Wags for Wishes

Wanted to share our experience this last Sat at Wags for Wishes, a dog charity event benefiting the Make a Wish Foundation. For those of you that don't know, we joined a frisbee dog group called PHADD (Phoenix Area Disc Dogs) a couple of weeks ago. Its been great for us and Murphy since he LOVES catching the frisbee and we think shows some real potential to becoming a real disc dog. Plus its a great way to meet new people in the area and feel like we belong to a community. And to top it off, the practices are held at the park just a couple of blocks away from our house!!

We've been to the last two PHADD Sat practices and this last Sat we attended Wags for Wishes, held in Glendale, AZ. There were a few different disc dog groups there and some of dogs were doing some pretty amazing tricks. There were three novice competitions that everyone could enter, freestyle (where you see all the cool tricks, like dogs vaulting off of the handler's back and catching the disc), distance and accurancy, and time trials. Most of our group entered the distance and accuracy, which basically you got points by throwing the frisbee and having your dog catch it as many times as you could in one minute. It was $10 to enter and you got two trys. About half of the dogs in our group participated, including Murphy. We decided that Wally should be the one to compete, since he's the better thrower and I had stage fright, lol. His first round went pretty good, he caught two throws.

Waiting for the time to start...


The second round started off even better, he was catching every throw, including a couple that got bounced off his paw and still caught it!

Then with 30 seconds still to go in the 2nd round, after an impressive catch followed by much applause, he stopped in the middle of the course, spun around a few times, and relieved himself, right in front of the crowd... and I'm not talking about no.1... (no I didn't get a pic of it, I was laughing way too hard) I guess when you gotta go, you gotta go, haha!!! In the end, we placed second to last within our group, but I'm pretty sure he won best entertainment value, judging by the roars of laughter from the audience. What a dog...

He managed to redeem himself in other events though. We had him tested for natural herding ability, and not only did he pass, but the tester said he got an A+!! It was pretty cool to see his instinct kick in, once we got into the pen and I let him off the leash, it seemed like he immediately knew what to do. I half expected him to run away scared from the sheep, haha. But she said you couldn't ask for a better dog to start with, so that might be something we'll try to get him into also.

Kinda hard to see him in this pic, he's in between the black and brown sheep..

Rounding up one that broke away from the herd...

There was also a lure course set up, which was a sort of narrow, basic agility course with this squirrel tail that was run on a fishing wire track. Murphy went CRAZY while we were waiting in line for our turn once he saw the other dogs chasing it. If you've seen how excited he gets about the dot, just imagine him even more pyshco... I don't have any pictures of that b/c my camera battery died :(

Anyway, we had a really fun day and look forward to the next dog event, there a couple coming up in the next few months.

Christmas in Arizona

We celebrated Christmas at our house this year, since I didn't have any enough vacation time to make the trip back home. So both our parents, my sistser and her husband Chris were nice enough to come out to us. My aunt Linda was planning on coming too but she had to have back surgery and wasn't able to make the drive out to AZ. We were sad she couldn't make it, but her surgery went very well and everything is healing nicely, so we're glad she didn't attempt to risk it by coming out here. Here are some pics from Christmas day...


Ginger bread house building and an intense game of chess between my dad and Wally. Wally beat him, so my dad said I was officially allowed to date him now, haha.



Another "intense" game of checkers between Maureen and Chris... Maureen smile!!!

Most of Christmas day was spent working on a puzzle... just couldn't seem to pull ourselves away from it until it was finished, talk about addicting!!

The finished masterpiece...

We tried to get Yogi dressed up and into the chrismas spirt, but I don't think he was very happy about it...

For dinner my dad cooked a whole rack of prime rib, turned out amazing, as always... The hats are from these Christmas cracker things that we opened.

Holiday Decorating

Some pics taken last weekend while we were decorating the house for Christmas...



The completed project...

Our big fake tree

Murphy's Vacation

We wanted to get away from the heat for Labor Day and decided to go to San Diego since we miss the beach so much out here in the desert. We booked our stay at the Sheraton on the San Diego Bay b/c they allowed dogs and found two restaurants to have dinner at that also allowed you to bring your dog. The weekend turned out to be basically a vacation for Murphy!!! Here he is on the left lounging on the bed in our hotel.

We got a room on the lower level facing the marina so Murphy had lots of boats and people to bark at!

Here we are at Terra restaurant in Hillcrest. This place was all about dogs, they even had a "Doggie" menu. He had already had his dinner but we ordered him the gourmet sausages as treat (what I am cutting up.)

Tricks for treats...

We had planned to bring Murphy to the beach with us assuming San Diego beaches allowed dogs as long as they were on a leash......WRONG! Luckily we ran into a guy with his dog on our way back to the car from Mission Beach and asked him if he knew of any beaches around that allowed dogs. He told us about Dog Beach, which is right next to Ocean Beach. We thought, "ok, cool its probably a small area where you let your dog off leash." Then we got there and WOW......... if there was ever a dog heaven on earth we had found it!! Its a totally normal beach only its more crowded with dogs than people!!! And no leashes required, so its like a huge dog park on the beach! I think its a genius move by the city - it eliminates the problem of people getting annoyed with people not keeping their dogs on leashes at the regular beaches and lets the people with dogs all gather on one beach and to let their dogs run around and play all day. And since its so big you can still enjoy all the benefits of a regular beach, as long as you don't mind a dog running across your towel every 5 min and getting sand all over it!! But everyone that goes there expects that, so you don't have to apologize to anyone when your dog does it :) We had a total blast there, we were so happy to have found out about this place!

Beach babes....





Murph has always been very timid about water ever since he fell into the pool at our apartment complex last year. I was in the pool and he wanted to come to me and I think he thought he could walk on water or something, lol. Anyway, he will chase his frisbee anywhere so we started throwing it into a shallow creek running from the ocean. After many small baby steps he was swimming pretty good by the end of the day!

Surfy Murphy!!!

Tastes salty, hunh Murph?

Swimming out a little further on day 2 at Dog Beach...

"You Blogger!"

Okay, so I've teased Wally by calling him a blogger b/c he's always online writing comments about baseball blogs (I guess he's not really a blogger but a "commenter" then.) Anyway, I'm going to get a lot of greif from him now that I'm starting a blog and now I'm going to be the real "blogger," haha! But anyway I thought it would be a good way to keep family and friends updated on what's going on in our lives since sometimes I feel so far away here in AZ and they say blogging is good therapy.... So - Welcome to our Blog!

We just got married this last June! Here are a few pics...