Surf Dog Take 2: NO ONE KILL THE POWER AGAIN OK?

A refresher, if you haven’t memorized all the details of my life, and I hope you haven’t:

Last year, Brody was scheduled to surf in the Helen Woodward Surf Dog Surf-a-thon. We had lessons. We had a board. And, of course, we had Evan the Surf Instructor:

Who is probably blissfully unaware of his cult status in the pet blogging world. But I digress.

At the very same moment we were out practicing our wave technique, someone, somwhere, hit a button they weren’t supposed to and some Very Bad Things happened. As we were driving home from the beach, my husband was punching fruitlessly at the radio as all we got was static, static, static. Traffic had come to a standstill as all the traffic lights were out throughout the entire county, here during rush hour. We had one, and only one, functioning AM station who could tell us only this: Massive Power Loss in the county. Chaos. Insanity. My husband and I looked at each other and independently arrived at the same conclusion: Zombie Apocalypse. Thank god we had Brody with us for protection.

As it turns out, it was nothing as sinister as zombies so much as it was a massive “whoopsie” by an Arizona Public Service technician. And one of the many side effects was this: a malfunctioning waste treatment facility dumped thousands of gallons of sewage into the ocean, rendering Dog Beach unusable for the surf event scheduled that weekend.

It was rescheduled to the week I left for Africa, and it would pretty much have taken a zombie apocalypse to make me miss that trip. That was an unmissable trip, bomb scares, flight delays, and idiotic KLM policies notwithstanding. So to summarize: we didn’t surf last year.

We were invited by Surf-a-thon sponsor Iams to revisit the competition again this year, and as far as I know no one’s fouled the beach so it should proceed as scheduled on Sunday. Brody and I will be hanging out with the So Cal Surf Dogs and the Iams VP of Canine Communications Pawl Griffin, who is making his surfing debut at the competition (he lives in Ohio so I don’t think dog beaches are a regular thing for him.)

I’ll be doing some live broadcasting- out of the water, at least- using my phone and the new Color App. This is an app that allows people to stream one minute of video live from their phone, to your phone. It also posts directly to my Facebook page, but if you download the free app you can actually see us live streaming on your phone, which could be awesome or disastrously hilarious as it will be 100% live.

If you’re interested in trying it out (it’s pretty cool! I use it on my personal Facebook page too) you can download it from your app store or just call **COLOR (that’s **26567) from any smartphone, and you will be sent a text message with a link that takes you to the proper storefront (Android’s Google Play or iTunes) to download the app.

We’re going to do a refresher surf lesson on Saturday, to get Brody’s sea legs back. I’m a little nervous about him meeting a VIP like Pawl, but hope springs eternal that he will behave himself and not hog the instructor or vomit up seawater.

Festivities begin Sunday at 8:30 PST but Brody will be going later in the morning. I’m embarrassed to admit how nervous I am for this.