I swear I am trying to fix the RSS feed.

Hmm. Look what some hoodlum did to all those New State Parks Signs about the leashes.


These are just gratuitous photos. Maybe my mom would like them.


She knows I have a blog. She calls it a Blah-dge. Like rhymes with Lodge. She looked at it once and saw a picture of a dog! It was on the internet! I always thought she would like to see more photos but it's hard to be the child that does not provide actual grandkids but just has a mess of dogs.


But also I took them because I got home from work and Colorado dog agility lady who also loves the Clash, Elayne, put up a picture of herself and her dogs wearing almost exactly what I wore to work yesterday. She said hers was a Crazy Dog Lady Outfit. Mine is just regular work clothes. I may have a horribly wrong sense of what is Regular.


Also, if you know about RSS Feeds and Blogger, I would love any kind of help you could offer me. I do want to have a working RSS Feed but it is woefully beyond my skill level. Thank you so much to the Agility Nerd who has been trying to help me too!

Usually you need a headlamp and a jumpsuit for this.

How does this team ever provide good customer service? Do you see a problem here?

The way you get underneath our house is through little vents. Most nice people keep their little vents carefully screened up so that animals don't get under there. The kinds of nice people who do maintanence on their house and garden. The kinds of homeowners with crap piled up in their driveways and unsightly, trashy piles of boards and tarps and paint cans outside the back door and recycling piles everywhere and messy yards with weeds, they don't always have covers. That would be me. We've cultured a very ghetto look to our house over the last year or so. So I figure, well, the cat, it can go under the house. Get any mice out. Have a nice dry spot for the rain.

Twelve Pound Dogs fit too. Scrawny, little animals, smaller than cats. We got one dog here fits that descrip. Yep, and that's where Gustavo likes to hang out now. Under the house. I guess he isn't exactly hanging out there, though. That would be too understated. I believe actually either frolicking or hunting. Not sure who else is under there with him, because he slips through the tiny little cat size vent and runs around and barks. You can hear him from here, in the house. Under your feet somewhere, with his weird little Mexican Pet bark. Running. The barking sounds are over here and now over there. Why, I hear him now. Down where it's moldy and dark and damp and spiders and cable guy stuff. Running and barking that funny non dog bark. This is who I am trying to teach weave poles to?

Fireworks season begins!

Tonight is going to be a Super Fun Night in Santa Cruz. Because it marks the beginning of fireworks season! Fireworks season runs from mid-June thru mid July. It peaks at Fourth of July, that is the night all the neighbors buy their internet illegal fireworks, just like the Pro's Use, and set them off all day and night. Tonight it starts with the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk's (a website designed by me, back in the day) 100 year anniversary fireworks night. Which gets everyone all going, and revved up for fireworks season.

The reason I know about this special season, so precious to our beautiful beach neighborhood is Ruby has horrible fireworks or gunshots (both things you hear on our street sometimes) phobia. Worse than her phobia of flies or things that feel funny to her feet. Or her phobia of water bowls she has not met in a previous life. Flies is a close second. But fireworks is the worse. At the first sound of one, far away in the distance, she starts to shake and quiver and trot around the house trying to get under things. On a bad fireworks night, like when the Fireworks Fiesta starts on the street behind us and sounds like loud booming cannons for hours and hours, and would actually be cool to watch if the dog didn't have the sound problem, it gets really bad. Like she shakes violently, wedges herself under the lowest piece of furniture she can find and shakes uncontrollably til the noise stops. Usually I put the stereo on as loud as possible so it shakes the house and that's all she can hear and that helps, but I have to be home and know when to predict the fireworks, which is hard if they are unscheduled in the neighborhood. And they are Big in the neighborhood.