You asked for boring, here it is, but with peppy beach photos.

OK. You're out there. We all just have the winter blahs. Tight pants and scowly faces and freaking out over money. Maybe if Barack wore a funny hat next time he gives a speech on tv? Or gets a border collie? And hires Heather from Elite Forces of Fuzzy Destruction to train it and bring it back and forth from her house to the White House on Airforce 1. And she'll take pictures and we'll all be super entertained and agility explodes and is no longer a fringe sport of the weird dog training ladies! Because then we will all have Blackberries!


So since you're ok with boring, at least those Norwegiens among you from the Midwest, here's some nice boring for you. Boring but I included beach photos from after work yesterday.

Old news that is new again:

Ruby is lame. Poor Ruby, Hinky Dog of Hinky Town. I have no idea what is wrong with her. She's been pretty darn sound for, like a year? You guys remember? There was that time I tried to run her after her getting kicked by the deer. Oops. Danger prone Daphne.

She looks sound at the trot and canter (I forget what we call this in dog language) but when she canters down to a jump (in dog language, hauls ass down to the jump), she looks all hinky (we say this in horse language too) and then flings herself over from even longer (horses are not ever allowed to fling, saints preserve us, give me more gray hairs) than she normally would with her unorthodox, bar hitting jump style (hang a leg and knock a rail in horse language). And there were a couple times when she was just running around the last couple days when all of a sudden she screeches out a random yelpie sound (would be seriously disturbing if a hinky horse ever made a random yelpie sound).

The good dog owners would have her in the chiro and the vet and the massage therapist and the xrays and the ultrasound and swim therapy. Hi! Team Small Dog here! We just put the hinky one in a crate for a while with a bone and if it stays hinky for too long then jack her up on the Metacam again, and no running for you, missy. We've been down this road before.

She was only entered in a couple things this weekend when we are at beautiful...Turlock! for the dog show. Hi Turlock friends! Turlock, where you will see cows and hear the train and the freeway and did I mention some cows? Come visit Ruby in my car, which is always parked super far from the ring and most of the dog show you see me running back and forth out to the car swapping black dogs in and out. Got herself a free pass out of another agility trial.

New News for the First Time:

Our Gustavo is going to run Standard for the Very First Time! With super weave poles and outstanding contacts JUST LIKE YOU PRACTICED TODAY GOO! Went allcaps on you for a minute just in case he can hear that. Boy o boy did he have a good practice. All speedy and focused. So maybe this is totally weirdo, but I brought a crate out on the field and reverted to the Space Pod game.

You remember that?

I sort of invented it yet actually, no, I stole it from Susan Garrett when he was but a pup.

This is a weak version of crate games where you use a crate as mission control center and send the dog from far off places across the field into the crate, and then release them out of it into a sequence. Also a super funny party trick. This was a huge element of his foundation, Space Pod Foundation. This is what happens when you teach a dog yourself and you get bored easily. I am pretty sure Moe Strenfel does not feature this on her dvd yet I could be wrong. It makes them go really fast though! Since he's been having to sit in a crate for less insane barking during practice, I thought why not make the crate fun again like when he was a teensy, shrieky, out of control little monster. I dunno. Still works good as a blast off station, and makes him happier and quieter in his crate when he thinks it is a piece of agility equipment.

And this is helping us prepare for the trial how?

And anyways. Well, was just trying to think of some news and that's how we practiced yesterday.

Unpleasant, Crabby News:

Otterpop, gets a try Sunday at Masters Gamblers for one of those pesky last Q's that stands between her and her ADCh. She's been extra unpleasant lately. Doesn't bode well for being a cheerful, well mannered lover of judges running near her this weekend. Send happy unicorn thoughts to Otterpop this week and bring her out of her funk. Like where unicorns stab you in the eye and leave you for dead in the desert covered with tar. For some reason she was been all rainbow brite ears for a while, and really is just back to her Bright Eyes Loving Emo unpleasant crabapple.

Don't bother saying hi to her at Turlock.

She's just send you the stink eye and think super mean things about how your pants fit.

When you can't quite see across the sky.

