An Architect's View

We got the notification this morning that the TICA board (The International Cat Association) voted to approve Jay's application to become a probationary specialty judge, the first of four tiers of judging. As those who know us well probably understand, we're very excited about this! To get to this stage you have to pass a six-month open-book exam (180 questions, mostly essay style) and complete at least 40 hands-on training sessions with other cat show judges, followed by four solo judging rings under supervision. That's at least 22 two-day cat shows and a proportion of them have to be at least 500 miles from home. Jay started her exam in May 2004 and we did a lot of traveling in 2005 for all those shows! To be eligible to take the exam in the first place, you have to have been a TICA member for at least five years and bred a number of championship level cats in multiple categories as well as exhibited cats in a certain number of shows, become a certified ring clerk, acted as entry clerk (several times), master clerk (several times) and show manager. The path from probationary specialty is: approved specialty then provisional allbreed and finally approved allbreed. Hopefully Jay will reach that point around 2010! I love my wife very much and I'm very proud of her - she's worked incredibly hard to get to this point and it's very much her dream. I'm very happy that I can support her in achieving her dream!