Dogz Rule! Off To Huntsville

The club is heading off to Huntsville, Texas, for a great weekend of flyball hosted by our good buddies Texas Heat. They are trying out a new facility there and we are all excited about checking it out.

As usual, most of us are staying at the always-pet-friendly La Quinta!

Allow me to share a personal La Quinta story with you. I drove to Utah this past December with three of my dogs to spend the Christmas holiday with my good friend Gosia. The weather was threatening to become horrific--giant snow storm on its way down from the northwest. I was racing west and north as fast as I could. On our second day, I made it from Amarillo to Moab but found I just couldn't drive any farther. It was December 23 and I was worried about getting a room. Any room. As I was cruising down the main drag in Moab, I saw the familiar LQ sign. I parked, went in, and found they had rooms available! The woman at the desk was welcoming and friendly, and pulled the latest weather reports off the internet after she checked me in. The hotel had a large, clean, fenced potty area out back (with a stocked potty bag dispenser and a large trash can nearby) where the dogs could stretch their legs. As usual for LQ, the room was clean and quiet. We woke the next morning at 5am to heavily falling snow, but that's a whole 'nother story!

My red Dodge rental in the Moab LQ parking lot, December 24, 2008.

Anyway, we are certainly not expecting snow this weekend in Huntsville.

DR! is taking three teams to this small tournament. Stay tuned for results!

Trixi, Warrior Princess

Trophies.

I'm posting this for Trixi, our very own Warrior Princess. Who could believe that tiny little dog could kill an adult coral snake (scary, poisonous, and most certainly pissed) and what may be a juvenile rat snake (not poisonous but has a nasty bite and also most certainly pissed)? In the same morning! Whew! I guess that silver tooth has given her super snake-killing powers.

The postscript to this event is that I convinced Kim to go back out to the field, brush the ants off the carcasses, bag them up, and stash them in her freezer! Ew, ew, and ew. I am still surprised she went along with this.

I have a professor friend at UT Austin, Chris Bell, a vertebrate paleontologist, who studies living species of snakes and lizards in order to better understand fossil species. He is particularly excited about getting his hands on the coral snake, head and guts intact, because he can study skull morphology (important in identifying snakes in the fossil record) as well as what it ate (gives us an idea of the kinds of environments that snakes live in).

Sometime in the next few days, I expect that Kim and Chris will meet up in some hot parking lot of some fast food joint somewhere in Austin and transfer the precious goods from her car to his!

Not only did Trixi make the field safer for all of us and our dogs, she's made a valuable contribution to science!

Just For Fun

A little video of Ryp and Remix from January (? I think?). We were having fun goofing off during a lighthearted training session.

What cuteness!

--La

Border Collies are Crazy aka the Wiggley Giggley Incident

Usually when I clean out the dog room closet I'll find various toys buried (hidden) under random things. I tend to forget why I have them there in the first place. After bringing them out . . . I remember why.

The wiggley giggley is one of those items.

Marz is a pervert - he violated that poor bowser bed.

--La