ChuckIt

This past Monday morning, a dreary one even by November standards, I drove over to a friend's farm to discuss the 2012 budget for the nonprofit whose board we serve on. I was carrying a file folder full of bound audits, spreadsheets and financial statements.
As always, a group of friendly dogs greeted me, and I picked up a tennis ball and tossed it to them a couple of times.
But then my hostess took down from a nail on the wall a sort of catapult called a ChuckIt. It's a slightly flexible blue plastic stick, about 18 inches long, with a claw at the end. You pick up the slimy, slobber-covered tennis ball with the claw, do a slight low backswing (she demonstrated) and then -- whammo! -- you launch the ball and watch it go soaring a phenomenal distance out over the field, with the dogs racing after it at perilous speed.
It's hilarious and exhilarating. A couple of my shots almost went into the lake and one nearly beaned a swan. We went inside in a happy frame of mind and got the budget hammered out in under two hours.
Perhaps the congressional super-committee should have tried playing ChuckIt out on the Mall before their ultimately unproductive meetings.
Check out the ChuckIt website for their products and lots of photos of dogs and humans at play.