The time when she forgot the course, because she says she never does that but clearly NEVER is an exaggeration.

Last night at Dirt Nite things were going swimmingly. Was a dirty night, not too hot, not too cold. Clammy damp dirt clinging to everything.

Just had Ruby and Otterpop and Hobbes out. Gustavo was barfing. Is that too much information? Well, he was. So he just sat in the car.

We ran some courses, life was fine, dogs were good. You realize Dirt Nite is called this because it's filthy dirty and it's at night. So all day long, before I go, I ride people's horses and teach other people how to ride their horses. If it needed a new name besides Work, it could be named Dusty All Day. So I yell loudly at people about horses, then I leave and go to a different barn to yell not quite so loudly at people about dogs. From Dusty All Day to Dirt Nite. It's a glamorous life, the one that I lead. Lucky for me, my day to evening ensembles are so easy and breezy and don't even need different accessories to carry me through my day.

Because dirty goes with everything.

So by 8pm or so when I get a chance to run my own dogs, I am possibly somewhat brain dead. Wednesdays are long days.

Usually, I just carry on. There seems to be enough brain cells to run some runs then drag the equipment back to the trailer and drive home by 10pm.

Last night though, walking the last course, the brain cells just ceased. My non agility friends, imagine a sea of sticks and boards and floppy vinyl tubes. Drifting across a grand floor of sticky black dirt. That with the wave of a hand, becomes a Course and you walk around and remember what comes before what and where you shall turn and where you shall turn or not turn your dog. You walk and think, you walk and look, then POOF. Out you go and pummel around at great high speeds doing everything in an orderly fashion and this is the whole dog agility bit.

It is a useful and helpful thing that this vast sea of items is logical and makes sense and has one thing before the other. This, I believe, is course analysis. Which is employed after the course memorization. Which is employed by the stomping about with a pointy finger pointing and side stepping and back stepping until the steps have memorized their way into feet.

Usually, I use the logic and the memory and that a course may drift out to sea in front of me is the last thing I worry about. There's bigger fish to fry. Can I run faster than a border collie here? Will the small speeding zucchini loaf of a dog put her feet in the yellow paint on the end of the board? Can the doggy wrap their doggy body around that first pvc pole sprouting straight up out of the ground and zig and zag through all the rest of them if I am actually running way over there?

But last night, at the end of the night, I found myself adrift in that sea for a minute. Brightly striped pvc sticks floating by, over and over, and all I could do was spin around in circles. And realize that the clock had struck 9. And there wasn't a brain cel to be found. POOF. Gone. No logic. No order. Just floating around and spinning. In my mind, I am thinking about coconut cupcakes and how lovely they are. And what I get is a border collie pummeling at me, trying to have logic and get pointed in the right direction and carry on.

Kind of like when the ship slams into the ice chunks, gets some sense knocked into it and it's either sink or swim. Unless it's whale saving Captain Too Radical for Greenpeace and his ship isn't supposed to hit the ice! Sink or sink. Whales are dying! Coconut cupcakes! Good god, just put in a rear cross. Huh?

And then finally, the order comes back, and carry on.