a Taj MuttHall Dog Diary: About to Be Swamped By Dog Agility, Plus Drawings

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

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?

7 comments:

  1. Wow. Looks like I'd better have my ice cream sociable the weekend of 8/14. That's when our respective calendars coincide.

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  2. That would be lovely. I didn't mention the weekend in August that I'll be out of town w/out the dogs, but that's the prior weekend.

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  3. You are cracking me up! To save time, I vote for skipping cleaning the house once a year. No one will notice, not even you...use that time to ...well...do everything else you love! Like drawing! How cool! Tika does not look like a coyote! And I knew that was Boost even before I found her name.

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  4. Dawn: You are a very kind person. :-)

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  5. I owe you a dog drawing for moving my blog! I could use those drawings as reference!

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  6. TSD: ROTFL! OMG, those would not be the best references for actual pictures of my dogs! OK, OK, I'll have to go through my photos and find some that might be of more practical use.

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  7. That sorbet looks deeelicious. I like those drawings! Tika is instantly recognizable with that ear tip, and I'm impressed at the precision of your arrow. Way better than anything I could do, trust me.

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