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.

Walk around the neighborhood with the Team.

So there's these 2 guys on my street that are new additions to the cast of characters of my own little entertainment show that I call "Stuff That I See on My Street." I lead a pretty boring life. Some of these other characters include The Really Old Chinese Man That Gives Me The Stink Eye All The Time Except for When He Lets Out A Groundshaking Belly Laugh and He Has No Teeth. And of course, The Family With 3 Little Girls Who Wear Princess Uniforms Exclusively And Jump Off Their Fence Into The Street. The Small Boys With the Weapons. Crackhead Professional Surfer and His Skinny Skateboard Pal. Nervous Looking Yuppie Neighbor of Crackhead Surfer. Deranged Mountain Man That Climbs the Highest Palm Tree With a Machete. And there are so many more.

So these 2 new guys, maybe a little shifty. But probably just in a stealing aluminum cans from recycling bins way. Not going to be too worried about them. But they are just sort of endearing in their shiftiness, in a weird MTV sitcom kind of way, and even have their own dog sidekick too. We'll call their dog sidekick Buster. Maybe the guys have made up names for my dogs? Or maybe this is just something I do to pass the time.

Guy Number One is super tall. He's younger than Guy Number Two. Sort of a little gangstah, backwards cap and sometimes sporting the Blacks. If you dress all in black or all in blue, apparently you are sporting colors and it is kind of best to wear coordinates and not be all matchy matchy when outfit selecting in my neighborhood. If you are me, you are probably ok with all black though. Being a 40ish dog agility lady doesn't get me confused with being a gang member too often so I will frequently wear the all black (slimming!) and be matchy matchy with all my dogs. Like me, Guy Number One, he's sort of older than most colors wearers. He has Buster with him usually, who I believe is a relative of pitbull Teddy, from back in the day of our street of the fun pitbull breeding program 8 houses down. That didn't go over so well and we spent about a year never walking down that part of our block. It ended up with a couple kids in jail and the pitbulls vanished, with the parents off to Texas I heard. A couple with a baby and a couple dogs and Obama bumperstickers on their Subaru moved into their house and replaced the windows and pulled the weeds.

Sometimes Guy Number One also wears a garbage man style jumpsuit. Which is a little weird considering his other more stylish outfits, but that seems to go with the aluminum picking job so is more functional office wear for him. We are pretty sure he is not really a garbage man though, because he is more of a stroller and garbage men are not really known to just be strolling around the neighborhood at random times of day, selecting specific items out of garbage carts.

Guy Number Two is really old. He sort of shuffles down the street, and Guy Number One, when they're together, just walks slow with him. Sometimes they're together, sometimes I just see Guy Number One. Like maybe Guy Number One sometimes takes Guy Number Two out for a walk like I take Timmy? And brings Buster along too, so everyone is getting a little fresh air and exercise on the block. Although sort of a different kind of walk than with me and Timmy or the small dogs because Buster seems not so well behaved and subscribes to Leash My Ass even when walking in the street and goes bouncing off after a cat while the Guys stop and open up some trash cans and look in. Or Guy Number One, sometimes who carries either a coffee or a brown bag beverage, stops and hangs out by a recycling bin. He kind of takes a long look down the street, like to see who all is watching this. I wave. He waves back. He just hangs out there while I'm walking by, sipping his beverage, ignoring his pitbull who has gone after another cat, and enjoys the day.

I know. You're like, OK, where's the punch line or the exciting part where I chase his pitbull down the street with a board or start yelling at the Guys about something? But I guess that was the kind of day it was. I did help take home a lost dog, and during the wacky volkswagen starting debacle with the drunk guys I rescued the surfboard bag out of the street before the Lady That Moved Into the Cryogenic Guy's House ran over it while the Deranged Mountain Man and his new sidekick Another Deranged Mountain Man cackled over their Coors Lites. And the Guy That is Always Chopping Wood in His Straw Hat chatted with me about the weather for a minute and the Evil Robot Mailman ignored me and it was just another walk on my block.

It is easy to just pretend Courtney Love is Laura.

In Marfa, you should have your dogs on a leash only if you are visiting the Marfa Prada. It is on a highway. It is some Art. Even though I believe it may not be on a busy highway, if any of your dogs tend to chase trucks, you might as well leash 'em up there. But everywhere else, I believe it's ok to just let 'em run.

This is what I look like most every morning when I walk around the block. Today it involved the Timmy shuffle backwards and forwards, Ruby sort of 3 legging it, Otterpop REALLY disgruntled about going slow, and Gustavo howling and flying at cats and squirrels. Because you know on a day like this, you will see EVERY cat and EVERY squirrel. And, just when you think it can't get a lot worse than that, a lady with a reactive dog walks up to us. Otterpop, who usually is not reactive to other dogs or leashes, starts to react to her already melting down dog. The lady stops. Right in front of us. Wearing a flowery sun hat with a string around her chin to wedge it tightly on her head. And says, "Oh, is one of your dogs like that TOO?"

I have this insane clown posse of a pack either shuffling, 3 legging it, howling and flinging, or growling and pulling. And hers is lunging towards my whole mess.

I sort of look at her, thinking, well, she is a smart lady no doubt. Just move along, smart lady from around the corner with your own dog problems to take care of. Kind of a no brainer. Bad dog lunging=move away smart lady with your ugly ass hat.

But no. She inches closer. I believe to chat about our dogs. I back up. This is just too much of a circus to have some kind of weird leashy dog fight start. Otterpop has a rockin' Leave It and she does that and comes in to her close position. The lady is staring at me, wanting to chat about bad dogs I guess. I just need to keep this rolling party of freaks moving. I have eye contact of love with Otterpop so she stares at me and not at the bad dog that is calling her out and throwing out some Them is Fighting Words.

