About to Be Swamped By Dog Agility, Plus Drawings

SUMMARY: My leisurely spring is coming to an end.

No more quiet, relaxing weekends at home doing calming, casual activities like frantically trying to clean up a yard that hasn't actually been guestified in a couple of years to be ready for a blackberry sorbet party (Prince sings in the background: "Blaaaackberry sorbet..."). [FYI, yes, thanks for asking, my 25-yr-old electric ice cream maker worked great!]

Summer used to be agility down time, but not no more.

• This Sunday: My club's agility fun day--agility plus potluck plus hanging out and enjoying each other's company.
• July 4 weekend: 3 days of USDAA agility
• July 10/11: Open
• July 17/18: 2 days of USDAA agility (it actually starts Friday night but my common sense finally absolved me from having to go friday night for one run).
• July 24/25: 2 days of USDAA agility.

Whew, I will be having had enough of agility for a while after that, and WOW LOOK no agility for 4 more weekends after that! How'd that happen?!

I can answer that: Because all the clubs scheduled all their USDAA-like events IN IMMEDIATE SUCCESSION starting at the end of August:

• Aug 28,29 SMART USDAA
• Sep 3,4,5,6 Bayteam USDAA
• Sep 11,12 VAST USDAA Turlock
• Sep 18,19 TRACS USDAA
• Sep 24,26 USDAA course-building clinic (if I can afford it by then)
• Oct 2,3 NAF UKI** (** UKI being USDAA-like, if I may be so bold)
• Oct 8,9,10 Haute Dawgs USDAA
• Oct 16,17 VAST CPE

and those are ONLY the trials I'd consider going to; not even mentioning the many ones that I'd not attend.

I think that I will not do all of those, but it is hard to decide which to skip! I mean, all my friends will be there!

Meanwhile, Tika and Boost are bored bored bored while I do exciting things like try to catch up on sorting all my photos, cleaning the house once a year whether it needs it or not, trying to see all the good movies while they're still in the theaters--oh yeah, and working--

So, because I always like stealing good ideas and using them to avoid doing the things that are nominally at the top of my priority list, I was reading Team Small Dog's blog, and once again TSD's talented producer who is an actual artist produced some actual drawings of her dogs in yesterday's post, and I thought, hey, I'm a writer, which makes me capable of drawing, too! (Oh, yes, I get this all the time: "I'm an engineer, but I know how to type, so that means I CAN WRITE!" and "I'm a marketing person and have my MBA and I wrote term papers in college so that means I CAN WRITE!" and "My mom loves my stories so that means I CAN WRITE!" and so obviously having any kind of skill, call it SkillA, means that you automatically also have SkillB, call it DrawingSkill in this case.) (Plus someone gave me a book "How to draw dogs" when I was a kid, likely because they saw one of my earlier drawings of dogs, and I faithfully followed all the exercises, mostly by tracing the pictures in the book.)

So I labored over drawings of the Taj MuttHall dogs for at least 3 minutes, and now in the future instead of photos I can use my extremely accurate, talented, dog-drawing skills to illustrate my tales of agility woe and exhilaration. As you can see for yourself.

I hope that no one will mistake my drawings of Tika for a mangy dwarf coyote. Poor Tika. I wonder whether she'll hold still long enough for me to trace her on a large sheet of paper?