Practicing with the Team-When a morning of very fast running means very fast driving to still get to work on time.

Boy oh boy what I would do for my own agility field. We love to practice. And there's never enough time to go to all the cool places.

To do some agility, I leave extra early on the way to work. I am very grateful in a very Oprah Gratitude Journal way to have a friend's agility field right on the way to work, and I stop whenever I can. For this I know, I am supremely lucky. But you know how it is on the way to work. You leave early. You still don't have enough time. You want some leisure. You don't want to look at the clock. There should be a lot of frisbee breaks. It's not my course and I need to drag stuff around for my master plan each time I practice, then drag it back into place.

But I'll take what I can get. And this is how it is on a work day. And it certainly doesn't happen every day. I would need a whole different level of life organizational skills for that. People with agility yards, you are all lucky people.

We're backtracking on Gustavo's running dogwalk a bit. As we've moved up to the full speed ahead big boy dogwalk as part of a balls out course, I am not seeing his feet pitter patter on the yellow paint according to the program every single time. This makes me queasy that more blatant misses are in store. So we're back on the Robot program, getting those feet to hit according to my beautiful Silvia Trkman vision. Maybe a million more repetitions running down to Robot for the beep. And Robot is only beeping for the perfect pitter patter.

We practiced some miniscule yet tricky jump patterns where everything ended at the table. We are also on the millions of non tap dancing stressy pants tables right now. So far so good. Frisbee, table, frisbee, table. There are millions of treats for those tables. The tables in trials now have rubber on them and Gustavo thinks they are poisoned. For that matter, the contacts that we'll see in the next couple trials now have rubber on them, and I am highly interested to see what Gustavo thinks of that.

Maybe not interested in a good way. There is a very high likelihood that he won't get to practice on rubber contacts before encountering them in the show ring. I don't worry about Otterpop, but this could prove complete brain explosion material for the Goo. Everyone says dogs love them. And the new 24" poles. Everyone doesn't do things like Gustavo. Let's please keep him and the rubber grooviness in your thoughts and point your voodoo love spells in his direction.

We try hard. We sure would love to run out to our back yard and set these things up. But heck. We would love to have a lot of things. Those of you with a big enough flat patch for some poles and some jumps, thank yer lucky stars. Your own dogwalk? Lucky dogs. I would really just like the flat patch in a place where I could look up and see some stars instead of neighbors. And a fence made of poles with the ends sharpened to points. And a million flip flops nailed to a tree with toasters hanging out of it. Oh wait. That's just my neighbor's house. My ranch dreams are supposed to stay repressed but sometimes they still come out like a big, weepy sigh.

I sure do like how happy we all feel when I'm driving us, like a bat out of lateness hell, to work, after a very fun practice, though. Except for the sweaty neck. And messy hair. And muddy paw pants. Because the training topics du jour got accomplished and everyone, EVEN GUSTAVO, was bringing back that frisbee and there was fast, maniacal, crazy running and barking the whole time. OK, maybe not the barking. Or maybe just not ALL the barking. We were just having a really festive day. See how I'm perking up? It was a good practice. And for that, we're all lucky.