Hardly ever do I leave the dogs home when I go to work, but yesterday was a day I did.

When I got home, together we all walked down to West Cliff, the narrow, cement path that hangs above the sea and separates you from the water with only a thin rail above the cliff.

Looking across the bay, it became apparent that the I am in global warming, the smog filling the sky lit a wrong kind of orange, from the sun about to drop down, in the same spot as it does every night.

No matter what you do, never going to get it to come back up there.

Quickly I realized, this is the future I see. The air shows poison today like how we'll see it every night when the future starts.

The sea below was rolling and boiling, the tide high on a big surf night and you can feel the spray stinging skin. A sting you can live with, not always so bad to know what a sting feels like.

Lots of people walking, and the path was crowded and everyone together watching and wondering what was wrong with the color of the ocean and the sky, bleached out sort of toxic, like the chemo drained the right colors out and put in the bad ones.

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When we got to the beach, I was surprised that there was still a small patch left bare by the rising tide and we joined the tourists and locals on the steps to make our way down, closer to the thick, hard sea.

Past a girl in a faded, shrunk pink top, with the saddest prison tats scaling her arm I've ever seen. Both her and her black and gray work had a dour look and I brushed her tattoos on the crowded stairs.

A naked old fat guy in shades was sitting behind a rock where the beach makes a turn, twaddling his twiddly bits in the sand but we just marched by and found this little patch where the tide was still staying away.

Everywhere you look, scattered amber turnips I call sticks but are really seaweed bulbs ripped loose by the current.

Diseased, thick air, waves slamming loud, and we still had a few minutes before dark where everyone could run, a dead, fast run, through the mist after sticks. For a second, I looked the cholo guy with a black striped shirt and the knee socks with his boxer puppy, right in the eye, and we smiled at each other, then turned back to make sure the rising tide didn't swallow our dogs.

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In the dim, walking home across the field, a drop line of ground fog hugged the weeds and stumps and obscured a scurrying few out there.

The signs, where decals stuck for a while, and now just show the stick guy walking his stick dog on a stick leash, freshly marked up with black marker tags that I couldn't really read.

We headed out through the bushes, out of sight, and when I felt how hot the air was, for a January night in the north, I realized that this is just how things are now.

Something is different, and we are learning how to do things over again.

Happy [Letter prior to C yet after A] irthday Gary.

Happy Irthday Gary.


He likes dogs too.


They like him too. Otterpop will howl for you as soon as we start singing the Irthday Song, during which we can actually use missing letter. What a relief.

In this episode, we learn how to type using 25 letters of the alpha-something.

I can't tell you where I took these photos. Not porque it is some kind of important secret, rather porque last night I spilled a cerveza on my computer and the letter located after A and prior to C, if you were singing a song that used those 3 letters, doesn't work anymore. You speak some Spanish, right? So I can still use my computer and type stuff, unless it uses that one certain letter. That's why I have to say cerveza. The real thing I spilled starts with that letter. It's also hard to make a space. I am pounding that spacing key very, very diligently here.


This secret place is known for sand and water and wind and sun. I go there a lot. Dogs run there. They might chase flying animals with feathers. It's a nice place to enjoy a cool drink made from hops and grains and stuff like that.


Oh yeah. And the little key that has an clover and an apple on it doesn't work. You don't have this if you have a pc.


So who knows how to fix malt liquid soaked computer keys? I am pretty sure I am going to need that letter soon.

It is how you have a nice evening at the beach with dogs.

Last night I had the small dogs down on the beach, doing the usual thing of frantically attacking each other over a stick. It's just what they love to do. Sometimes people have commented to me that it looks like they are having a fight while they are running, but I think it's mostly herding behaviors from Otterpop as if the other small dogs are giant cattle needing to be moved somewhere which is away from a stick, and also they all just really want the stick BAD. Even Gustavo has learned that the stick is incredibly important to get to first and it's every small dog for himself and it's pretty funny to watch is what I think. They just play rough. I dunno. It gets them really tired I guess. Maybe I let tiny dogs do things that might freak me out if they weighed something closer to what giant cattle weigh.

