Vet Checks, Banquet, Odds and Ends - Bet

Howdy Ho, Bet your roving Border Collie reporter here!

I have to admit that I'm totally exhausted today!  The vet checks, the banquet (and everyone adored my blue outfit with the blue booties), shmoozing with my groupies, and then the start of the race this afternoon.  Its been a whirlwind trip so far!

First off, I have to tell you the story of the vet checks!

Things went very well with the curly tails, all of them are nice and healthy, happy, and raring to go.  We had a bit of a problem because the Musher made the mistake of introducing the game "Angry Birds" to the Musher Handler Guy... HUGE mistake!  This is what he looks like all the time now:

Like most other Angry Birds addicts, he shuffles around like a zombie holding that phone up to his face and sorta moves from side to side as if willing the bird to hit the pigs...

I finally had to put the phone in a safe place so that he'd leave the hotel room and see where he was going.

The safe place is getting kinda full.

Anyhoo, once we got Musher Handler Guy out of the hotel room, we went off to the vet checks, and as I said, the curly tails are in wonderful health.

Some of you may wonder how the vet knows that he's checked all of the dogs?  I mean there's a LOT of curly tails there, and some not so curly tailed, and some not so fluffy, and well, its hard to keep track of them all.  Well, at this particular race, the vets used spray paint to mark the pups... don't freak out, its not permanent (thank goodness), but I totally freaked out by the choice of color and suspect that Richard had something to do with it.

GREEN!!!!!  Seriously?  I mean I was being nice to Richard (because he's so nice and all) about taking green things from the green bin, but now this?  It totally clashes with the whole North Wapiti color scheme!

Even Crunchie knows the green doesn't go with his fur, he's so embarrassed, he tried rolling the paint off in the snow, but it just stuck like that!

PLEASE GET THE PAINT OFF ME!  Or maybe that's the PLEASE GIVE ME MY SOUP I'M STARVING AND DIDN'T GET ANY PIZZA look.  Come on, there was barely enough pizza for the mushing crew, so its not like I hogged it all.

See, the soup is MUCH better than pizza (hehehe).

Then we all went to the Musher Banquet


Richard got bib #2 and the Musher got bib #11 (5:10 in the video and then Richard after her... no, he doesn't speak).  You can't see me in the video because I admit that I had a little bit too much to drink and was under the table.

All of the mushers started off this afternoon, and I have to say that the Canadian Challenge site and blog is doing a good job of keeping up with things to help you follow along.  I'm sorry that I can't provide quicker updates, but with the Angry Birds zombie around, I can't wrestle the phone away from him to post updates to Facebook or the mail list a lot, he gets really cranky.

Just to let you know, the Musher is at Marshall Lake right now, and if you want a map of the course, you can find one here

Off to snooze and more later!

-Bet