Corrie In A Box

8 Photos

Also, my job at I and I will be ending next week, so I wanted to get some before and after pics of Corrie and Gus and just of Corrie’s growth. The very first picture that I took of Corrie was here at the office. Here it is side by side with one I took yesterday. (click for bigger)

And here he is compared to Gus in the last few weeks. In the younger pic, Corrie was 8 weeks old. He’s now 17 weeks.

Well, once again we are happy that we decided against buying a house in Centralia.

While there is some flooding around Olympia, we are happy to be on a hill. It’s definitely wet here, but there’s no standing water in our yard or around the neighborhood. We are stuck here, and I’m glad that I’m not stuck in Boise on the other side of the passes (which I might be if I had gone over for the after-xmas visit). Currently, every pass over the Cascade range is closed, as well as 20 miles of I-5 south of Olympia. In order to get from Portland to Olympia (normally about 100 miles) you’d have to take a 400 mile detour right now (since most of the back roads are flooded also). Trains also aren’t running, and I don’t know about the airports. So let’s hope that we don’t have any urgent reason to get out of here, since we’ll be on a bit of an island for the next few days.

Also, I’ve been thinking about things that i will miss when civilization collapses, and here’s one of them.

If you would like to see the current gratiuitous cute picture of Corrie, you will have to click over to the Dailey’s Weekly where you will see him helping us open Xmas presents.

Y’all it is full-on winter! I know I said that before, but since then it’s snowed another 6 inches or so, and it’s snowing as I write this. We have about a foot of snow on the ground, and more coming down. They’re predicting up to 4 inches more in the next day or two. And it’s not supposed to get above freezing for another week. It’s just weird! Preston got up on the roof today to shovel snow off the septic vents and the dryer vent. Pictures coming soon. Most folks’ cars are snowed in completely, so it’s fun to walk through the neighborhood and run into everyone out walking.

Corrie has me out walking twice a day, which has been a lot of fun (although I’m sometimes cranky about it before-hand). These photos coming up are from the very beginning of the storm, a few days ago, when it was still exciting and novel that there was a skiff of snow on the ground. The first ones in the series are from a local park where you can walk down to the Sound. The inlet creek was frozen over, so when Corrie accidentally jumped in the Sound, I was worried that he would freeze before we walk the half mile back to the truck. But all was well. (”Accidentally” in the sense that he saw some bubbles out in the water and forgot that there was water there when he went to pounce on the bubbles. It was pretty funny.) Then there are several pics from the backyard and around the neighborhood with what was already an extraordinary amount of snow, although we’ve now got several more inches. I’ll have the pics from today up soon.

Corrie, 13 weeks

27 Photos

We are having a full-on winter storm. I know, for those of you in Montana and Alaska and such, this doesn’t count for much, but in this neck of the woods the city has maybe one snowplow and none of the roads are sanded or salted or anything. And also, many of the people who live here didn’t grow up in places like Montana or Alaska and so don’t know how to drive on snow and ice, or even that maybe one should avoid driving on snow and ice, if possible. We have around 8 inches in the backyard, although I don’t know what the official count is for snowfall in the last 2 or 3 days.

That means that I have a solid excuse for taking snow days from work, since the roads are bad and traffic is bad, and a lot of my job I can do from home anyway. So Corrie and I have been playing in the snow a bunch (pictures coming soon) and hanging out by our fabulous wood stove. Various predictions (weather.com and NOAA) say that we aren’t supposed to get above freezing for the next week, and the snow should stick around, and maybe even accumulate more. That’s fun and novel, but it does jeopardize our holiday plans. If roads are still like this the day after Xmas, we won’t be heading to Eugene to visit the fam. That would be a bummer.

Corrie thinks the whole thing is pretty swell (although he doesn’t know about the potential for missing Xmas). It’s pretty hard to capture a picture of him in the snow, since it seems to be some sort of puppy speed, but this might give you some idea how he feels about it. (click for bigger)

This is just an fyi about something I learned at work today. If you buy something online internationally, say, from Canada, your credit card automatically runs the exchange rate and converts the funds. If you then return the merchandise, or for whatever reason the charge is reversed, the reverse of the funds gets the current exchange rate applied to it, regardless of what the rate was when you made the original purchase.