So in the era of State Park Rangers, my trips to the beach and the field are usually pretty solo these days. I frequently have a whole beach to myself in the eveining, sometimes a couple other dogs, sometimes some drunk guys or some tourists from India. Sometimes I take a tourist picture for them with small dogs attacking a stick in front of the scenic sea as their background. Last night there were a couple people down there with pitbulls, so a small herd of small dogs at one end, and a small herd of pitbulls at the other.

Some of the pitbulls I knew, have known them for years. Good dogs, with a foxy girl owner who runs up and down the beach with them. Very sweet and well behaved dogs that like a tennis ball for some good fun. The other ones, never seen before but didn't give me any cause to think Maybe Leave the Beach Now, which is something I have done a lot, because when your dogs weigh like 14lbs, and other dogs down there start attacking things and obviously have no clue about the word Come or have an owner that obviously isn't ever going to use that word, you just pack up and move on somewhere else.

So I am down at the far end of the beach, throwing that stick, when I look up and at the other end, 2 pitbulls attached to each other and 2 owners holding pitbull legs like wheelbarrows, standing there and pulling and pitbulls just attached like glue, mouth to head. For a long time. My one thought was, they probably need some help because there are 2 other pitbulls just hanging out and those things are not coming off each other's heads, but my other thought was, I am not bringing my tiny dogs anywhere near where there are already pitbulls attached to each other like that.

In the end, one of them had a bloody but not ripped off ear. Still attached. Never saw the other one because the owner got it off the beach. The foxy girl, she just started running down the beach again with her tennis ball, and the old fetching pitbull just trotted after her for a while, bloody ear somehow still stuck on his head.

We are having an accessory crisis here.

What is the best thing to do if it's a Sunday and there is no dog show and your taxes need to get DONE like last Friday?

Go out to breakfast!

We went up to Davenport. It's a teensy town of population 200 about 10 minutes up the coast with 2 places to eat, and a beach that not a lot of people go to, usually just some drunk guys and marine biologist types, and where dogs aren't criminals.

We can't take Timmy anymore. Blind, demented, waves and high cliffs don't mix. We had to wait until he was asleep (easy) and sneak out of the house. Poor Timmy.


At low tide, there's even a cave. It was high tide at breakfast time. It's the time change. I have no idea what time it was. It actually may have been the afternoon. I forget what the difference is of new time and real time. I was hungry though.


The beach is a good place for dog games because the sticks are plentiful, and aka Seaweed. They are Otterpop's favorite size. The biggest size.


It is even like dog training to go to the beach. They are on a down stay so I can extract the stick from the jaws that are Otterpop and throw it again. No beach would be the biggest problem of Marfa.

Is it due to the sunshine?

OK. I know I was all cranky and not a good Sunshine Lady yesterday. But then I left for work, and the sun was out, and it was a day I had time to go practice with the dogs on the way to the barn, and time to go to the beach on the way home from work. And it was hot and I wore a t-shirt all day at work and no parka and no horses were bad and I had time to eat lunch. Nothing was irritating. Sorry. If you like the ranting. Actually, I was probably still curmudgeonly and mean part of the time. But today's story shall focus on the daisies and the rainbows.

The dogs were like phenomenal. Am I making you crazy yet? Ruby is back to the old Ruby which is actually a super fast, pain in the ass speed demon. We missed this Ruby! She was happy to do a little agility in her crazy freaky out of control mode that I love and run like a maniac with the other dogs on the beach. So what's been wrong with her, I dunno. I hope this Ruby is here to stay.

Otterpop practiced super fast and hit her contacts and weirdo pole entrances and attacked the frisbee like frisbee death. I encourage bad and evil behavior when they are doing agility and it makes them CRAZY. Small fast and kick yer ass. I think in dog training language Training in Drive. Training in insaneness of speed and attacking of frisbees and fast weave poles!

OK. Get ready to barf from the barfiness of the joy of it all. Gustavo. Gustavo I take it back everything I said because today you were a sharp knife, the super sharpest one that Dexter uses for serial killing! I might be a spoon but you are turning into a knife! A speedy knife who at this very moment is eating a cardboard box but anyways. We had a lot of knife moments.

