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.