Likely, Otterpop is bodyguarding Timmy, a new development we got with Timmy's descent into the decrepit. In a sweetly endearing, yet frightening and pack-like way, Otterpop protects Timmy against all evil these days. If I take Timmy somewhere, I take Otterpop. We had a couple of bad Timmy days this week, horrible panic attacks where something unknown scared the pants off of him and he was literally climbing the walls until I could jam tranquilizers down his gullet and corral him in a padded cell until he jonesed his way down. Otterpop stayed by his side the whole time, his calm in the storm, just me and her waiting it out with him when he didn't know us from the furniture he was bashing into.

Hat lady with the dog finally assumes I am a mute freak with my freak show of black dogs and makes her way down the street, away from me, tugging her own lunging bad dog along behind her.

Will you send me cookies when I end up in prison?

Yesterday, we took the 3 fast dogs hiking through the meadows and the redwood forest for a couple hours. There's a creek that Gustavo swims in and Ruby tries not to fall in. Good and tired dogs after they run for 2 hours straight on the steep trail through the woods. Santa Cruz has miles and miles of the most beautiful land I've ever seen. It was in the '80's this weekend and it was a nice place to go on a hot day, and in the middle of the day so we didn't have to worry about taking 3 single servings of bobcat snack out during coyote witching hour at dusk.

We went to a spot where it's ok to ride horses and mountain bikes. Because those are super low impact to the environment. But not ok to take dogs. Which are super high impact to the environment. My dogs could easily scare a bunny. Probably even cause global warming, Al Gore. Well, we take 'em anyways. Never see anyone in there but a handful of bikers with lots of tattoos and special bike crash padding because they are gnarly. We have to leave our car on the university campus to get there, because it's illegal to park on any roads around there. And it's also illegal to have dogs on the campus. So have to walk 'em down the hill to where the trail starts, right by a large sign at the entrance to the campus clearly spelling out N-O D-O-G-S. I made very, very sure to drive the speed limit and wear my seatbelt to get there though.

I swear I'm not trying to be a criminal. But I live in one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I just like to walk around on the land that is 5 minutes from my house and run my dogs. That's it. Are dogs a gateway drug? Is the next step embezzeling the elderly and cooking up meth in my garage? Then I start trafficking in sex slaves and stealing copper pipes off construction sites? Do you see the trouble I get in just from staying home from one single dog show?

Hey, not to change the subject, but to change the subject I made a quiz. Called the Which Member of Team Small Dog are You? Quiz. You have to go to here to take it. Come back and tell me if you ended up the Team Member you thought you would be.

Can I drop them off at Curves?

Because we are really, really religious. A happy Hanukah to our Jewish friends!

See, the real dog people, they have things like the dog treadmills or they make sure their dogs get at least 2 hours of hard running in mountains daily with one all day mountain hike per week. They have training journals with copious notes.

I feel like most of the time, I am all about exercise. Who wants a fat ass? Or chubby dog? Everyone gets a walk twice a day. Timmy's walk, very creepingly slow. The small dogs are supposed to have a hard run twice a day. For conditioning and my sanity of 3 fast small dogs bouncing off the walls in my tiny house. But a lot of days, I get home from the barn (where the small dogs sat in a pen all day) and it is dark and 7o'clock and freezing and I am lazy and starving and there is no place to run em in the pitch black. So I need to leash em up and walk fast, albeit on the beautiful West Cliff Drive ocean path, for 3ish miles. Fast brisk exercise walking. Makes us all skinny and healthy and did I mention the skinny.

So some days, not so much. Twice a week, we go to a genuine agility field and practice mad skillz. Gustavo learns his teeter and I set up drills for the good dogs. But man, we have to be in SHAPE, man. And that means the jogging or fast walking for miles and it is a hard thing to do on a cold night. In the pitch black, near the cliffs, past the meth dealers and thinking thoughts like, what if a small dog tumbled to their horrible death in the pounding sea? All dark and brooding and Captain Ahab.

In the mornings, we have multiple walks including the barely shuffling for one block for Timmy and fast for some kind of far distance, ideally on a long beach, for the rest of the team. I am like the freaky dog nazi in the park (this is illegal now, walking around in the park) of not hanging out to chit chat about things dog with other walkers but storming robotron fast all around it while my dogs dash around it, either running on top of homeless campers or frolicking or carrying large tree branches in their mean little Otterpop mouths. Making comments like, when the cell phone talking, sharpei walking lady, explains of her dog, who lay crouched and tensed before springing and launching itself badly but not using teeth, "She likes to do that!" for a moment with her cell phone talker still on the other end, my comment like "watch-your-dog" from my mean dog nazi all slitty eye glareful at her lameness. I was not volatile, since I didn't have Timmy with me and the rest of them can fend for themselves, within reason. Smallish sharpei, mean or not, within reason.

I digress. Yeah, so basically, I didn't walk the dogs last night. Can I use a Jewish holiday as an excuse when I'm actually Catholic, pretty much? Our whole celebration was to light some candles, and not use the oven so as no more smoke filled house, and just go about the evening. Will I want to kick myself in 2 weeks when we're at the big dog show in Santa Rosa and we all feel sluggo and unconditioned? Where's the damn See's candy? Do you see some of the reasons I am not voted America's Next Top Agility Handler? Is it blaspheme to mix a Jewish religious holiday with tales of dog conditioning? I leave you with those things to ponder.