He's still just running down the top of the dogwalk. But as fast as I can rev him which is Fast! And hitting his 2o/2o target position smashing wow!

My a-frame technique I am using is called the "Haul Ass Super Fast and Click for Running all 4 Paws Down to the Bottom Method." Perhaps you read about it in Clean Run. I throw treats in a bag so he is learning to not look at me on the click and out to his treats in a bag. He is getting it and so far he hits the bottom every time. The a-frame is way low. The buzz around these parts is all about Rachel Sander's running a-frame box technique but I am going to try to just take this one slow and see if I can teach a consistent hit at the bottom by clicking and running out to tasty snacks in a leopard print bag. He is tiny! Sorry Rachel Sanders!


His teeter method we are using is the similar "Haul Ass and Slide into a Down." It's just all about haul ass with him. And have a piece of cheese on the way down. I am trying to channel Silvia Trkman. I may never be anywhere near as adorable or good. OK. Not even close. But I am just channeling. And not eating so many donuts. So far so good.

Then they had to sit at work all day, on the deck and sleep in a chair. Life is hard. I actually have to work and they are lounging.


And for all my bitching, I can still stop down at Seascape beach on the way home, there's just enough sliver of daylight if I get done a little early (sorry horses and people that I run away from work do not say goodbye to you) that they can get in a quick run before driving home.

But hey! Global warming is still getting worse! Our city is planning for the day when there is No Water!

And Hilary's and Barack's health care plans don't sound very thorough!

And Patty Hearst now has dog show confirmation dogs for a hobby! Beloved Tania!

Opposite of meth people but just as bad.

That house from Sunlit Lane is back on the market! This was the one we thought about buying back in September 2006-I think there are some posts in this blog from then. It had the neighbor mayhem going on because of the horses and the no permits and we basically ran screaming from it. It's back on the market at $150,000 less-only $649,000, which is exactly our price range! Except that we have already run screaming from it once and don't need to do it again. Frantic and determined neighbors that speak of horses with this sort of meth addled look in their eye (except they are the opposite of meth people, they are baby owners, hemp wearers, volvo drivers) and the Flies, the Dirt, the Smells are not good neighbors. And they were everywhere. They surrounded us the second time we went out to that property. Like literally, we drove away in our own Volvo (ok, Gary's) fast.

There are no longer horses on it. It was an adorable spot-not exactly a ranch. Only 2.4 acres, with a 1 bedroom house. Small! But the house, (ok, unpermitted cabin with nice decks) was perfect and the property layout (ok, flattish 2 acres of poorly graded eroding dirt), with exception of proximity of the crystal wearing stockbrokers or whatever they were, made it frightening. You could walk right out to Fall Creek Park and trail ride amongst steep redwoody trails though. Likely full of serial killers. And, from my current barn, would be about an hour and 15 minute commute in good traffic. Let's say hour and a half plus in bad. I think that one was the rebound property from the Perfect Ranch of July 2006 in which the cocksuckers outbid us by the $200,000.

Um. Why don't we just move out of Santa Cruz? Would be hard to do in such a perfect June.

Ran the dogs yesterday morning in Watsonville. The other half of my life. Half beach, half ranch. Love having the agility field right there near the barn. Dogs were actually fantastic- fast and perfect contacts. Speedy weave poles. Only one dropped bar. Did a scientific experiment with Otterpop. Have been not taking her frisbee anywhere, it is a Special thing to Play with at Agility, hence making agility always fast because Frisbee is there? Yep. Super incredibly fast if it is in my pocket. Even trying to sneakily hide it as if it is still in the pocket or leaving it sitting with Ruby for convenient retrieval at the end of a course is not good enough. If I have that stupid, dirty piece of orange cloth, Otterpop is a speed demon. Frisbee anywhere else, she runs faithfully and cleanly around the course but not fast enough to Win. She is like an addict. I can't believe so many brain cells in my head have to think about dog frisbees. With an ugly cartoon squirrel drawn on it. Like, this is something Al Swearengen would never, ever approve of. Ever.