Happy Friday to you! It's the last day of September, and finally we're into my favorite season. Weather has been crazy rainy and windy (blew pieces of my neighbor's chimney right off her house!). Anyway, it's been a little while since I posted. I've been quite busy with some other things in real life, but I do have a new project that I've started working on. The very talented Lisa Bickford was looking for someone to create a Secretariat set for a non-hobby person. She's painting a Valor to look like Big Red, and I contacted her asking about doing the commissioned racing set. Very exciting! It's going to be displayed along with a piece of real Secretariat memorabilia. I'll be sure to post some updates along the way. I'm currently experimenting with some new methods to really capture the realism of the tack, so I hope it turns out! Photos to come soon.
I do have some other news from real life, both good and bad. The good first -- I've been competing with my dog at some local AKC shows, and we're doing quite well. We earned a Beginner Novice (BN) obedience title in July. BN is just an optional titling class, it's not the same as an official title because it was earned in a non-regular class. It is a title, but it doesn't have the same prestige, if you will, as regular titles. It's good for people who want to get their feet wet in showing. Anyway, that was quite fun so I decided to also try Rally classes. We've only been training for 7 weeks (as of yesterday), and I decided to try our hand at showing already. Last weekend, after only 6 weeks of training in Rally Novice, we competed in 2 trials. On Saturday, we earned a perfect score of 100 and 1st place out of 8. On Sunday, we earned another perfect score of 100 but 2nd place out of 10. Someone else who got 100 did it faster than Dewey and me, but I can't really be disappointed with a perfect score. Tomorrow we're going to our 3rd trial in Rally Novice, so I'm pretty confident that we'll at least qualify. I'm hoping for but not expecting 100, but a qualifying score will earn us our first regular AKC title -- RN. Yay! He'll be known as Newsflash Let's Make a Deal BN RN.
As for the bad news, I just found out on Tuesday that my parents' house is being foreclosed on. I guess that makes us another statistic in the wonderful state of IL. My dad has apparently known it was going to happen for at least a couple months, but didn't bother sharing it with my mom or me. Yet another aspect of our lives he's been able to muck up in the last few years. Ugh! Luckily for us, we do have a place to go -- my house! Half-hearted yay. My mom is quite stressed out over the whole situation which I can understand, but I'm oddly at peace with it. Even though my house is still a construction zone from the remodeling, having this looming deadline is a little more motivation to get things done faster. My house is like 1/3 the size of their house, but at least they don't have to seek out a real landlord with all the stipulations that'd go with it. I had been excited at the prospect of living at my house alone, but if I can help my family out like they've helped me over the years, then I'm glad to do it as much as I'm not looking forwards to living with them in such close quarters. Oh well. I think my biggest worry is the fact that they're messy people -- they can come over but their clutter cannot! We'll see. I don't think they're going to appreciate abiding by the rules of their child -- mom might be, dad + rules = don't mix. It's nice to have a place to share this with people who don't know me!
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