New England Sporting Dog Show

Well, a few weeks ago, we had one of those "weekends to remember". Every March, there is a Specialty Show in Fitchburg, MA that is only open to the AKC Sporting breeds (Setters, Retrievers, Spaniels, etc).
We had an outstanding day on Sunday...Best In Sweepstakes (puppies ages 6-18 months) was our light blue roan girl, Lacey (Ashbrook Queen Anne's Lace). Winners Dog & Best of Winners for a 5 point Major was "Rookie" (Ashbrook Put Me In Coach), my tri boy. This win finished his Championship with all Majors - FOUR of them! Lacey was Reserve Winners (runner-up) to the 5 point Major. Java (Ch. Kabree Ragtime Espresso), our cute little liver and white girl made her debut in the Veteran Class - can't believe she's 7 already! - and WON Best of Breed with an entry of 30 ECs...we went into the Sporting Group, expecting nothing, but she went on to WIN the Group, with a total of 667 Sporting Dogs entered in the whole show...holy cow!!
Java will be shown sparingly as a Veteran - she LOVES to strut her stuff in the show ring!

Mother Nature's Fury

It was a dark and stormy night...

Well, I know I haven't been keeping this blog up-to-date - shame on me; I promise I'll get better! It's been a weird winter/spring; we had kind of a disaster when the February wind storm took place. Feb 26, 2010 was a very scary night. It was my niece's birthday, and lucky her, she'd just flown out of Boston for 10 days in Disney early in the evening... sure wish I could have gone with her! They warned us that we'd have heavy winds and rain that night, but nothing could have prepared us for what was to come.

About 10:20 we lost power. Up until that point, we'd been watching tv, and could hear the wind and rain, but it didn't sound that bad, as the tv was on. Once we lost power, we decided we might as well put the dogs out one last time and go to bed. I opened the basement door to let them out into the yard, and almost had the door ripped out of my hand! SO, we told them to pee REALLY FAST, and got everyone back inside. We crated everyone up, and went upstairs. Within a few minutes, the first pine tree fell, and landed IN THE PEN where we just were with the dogs not 15 mins earlier! It hit the pen, the deck and the sliding glass doors. Petrified, we grabbed the cushions off the couch and headed to the basement ourselves. There we (didn't) slept, on the floor, listening for the next 3 hours to pines cracking, falling and landing. I've literally never been so scared in my life. The dogs? They slept thru it all! Oh, to be a dog!

The next morning, we were in total shock when we looked out into what was once our fenced in back yard. About thirty 120+' pines were all lying flat on the ground, taking out almost every inch of our 6' chain link fence! It looked like a war zone. We heard later in the day that the winds reached between 70-90 mph during that three hour time span - I believe it! I still think we had a mini tornado or hurricane come thru.

We are now in the process of having all the trees removed (big job!), and the remaining eight standing pines dropped. Most of the hardwoods survived, so we'll still have some shade back there, but it will look mighty different come Reunion time (JULY 11, 2010!)! We're trying to look at this as a good thing; we've wanted to have those pines taken down for quite some time (pine pitch is a b*tch on show coats!) but we couldn't afford it. Now, they are down, will be gone soon, and I can hopefully set up some agility equipment back there now!

The insurance company wasn't as helpful as we'd hoped (big surprise there!), but our friend Marsha Wallace (ECSCA Rescue Chairperson Extraordinaire) had taken up a collection unbeknownst to us, and we *should* be okay. Dog people are wonderful!!!

Hope all of you with Ashbrook dogs can make the Reunion this year for the "unveiling" of the "new" yard!