Superdogging

This week has been crazy.

Normally I'm pretty busy so when I say crazy...I mean I have not stopped moving all week. It started in a whirlwind of moving starting Sunday and lasting until cleaning and handing the keys over on Tuesday. You'd think that I would then take a few days to relax and unpack and get used to my new place...but no.

Wednesday I left work at noon to go hang out with the Superdogs at the PNE. Our "in" was Dana with Zephyr (Ryan's brindle 'brother') - she's been in Superdogs for 7 years now I think? I brought Abby and Ryan and we played around on the equipment in between shows. The courses are fast and easy (compared to twisty agility courses) so they loved it. Me, on the other hand...I got a really bad impression of the people at first. By the end most of them were a lot friendlier but there are still a handful that are so snobby it's almost funny. I mean, come on, you might get an inflated ego from being cheered on my such a huge crowd for 2 weeks but you're still running around wearing a sparkly gold jacket making your dog jump over giant tampons (the barrels for some of the races can be described in no other way).

Thursday we went to agility after work and then we went back for the full day of Superdogs on Friday. Abby got to run in the midday show that was packed full with people standing. She did a flyball type race with 16 dogs on the floor at once. This is Abby we're talking about - the dog whose major distraction is other excited dogs. We were supposed to "burst" out from the sidelines with our dogs running all around us but under control, of course. Abby was overwhelmed and wouldn't tug (my plan was to just keep her tugging) but luckily she was fine eating treats so I kept stuffing liver in her mouth the whole time. She did fine with the racing (flyball had prepared her for the crazy atmosphere) and all in all was pretty amazing. The nicer people gave me a lot of compliments on my dogs' training which was great to hear. That nutty mutt sure has come a long way.

Something depressing about the Superdogs - they claim that 30% of them are rescued dogs but that is a pretty inflated stat. Most of them seem to be sport bred dogs of one kind or another. Way to prove that rescue dogs can do it all, people. More than slightly bitter here.

On a better note, tomorrow we head back to the beach and low tide so hopefully I'll have some good beach pictures - a bunch of my friends have never been there so there will be about 10 (mostly rescued for real!) dogs racing around having a blast!