) is a small chain of gas stations/convenience stores in western Nebraska. They’re so small they don’t have a Web site. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a great sign and motto. (“You Are Nowhere.”)
- Book publisher Penguin Australia published a pasta cookbook, one recipe of which calls for “finely ground black people” instead of “finely ground black pepper.” Although Penguin hasn’t copped to it yet, this reeks of an instance in which a mispelled form of “pepper” generated the suggestion “people” in the spell checker, and some underpaid knucklehead editorial staffer clicked on “accept all.” I gave that lecture to a couple of my staffers ten years ago. You’d think the publishing world at large would have internalized the danger by now.
- NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite goes live today, promising the best solar images we’ve ever obtained.
- Give up? (See first item in this entry.) It’s a…bichon frieze.
Small Town Life, With Bombers
Hey! We’re here again! Where’s here? Heh. Guess.
It was a boring trip, and when I’m driving, boring is good. It was so boring, in fact (64 degress, clear skies, no wind to speak of) that I just kept on going and did 480 miles the first day, taking us all the way through Fat Dogs country and out the other side. My driving maniac friends may grin to think of 480 as a lot of miles, but with four dogs’ worth of potty breaks (and a few for us) it got to be a drag by 6 PM. And so we stopped for the night at Grand Island, Nebraska.
Just before dawn, a front carrying rain and cold air caught up with us, and we played tag with it the rest of Day 2. Getting out in front of it was easy, and while we were out in front we stopped for most of an hour to walk the dogs and look around in Ashland, Nebraska, population 2,200. The Midwest Homebrewers and QRP Group meets there, in part because it’s about halfway between Lincoln and Omaha. That’s also the reason I wanted to take a look: Carol and I have thought of renting a small house for a month or so as a pied a terre and exploration base in interesting places like eastern Nebraska. Being less than an hour from both Lincoln and Omaha, Ashland would be almost ideal.
And it’s a great town, maybe just a hair smaller than what I consider the ideal size for human communities. Tidy older homes along streets lined with big trees, a cobbled Main Street, riverside park with walking trails, ham radio club, an aerospace museum full of classic bombers (plus an Atlas missile), broadband–what else could a man need? (And if I do need a megalopolis for some reason, Omaha is just a short trot out I-80.) Remember: Boredom is a choice.
We met my friend Darwin Piatt W9HZC for lunch in downtown Omaha at the Old Market, where I signed his copy of The Cunning Blood and we BSed about homebrewing and much else before the front caught up with us and it started to drizzle again. Then it was back on the road, where we eventually got out in front of the rain and made it to Iowa City before packing it in. Day 3 is always short, and we rolled into Crystal Lake about 3 PM.
We’ll be spiffing up the dogs for the Bichon Nationals the end of next week, but in the meantime I have a few days to gather my thoughts, take notes, visit with my sister and her girls, and maybe write a little. It’s been a long, cold, ugly winter (and let us pray that the current volcanic tantrum in Iceland doesn’t dump us into yet another Little Ice Age) so I’m greeting spring with an enthusiasm I don’t think I’ve felt for twenty years or more. For the moment, life is good, and I’m savoring it.
Hail the New Champion!
Well, I’m dog tired and don’t have a lot of time tonight (and I hurt my back packing the car for the trip home) but the short form is this: Aero nailed it. He won Winners Dog the second day of the Terry-All Kennel Club dog show outside Denver, and because one of the other male bichons entered on Saturday but not Sunday, there were only two points to be had.
However, two points were all that he needed.
So now Aero is Ch. Jimi’s Admiral Nelson. We stopped at McDonalds and bought a cup of frozen custard to celebrate, and everybody got some, though Aero the Conquering Hero got more than his packmates. Furthermore, he got to ride the whole 90 miles home in Carol’s lap, a rare privilege shared only occasionally by QBit.
