I thought I was breaking my promise to work on the premium for the June AKC trials this morning, so that I could deal with the event applications for the August CATs in Kalamazoo. But, the site is incorrect on the new template events for those, so I want that fixed before investing the time to reenter information on those ten events. Thus, as promised, let’s see what needs to be done to make last year’s premium look like this year’s for those AKC tests and trials in Armada.
Directions, hotels, camping, veterinary information still looks ok, so the first step is changing out the dates, event numbers, and secretary information on the other side of the first page. Page two needs updates on the club officers, committee member names, and, of course, judges. It’s back to the AKC web site to get the judges’ addresses from their judges directory.
Pages three, four, and five contain quite a bit of exposition to assist newcomers that I think Amy created for a RRRRCoM premium some number of years ago. I carried it over to the MGA premiums once MGA started doing AKC trials again. It’s been tweaked now and again, but the important thing to check is that all of the points in the premium agree on when the tests will be run and those passages appear on pages two and five.
The course plans appear on page three. I’ve only got two plans that I like for the Armada field with the light poles, and I’m not going to invest any time in trying to come up with a new one this year. This is now the first event of the year for the club, and it could still get swept up in current events. A year later, the field could be further “improved” and that course plan would be moot—just effort never used. The two plans that I do have run well, are about as convenient for the exhibtors as possible, and make good use of the field.
Page five has the Qualified Courser Certificate. As this is the first AKC lure coursing premium that I’ve drafted this year, I need to go see if the AKC has modified the form. How the AKC organizes the forms on their downloadable forms page can be a bit perplexing. A search on the page for “Qual” discovers in lumped in with “Other Helpful Performance Forms”. The form number in the lower left matches that already in the premium, so no need to change.
Page six is the two entry forms, one for each day. In my Word docoument, these are actually images, so the earlier find and replace operations on dates and event numbers had no effect. No surprise that most of my mistakes happen here, as the source material is a PDF for each day, and its easy to rush through and miss changing the year in the event number. My awkward method is to then capture the PDF as an image, crop it tight, and insert into the premium.
I can now convert the Word premium to a PDF premium and attach the two special items for this particular event. The first is the camping registration form, which doesn’t include any date information, so requires no edits this year. The second is a flyer for the potluck on Saturday. Would be nice to sit with folks and visit. Hope that happens.
And with that done, I check the notes on my planning sheet abnd realize that I failed to mention the Jessie Reynolds trophy. I think I will add a note about that on page four under the “Notes for the Day” heading. A bit of gymnastics to slip that modified page into the PDF premium, and now it’s ready for review by the FTS and FTC.