Do you think when your computer is making a constant clicking sound from inside it’s tiny little guts, it is a bad thing? If my blog disappears soon, you may know why. Send help.

I read this on the newyorker.com, “Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.”

Last night at Dirt Nite I had a little break between teaching my beginner’s class and running Ruby, Pop and Hobbes in class. Yes. I run a lot in class. I set jumps a lot too, so I just pretty much am out there run, run, running for an hour and a half. I like running. Only when it involves dogs.

So during the break I took Gustavo out and practiced him on some of the equipment that no one was using. Did some dogwalks, some teeters, that kind of thing. There was a little sequence set up with a straight tunnel that I had used earlier for my class, having them threadle out of the straight tunnel to a jump. So I ran it with Gustavo. He’s never done a straight tunnel. Or a threadle. Duh. Oh my god. It was like a teensy, tiny 12″ cannonball coming out of the tunnel, and with no threadle, no way to pull him to the jump. He was just blasting away and out somewhere else. And I could tell he thought this was the coolest thing ever.

Like a kid who discovers a diving board. Or how to skateboard down the steepest hill. Or setting fires to Christmas trees in elevators. And he kept sending himself back up to the teeter so he could release off it and into that straight tunnel. I think he would have done it all night. If I was a good dog trainer, I could have used this opportunity to start to teach a threadle arm. But since we only had a few minutes, I was a bad dog trainer and let him keep shooting himself through the straight tunnel because it cracked me up. Perhaps inadvisable.

Maybe if they had some dogs and some tunnels in the New York city housing projects, it would keep the elevators from being turned into fireball pit plunging tubes.