Before the gang packed up and went home, we took a group photo down in the cow pens. Left to right: Carol (with Aero’s winning ribbons), Aero, Lindsay Van Keuren, her 9-month puppy Beanie, Grace Van Keuren, Mona Lisa, and Mona’s owner Mary Provost.
What’s next? Aero’s becoming a champion this weekend (which was hoped for but hardly assumed) may change our strategy at the 2010 Bichon Nationals in Indianapolis. Carol needs to consult the bichon experts a little, but one thing is certain: It’s time to get Dash into more show classes and teach him some discipline. He likes everybody, and in fact he liked the judge in the 6-12 Month Puppy Dog class so much that he put his front feet up on the judge’s chest and tried to lick his nose. He will technically be a puppy for seven more months (even though he’s already full-grown and reproductively mature) but once you’re competing in Open Dog, licking the judge won’t score you any points.
Overall, it was a fine, fine (if exhausting) weekend. And on that note, I think I’m going to take another dose of Tylenol and go to bed.
Bichon Freeze
We’re at the Terry-All Kennel Club dog show at the Adams County Fairgrounds, just outside Thornton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. And we’re back in the cattle pens, just as we were at the big Denver dog show in February. The difference, of course, is that the cattle pens at Denver’s National Western Complex are inside.
When we rolled into the fairgrounds at 8:30 this morning, the 4Runner’s thermometer read 36 degrees. We brought light jackets only (the dogs have their fur coats) which was, well, a mistake. We are working in a grubby 9′ X 12′ cattle pen with an uneven dirt-and-manure floor, rolling steel-tube doors, and gappy wooden plank walls going up a hair over seven feet. Past that there’s nothing but a freestanding tin roof another eight feet higher, complete with flocks of small birds roosting on the girders and dirty light fixtures that we (fortunately) do not need.
(The photo above was taken standing outside the red-painted barn entirely, looking in at our stall.) It was a cold, cold morning. Fortunately, we have a hair dryer, and every so often while blow-drying the no-rinse shampoo we have to use to get the day’s dirt off of the Pack, we stuck the snout of the hair dryer into our jackets for a second or two. A chill wind blowing freely through the stall didn’t help.
We now understand why Jesus was born between an ox and a ass. It was that or hypothermia.
It took until lunchtime for the sun to warm up the surroundings comfortably, and by then we were done. The guys were clean, fluffed, and expertly trimmed, and Carol took the quarter mile to the show hall carrying Jack, with me close behind, Aero and Dash each under one arm. If they had walked, they’d have been brown long before the quarter mile was over. (Anyone who has ever been to a county fair or a rodeo anywhere on the Great Plains will understand.)
Two people showing three dogs is an interesting exercise in logistics. Carol handled Aero and Dash in the first round (they being in different classes) and I handled Jack. As usual, Jack would not keep his tail up, and Aero beat him handily. Dash was no angel: We’re not quite sure how but he squirmed out of his show lead and would have leapt off the judging table had Carol not grabbed a hind leg in time. He thus narrowly avoided disqualification, and being the only entry in the 9-12 month Puppy Dog class, won his class by default.
In the subsequent Winners Dog round, Aero was up against Dash and a beautiful older male puppy, who had earlier won the 12-18 Month Puppy Dog class. Aero won the round, and thus (having beaten three male bichons) got three points. And because for male bichons three points is considered major, Aero bagged his second major win, of the two required for championship. In the Best of Breed round, Aero was up against the Winner’s Bitch and a male special (a previous champion competing for higher honors) and the special got it, afterward going on to Best of Group for Nonsporting. The special did not place in Best of Group, so at that point the bichon action was over, and we packed our stuff and toodled back to the hotel.
Aero clearly knows he’s hot stuff, and has been lording it over Jack and Dash here in the room ever since. (QBit is taking it easy for the weekend back at Sunrise Kennels, as he does not compete.) All Aero lacks now are two more points. If he wins tomorrow as he won today, he’ll go home a newly minted champion.
The tension is palpable. Tune in again tomorrow!