For instance, say you bought a shirt for $30 Canadian. Your Visa company would do the conversion and take something like $28US out of your account. (I’m just making up the numbers.) Then let’s say you returned it a few days later, and they issue a refund, but the US dollar has fallen as compared to the Canadian one. So they refund you $30 Canadian just like they should, but you only get back $26 US because the exchange rate is different now. So the merchant received $30 Canadian and they sent back $30 Canadian; they don’t have any of your money. But you sent out $28 US and you end up being shorted a couple bucks on your refund. Bummer. It also sometimes works the other way, where you would end up getting $31US back, if the US dollar increased compared to the Canadian one. The exchange rate varies every day, and it’s also hard to calculate since Visa adds their own percentage to the exchange in order to skim their take off the top.

There’s really nothing you can do about this (other than not buying internationally), but there’s one thing you can ask the merchant for if the situation comes up. If it’s still recent enough, sometimes the original transaction can just be voided, rather than issuing a return. If the original transaction is voided it doesn’t have to go through the exchange again and the money essentially never leaves your account (although it will appear to your untrained muggle eye to have been taken and put back). Sometimes the merchant doesn’t have any control over that, but it’s worth asking.

We’ve finally settled on a name, so I can make the official intro. His name is Corrie (short for Corriedale, which is a kind of sheep bred for its wool). He’s pretty darn high-maintenance, but he’s going to be a rad dog. He rides in the car just fine. Sleeps most of the way through the night in his kennel without much fuss, and seems to be doing fine with the cats. So far, they are still bigger than him, so he keeps a respectful distance. He knows how to “sit”, sorta knows “down”, and knows “touch” (when I hold out my hand, he’ll touch it with his nose, even if I hold my hand far away from him). He knows his name, and he knows he’s not allowed in the bedroom (handwoven wool rug on the floor) or the bathroom (kitty food on the floor). He likes to help make kindling for the woodstove.

He comes to work with me, where we already have a shop dog. The shop dog is a purebred Bulldog, just over a year old, named Gus. Gus is a bit of a bully, and Corrie was pretty intimidated by him at first, but Gus also LOVES puppies, so they’ve quickly come to an understanding. Guss will let Corrie jump all over him and chomp down on his jowls and generally be a pest for quite a while.

But eventually Gus will get tired of him, and will knock him down. Corrie still isn’t very coordinated, so just a bit of a tap will knock him right over. Even from the bottom, Corrie will still be trying to nip at Gus’s ears or jowls, so eventually Gus will open his mouth wide, as wide as Corrie’s whole head, and will use his mouth to muzzle Corrie’s mouth shut, sort of like you would do with your hand if you were trying to hold
a dog’s mouth shut. That’s what he’s getting ready to do here, right after Corrie tries to latch onto that ear one more time.

Can’t talk now!

Click any picture for a bigger version.

Last spring, Magoo “rescued” a baby squirrel that had fallen out of its nest. We called the local wildlife rehabilitator, Tammy Yuth, who runs We Are One Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation. She’s a pretty amazing person who runs this rescue and rehab facility out of the back room in her house. If you were to find an injured wild animal, or come across a deer with a broken leg, or see an owl hit by a car but not killed, Tammy is the person you would call and no matter how dire the circumstances she would pour her heart and soul into fixing the animal up so that it could be returned to the wild. She takes everything from baby squirrels (like mine) to a whole nest of weasels to great horned owls or baby deer or adult possums and really, just everything you can think of. Besides running We Are One, she also works full-time at a local vet’s office, AND works on Saturdays at the county Humane Society just down the road from where she lives. I’m not sure how she manages all that, because it would take at least three of me to do it, but she seems to thrive on it. She’s pretty amazing.

As you might suspect, she gets a lot of people who want to come see her animals. But, of all the things she does, running a petting zoo isn’t one of them. These are, after all, wild animals, and most of them are stressed enough as it is, without a bunch of strangers gawking at them or trying to touch them. Not to mention that the friendlier ones (particularly the babies, like the raccoons and deer, which you’ll see shortly) are very trusting and will bond to humans easily, which is all sort of counter-productive if you’re trying to release them into the wild eventually. Besides being complicated in the sense that the babies need to bond to *someone* so that they can learn some basic life skills and grow up to be healthy, and that all is a lot easier to manage if you just limit the number of humans that they come into contact with. So you can imagine how honored I was to get to spend a couple hours at her place last week, taking pictures of whichever animals she had around. You can check out the amazing pictures below, and if you feel like it added a little joy to your day, or if you feel like there’s a value in having someone out there who tries to fix wild animals after they get hit by our cars, then please consider donating a little something to We Are One. The rescue runs completely on donations, other than a couple very small grants she gets from the county (which don’t even come close to covering food for the animals, let alone all the other associated costs). You can donate from her site, or just click on this button to go directly to Paypal. Any amount helps.

We Are One Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation

30 Photos