Last night, we had dinner over at our friends' house. They are good friends, their world is dogless by choice, but they have things like handmade cloth napkins. Unscratched up wood floors. Furniture not covered up with polar fleece blankets. No nose prints on windows. Easy to walk on floorplan unlittered with stuffed squirrel carcasses and contraband sticks snuck in from the yard.
Naturally, the dinner table conversation turned to dog agility. Naturally, if by natural you mean I hadn't had a buncha glasses of wine and just started blabbing about dog agility. Because EVERYONE always wants to know about dog agility. It's the new black. Or brown. Or something. Actually, I think they had been mightily amused by the dog agility videos from the other day including my floundering around in a skort shreiking and pointing at my dogs and at things with pointy finger six shooter mitt. I thought perhaps my foibles would have amused you, over here on this side of the fence, dog agility friends, but what I have found is that they are most amusing to you guys over on the other side of the fence, non dog agility friends.
So Maia, who I believe could become a dog agility convert very easily, if we could just get her to get a dog, (did you know I have you specced out here Maia?) asked the very good question, "So you get the dogs to just do stuff out there and go over the stuff by pointing at it?" Actually, she likely did not say stuff. I don't remember what exactly she said. This involved wine. Does blog have same rules as personal memoir? Not trying to James Frey you guys here, I swear.
Anyways, Yes! You guys, you non agility friends, yes! I know. I get all technical here and I am talking about systems and crossing and this and that but really. If you just run, like the wind, like you are chased through the alleys of an abandoned amusement park at in the pitch black by alligator weilding zombie rapists-oh wait, wrong movie-and you point at stuff in the nick of time, you are getting the basic idea here. Maybe we have to practice some, like I watched the Tour de France guys on the new channel which has been discovered our tv has, which is a biking channel to add on to the Giants channel and mistakenly assume, well all you guys you bikers, you could do that! And everyone laughs heartily at the non biker in the room and talk of spokes and chain rings and sprinting ensues which now in my mind I possibly am switching movies again and thinking about underground gopher caves and tunnels and what they would look like to me if I was as tiny as a thumbnail wart and could tour them on a miniaturized racing motorcycle and would this be as popular a ride at Disneyland as I believe it to be right now?
8 comments:
Being utterly incapable of commenting on almost any part of the blog in any way that would make sense (which isn't what this is necessarily about), I focus instead only on "contraband sticks snuck in from the yard" -- what is it with that? The floor is littered with nobby tough purple rubber toys and favorite squeakies with the squeakies torn out and pressed rawhide sticks and braided ropes and all kinds of other cool and expensive things, and what do the dogs chew on? Contraband sticks snuck in from the yard. And sometimes cardboard boxes. Not necessarily ones you've emptied yet. Dang hounds.
elf I believe that chewing on contraband items (my team of 4 bitches enjoys the same type of off-limit items, plus paper towel rolls and packs of chewing gum) really gets to the heart of the Challenge of Training a Dog... sneaking random contraband items is really not all that different from, say, being momentarily diverted by a tunnel 50' away when your handler is screeching and pointing and clapping her way to a line of weave poles, no? Dogs and their "what works for dogs" way of being-- never ceases to amaze this human!
To quote one of my sons when he was about ten years old speaking to an friend envious of his (my son's) lifestyle -- at that time we had been living at the edge of a Panamanian rain forest for about four of his ten years --
"Rain forests aren't all they're cracked up to be."
I suspect that same may be true about handmade cloth napkins, unscratched up floors, etc.
Which is only to say that I get annoyed when I get a whiff of patronizing non agility friends. (Not my fault if you wrote 'em that way, and they really aren't.) Or maybe I'm just jealous of your non agility friends. Although I do like the one you talk about sometimes, and who posts funny things here sometimes, although I haven't seen her here recently, who does the weird going in a tiny circle over and over very fast, velcro? Cyclo? Psycho? I forget what that type of biking mania is called.
(I also get annoyed when people diss other people for a taste in velvet paintings of Elvis or big-eyed children, or even people who listen to Neil Diamond. I'm equal opportunity about this. Face it Laura, agility may be the new beige, and you'll still be addicted to it.)
Maybe we should start doing velvet paintings of dogs doing agility
Paul a
My non agility friends aren't patronizing. They're all nice. Most of my friends are used to it that Laura is going to pick the sort of weird way around to get somewhere rather than taking the more normal, direct route. So they might pick a more basic sport, say cycling, where I would pick the more fringe sport, say shreiking/pointing at dogs. It would not be unheard of that the next sport I take up is something like curling or donkey basketball. But I also have Neil Diamond in my ipod and have carefully repainted pages from farm implement and J.Crew catalogs onto maybe not velvet but yellow flowered bedsheets too. So maybe it's me making agility the new beige?
Ok, maybe it *is* you, Laura. The yellow flowered bedsheets really are weird, even for the hip artist types who appreciate rock topiary in roadside attractions. My only further question is whether you sleep on the bedsheets or you reserve them for overnight guests?
I just coated them in plastic gel and hung 'em on the wall. I wouldn't sleep on them because they were 50/50 and I like the super high thread count unpainted ones for sleeping on. We did at one time have all handpainted living room furniture that was also coated in plastic gel and not very soft to sit on. We were equal opportunity with guests and us and pets to all sit on the scratchy, painted furniture. We are all happy that I'm over that phase though.
Wow :)
This is an incredible collection of ideas!
Waiting for more helpful pieces.
You would amazing to read a similar one here-
thedogfences
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