It's just been such an exciting week.

So the big KaBoom of a dog show, USDAA Nationals finished yesterday. Luka, who we used to desperately try to win against until Ruby moved down to Performance, won both the Steeplechase and Grand Prix, which is never done and he wins buckets of money too. His times were just crazy fast. I can't wait til Luka moves down to Performance one day so we can never win in the 12" again.

Raymond ended up 5th in the Grand Prix with Tater. He sent me an email. Poor Raymond, the stats were all slow to come in and confusing and he didn't realize he had made it into the finals. So it is the big fancy finals at night, everyone drunk in the stands, like a crowd that would be there for a big, drunk, 49'ers game. Except different because they all thought they should be out there in the Finals too. Potential for meaner drunks, except they are all nice dog agility people and likely, not mean drunks. Not wearing weird face paint etc. too is how I imagine it but then, I don't know. Anyways, Raymond had gone out to dinner, the dogs were in the car, he is sort of hanging out down there and someone yells at him, "How does the course Look?" and he is like, "I dunno?"

And someone else is like, "HELLO Raymond you are running FIRST in the Grand Prix!" They are already done walking the course (you get about 10 minutes to walk the course in dog agility so you can figure out just where the hell the best place to move is to get your dog over and through everything in the right order without screwing up) and he runs out there and gets a quickie walkthru and Mardee runs to the car to get poor Tater who is sound asleep thinking his day is all over with. Tater is such a good dog. He is just this little fluffy pomeranian that does not look like he would ever kick ass out there and he does. I think he is going to be an honorary member of Team Small Dog. I need to find Raymond a shirt.

And then just like that, he's in the ring, there were a couple bobbles and Raymond's hardest thing is learning courses and he did it and came in 5th place in the whole darn thing. Maybe not as glamorous as Luka's double win, but for Raymond and Tater, HUGE! This gives us regular folks huge hope of having our 30 seconds (I think Luka's time was 31 seconds, Taters 58 or something like that) in the spotlight of a world championship event!

Hey Gustavo, would that be you? He just climbed up on the cat food thing and knocked over a cat water bowl. Do world championship style dogs do that?

Hobbes didn't do bad, he didn't do great, he did ok. I still love Hobbes just the same. I just like dogs.

Last night we played this thing called Wii which is like a video game except you project it on the wall and you hold remote controls that look like little phones and push the buttons on them and your video game character does things like bowling. In video game land, I am a great bowler. I do not know if I am a great bowler in real life because I think I've only done genuine in life bowling a couple times and sort of feel like I was rolling the ball into the gutters. So likely, not so much.

But wouldn't this be cool, you would all love it, if you had the wii and could run in the World Championship Grand Prix of Dog Agilty with your own dog you make by picking out eyebrows and marshmallow shaped heads and beanies except it's dogs and you could pick jack russel fur and border collie legs and sheltie spins and whatever you wanted to make your dog of your dreams. And then you go out and run it over the course and you are just really waving around a little remote control in the air in Karl's living room instead? And your other hand can hold a glass of wine! And the dogs can just lay around and watch or just sleep. I think it's a hit!