Sister's Family and their Really Big Jumping Dogs

SUMMARY: In which my nieces and sister do some fun stuff with their animals in the heat, and I watch.

Saturday morning, I tossed my borrowed SLR camera into MUTT MVR and swooped up to Portola Valley to finally (after meaning to do it for years) watch my nieces and sister ride their horses. It was wayyyy too hot to consider taking my own beasties along, so they stayed home.

It amused me to see how very similar to agility class their jumping classes are, talking about the line that you use to get from one jump to the next, what lead the animals are on, how your body affects the critter's actions, how many strides the dog--er--whatever--should take between obstacles, being careful about memorizing the obstacle sequence so you don't go off course, whether they should be bounce jumping (well--sort of--), watching the instructor change the jump heights (I'm tellin' ya, those are REALLY big dogs they have up there)--

I espied these nifty but humongous jumps in one of the fields.



In dog agility, it's the *humans* who wear the ankle and knee braces. (My sister's jumping animal.)
My sister didn't actually tell me that she was jumping *before* my nieces' classes, so I got to admire her animal up close and quiet after they were already done. He had to sniff my hands very carefully, just like normal dogs, except with nostrils about the size of some dogs' heads.

Here are my nieces, cantering their really big horse-sized dogs:


What ranch would be complete without a ranch dog? (Shaved just in time for the summer heat wave.)

Or a rambunctious lab puppy helping with the grooming?

Or a visiting dog, watching his human practice her horsework, and expressing his opinion about the whole thing (in between bouts of being a cute corgi)? (Owner claims this dog is sitting. With corgis, who can tell?)

I took a squillion photos of the riders and jumpers and will get around to posting the rest on my photo site sometime very soon. Really. Any day now.

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World Good. Facebook Good.

SUMMARY: Tika gets a vet appointment through facebook.

Facebook is interesting. It gets a lot of flack for the banal things that people post. But, for the most part, the people I know post interesting things. And I find out stuff that I wouldn't have known otherwise. Like, a distant friend's mother-in-law died. Like, another distant friend just had an operation. Like, who among my facebook friends are at the AKC nationals this week. Who got a new puppy. Who lost a dog. Who's working on running contacts.

Anyway.

Yesterday, I posted this in my status:

Tika is in so much pain (tbd what exactly--arthritis?) that Ellen has scratched both Tika and Boost (technically still in rehab) from the whole 4 days of Haute TRACS. [sags despondently]

I got plenty of sympathetic comments. One person asked when she'd be seeing the vet. I replied:

Scheduled vet for Monday. Regular vet gone this week, so only one vet in office, already overbooked, said I could come sit and wait however long it took until a few minutes opened up and I decided it's not that much of an emergency. I hope.

Another of my facebook friends just happens to have the same vet that we do. And she just happened to have an appointment for this afternoon. And she just happened to decide that she could wait until next week and offered the spot to us. And I accepted with pleasure.

This would never have happened without facebook.

Tika is feeling above average today; running around like normal, just sometimes forgets and does something forceful or twisty with her front parts and yelps. Not completely debilitated like she was Wednesday. Hopefully we can pinpoint where the problem is and then decide where to go from there.

I'm floored and grateful for the gift of a vet appointment 3 days earlier. It doesn't cost her anything except time to set up the changed appointments, but it feels wonderful and it feels like a huge gift. I know how hard it is sometimes to get appointments at times that are convenient. All is right with the world.

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