Gustavo just came flying across the room, did a rebound leap up off my lap, grabbed the paper towel accompanying my slice of pizza off my desk, and rebounded back under the couch to his secret lair. All in the bat of an eye, before you could say, Kumbaya Kombucha, Kumbaya.
That’s right. Pizza. At the desk. So much for the mushroom juice revitalization.
But, I did not even deploy a recovery mission because he was so super at Dirt Nite. Let him have his paper towel and shred it to bits with gusto. Because, with the exception of 2 emphatic dogwalks without STOPPING, and a pair of missed pole entries off of a funny left handed lead out, what a Dirt Nite dog.
I will tell you right now. We run some very hard sequences at Dirt Nite. Rob does not mess around. And these days, in class, I think I can handle Gustavo through just about anything. Gustavo and Hobbes sit next to each other and don’t bark together. Hardly bark. Not much. And I walk a hard sequence, and don’t worry whether I can run this with Gustavo or not. I know I can. There are many nights now where he feels, actually, trained. A wearer of big boy pants. A sensational dog. Sure, maybe not a Hobbes, there could never be another Hobbes, but a dog I can run with the same confidence and smile on my face. How I would face a sequence with Otterpop. Who has a sore leg and is seething in the car over being excluded from the fun.
Without fail, after the merry making that is Dirt Nite, we always come home to Garbage Nite. The trash bin has been drug down the driveway, out to the street, to wait for the trash guys to dump in the morning. And, without fail, Gustavo runs out to the front yard, and barks at the can through our little picket fence. Then barks at the neighbor’s. And the across the street neighbor’s. Bark isn’t really the right word. Monkey scream. Of shrillness. To him, Dirt Nite is the night where he runs around, does his agility, then has to get home to stop the alien invasion of giant plastic bins.
Whichever way you slice it, he is Gustavo. One of a kind, and I am the lucky one.
Why is it all the dogs love Dirt Nite so much? Gustavo flashes through those courses so fast that I swear I can see his little black Zorro cape whipping behind him. The shall we say formerly slowish Trooper has kicked it up to double- triple- quadruple-time since joining the 8:00 class … Cayenne and Izzy: well, no one who didn't know would know that they are into their double-digit years. Ariel sticks her nose down and cuts a couple of seconds off weave poles. If Wings had been there last night under that full moon, I think more than one dog might have jumped over it!
At Dirt Nite, Gustavo runs with conviction. Hobbes is inspired to lay down on the table. Otterpop flies like a legless weasel on the bobtrack sliding ice track with a never failing GPS. Ruby jumps as if she can see.
When I first started running Gustavo at Dirt Nite, he was a homeschooled little weenie who thought every noise that rattled off the metal roof was the howling of the undead, and would sit down periodically, during runs, to chew the sticky dirt out of his fur.
We are lucky to have Dirt Nite!
Dirt Nite sounds lovely!
Gustavo is a dog after my own childish heart–when we were kids, we lived in a rural area and so hauled our own trash cans to the dump. We visited my grandparents, whose cans were out on the street, and I had to run inside to say "those men are stealing your garbage!" Gustavo's just bumped it up one step sooner: Those garbage cans are attracting garbage stealers!
Well, very interesting. Google reader tells me that you posted a note about Arnie's little helpers this morning, and I can read it there. But it's not here. Even though I refreshed this page several times to be sure. I'm having a twilight Zone moment.
You were right. I did. But then I deleted it. It was about how I can see the IP addresses of anonymous commenters that leave creepy, hatey comments on some of my posts. I usually delete them. Sometimes, the IP address comes from an office run by this guy Arnie. The comments relate to some of his employees that I may have had some trouble with in the past. That carry guns. Today I decided, let's just leave this for another day.
Fun times, you have your own stalker!
In case they havent already figured it out, I think you should remind your stalkers that you have an army of middle-aged semi-in-shape agility-fanatics (who may or may not tend to wear t-shirts with bad dog-related slogans on them) who would open a can of internet-powered whoop-ass on any shady TSD-hating activities.
Just sayin'…
Yeah, I sort of opened the woop ass can a couple years ago, and i learned that if you photograph cops, they get very, very mad. And they have pals. And the pals get cranky. And they band together and win because, duh, they're the cops.
I don't worry so much about me. I worry about all the other nice folks that are still trying to walk their dogs out there, under the radar. If I get the radar detectors all riled up again, even though it's for good not evil, everybody loses.
Wow, Ellen, you should take a snapshot of the Arnie post. It will be like one of those flawed stamps that ends up being worth millions!
P.S. I am very mad that Laura was bullied sufficiently to pull that post. I understand why, and can't fault her logic, but it is disturbing on many levels that she felt she had to. (Primarily because I didn't get to read the post, which I am sure was hilarious, if you are not one of Arnie's helpers with a gun, anyway.
Mary: It wasn't that funny. It sounded like someone who knew they were being monitored by people who shouldn't be monitoring and furthermore were being rude about it.