One full gas tank and 2 travel mugs full.

The Rio Consumnes Prison at Sunset.

To get to where the dog shows are in Elk Grove, get up at 4:30am, drive past the freshly smashed deer on Highway 17 in the dark, go over Altamont Pass where the Hells Angels killed someone during a Rolling Stones concert during hippies, go through Stockton, turn where you can barely see the sign, pass the prison, hit a bird, make sure to turn after the little horse sign, drive REALLY REALLY slow down the driveway next to the cows, and you are there at 7am! Try not to stay up amost all night the night before because you were drinking margaritas at Palomar.

The big kudos today goes to Otterpop, who won Every Single One of her Good Sized Classes, and rightfully so. She was running like her frisbee was buzzing around in front of her. She was slamming contacts like a tubby little machine. She was racking up points like a, well, like a point racker. Their gamble equivalent in CPE was sort of oddball, and gave small dogs something like 50 seconds to rack up the points in a sort of snookery way and we found 60 points. Which is a heckuva lotta points for a shortie. We did an aggressive-ish Snookers and made it. (I did a HIGHLY aggressive Snooker with Ruby and got whistled off when she back jumped the last red jump in my attempted insanity of making it work. Thanks Tim Gunn.) Flew through Standard and all her other classes. This was the Otterpop I practice with! Thanks Otterpop!

Ruby was actually awesome, but so wild that we had errors every so often and didn't do as well. Even though it's CPE. She is challenging to handle when she's so, um, crazy. But she cracks me up because she is so happy to be out there and SO FAST! She did Q in almost everything, but also hit a couple bars, had the wild Snooker, and had one of those nutso Standard runs that just made me start cracking up at the end where the last error (there were a few others) was totally her and not me, because she was so wild and so far out (thanks all my gamblers practicing!) to the side and we had a wacky comedy run that had me running to the end cackling of the hysteria of it all. After stopping dead in my tracks, just standing there, in my nice rear cross position while she was like halfway across the ring because she wanted to be doing the non existent gamble 30 feet away. HELLO it is STANDARD Ruby!

So it was actually very fun, even if Ruby didn't win all her classes too. When she is like that, it is a good problem to have. Everyone was pretty cheerful there and no griping and freaking out and complaining. It is sort of a nicer crowd there I think. Not a bad way to spend a day. In Elk Grove. Where it's so flat. And we were treated to a stunning sunset over the prison yards on our drive out. One full gas tank from home.