So Sunday we raced out to Wittman between choral events to view and select the puppy. Here she is:
(Click on the images for larger, higher-resolution views)
Whaddaya think? Cute? or Not Cute?
She doesn’t have a name yet…figuring out what she should be called is the next project.
Breeder Lindsay thinks this pup is the quietest and probably the least assertive of the litter, the concern being that Cassie could get competitive with another female. Personally, I think Cassie will be fine. But time will tell.
She’s SO TINY at five weeks: no bigger than my shoe. In this photo, she looks like a sable (fur with two or three colors on each shaft) or a tri-color (red, white, and black), but Lindsay believes she’ll be red and white. Corgis change color dramatically in the first few weeks and months of life.
Mmmmm! Shoe! Good to eat! 😀 She may be the quietest of the litter, but in Corgi language that does not seem to translate to “retiring.”
Puppy. Kill. Starfish!
Puppy. Kill. Finger!
Whew! Hunting is hard work!
She found a cave and took it over as a nest, where she promptly fell asleep.
LOL! They look like a plate of tamales here! These are Keelie’s puppies at three weeks. And here’s the one the breeder currently favors to keep for herself:
Awwww! How cute can you get, eh?
Here’s a male from the Saydee’s pups, the group that the Queen’s new courtier will be coming from:
And a female from that litter:
At ten days old…not quite ready to take on the world, but gettin’ there. Breeder Lindsay thinks the second litter will open their eyes this week.
It is said that he who elects to go to war with a cat loses. And yea verily, that may be true.
Notwithstanding, the Realm of the Queen of the Universe and Empress of All Time, Space, and Eternity finds itself locked in combat with Other Daughter‘s pretty little, annoying little red tortoiseshell tabby.
Kitty, as you may recall, has been committing a variety of depredations around the queendom, the final straw of which has been converting the backyard into a gigantic cat loo, wherein Kitty likes to deposit little gifts for Cassie to eat.
Ruling out chemical warfare for a variety of reasons, I tried lashing a long row of carpet tacks to the top of the block walls around the yard. Looked pretty good, didn’t it?
Well, apparently Kitty thought so, too. Twice while I was sitting in the dining room munching my breakfast, what should I see but Kitty atop the wall, delicately stepping around and over the tack strips with all the grace of a prima ballerina. Argha!
One row of “extra wide” carpet tack strips, then, does not suffice to repel a cat determined to jump on top of your six-foot wall.
All right. Now we’ll see if two rows will do the trick.
Two tack strips laid side by side pretty well cover the top of the cinderblocks, except for the capstones atop the pillars. And this time instead of trying to tie the damn things on with string, I strapped them on with plastic zip-ties — the weather-resistant variety. Et voilà!
{cackle!} If that doesn’t work, nothing will!
Now, I really don’t know what to do about the wall’s supporting columns. Each of these is topped by a thin block, creating a relatively smooth objet that, unlike the wall with its decorative top row, offers noplace to secure anti-cat devices.
I could glue pieces of carpet strip up there, but would rather not — I don’t much want to get glue all over those blocks. Tried tying pieces atop them, but couldn’t get enough purchase to do any good.
Finally, I had this idea:
Caldrons of boiling oil! Or, in cat lexicon, about the equivalent: water! Lurking in the garage is a lifetime supply of cheap aluminum steam-table liners…perfect for roasting dog meat on the grill. It dawned upon me that these things are just about the size of one of those capstone blocks. If one were to half fill it with water and set it atop the column, the thing would fall on the cat the first time the damn cat tried to jump up there.
😀
If it tried to jump up there.
So far, I haven’t seen the cat anywhere on the wall. This noon when I got home from running around the city, one of the water pans had been tipped on the ground. With joy, I pictured The Enemy doused thoroughly.
But alas, no. After I filled it and replaced it atop the wall, what should come along but a bodacious mockingbird: he perched on the rim of the thing so he could drink the water. I expect it’s safe to assume he’s the one who knocked the pan off the wall.
Not sure how to deal with that the column issue. Obviously, I can’t leave pans of water sitting up there…we’ll all be overrun with mosquitoes. Can’t dose the water with detergent to discourage the mosquitoes if the birds are drinking the water — that would sicken the very creatures I would like to relieve from cat predation.
So I’ve gotta come up with a way to repel Kitty from the tops of those support columns.
One thought that occurs: Velcro. Stick-on Velcro will stick to the cinderblock, so in theory one could attach enough pieces of carpet tack to harass the cat. Another is double-sided tape, of which I have a little.
Tape is not very sticky, but the goop on the side of self-stick Velcro sets up like steel. It could be messy to get off, though. And it may not withstand rain and 115-degree heat. Still. The trick may be just to break Kitty’s habit of jumping over the wall — even if the stuff lasted only a few weeks, that might be enough to stop the cat invasions.
Heh.
You know, I used to like cats. I’ve had cats all my life — in Arabia, we weren’t allowed to have dogs because the jackals carried rabies into the camp. So everyone had cats, which could get up on top of cars and houses to stay out of reach of the jackals and hyenas, theoretically.
Out there, ours were outdoor cats. Really, in the 1950s I doubt if anyone had ever heard of such a thing as an “indoor cat.”
When my mother and I came back to the States, we wanted a cat. To get it, we had to smuggle it into our apartment, for cats were contraband in the whole development where we lived. This was when my mother got the idea that cats could be acclimated to live inside all the time.
And they can — most of them can, anyway.
Some years later, my then-husband and I acquired a pair of Siamese cats. The female was a prize lilac-point, and we stupidly bred her with the male’s sire before we had her fixed. The breeder took three of the kittens and we ended up with two of them. Which meant…yes! Now we had four cats.
Four indoor cats.
Well. This house we lived in had been massively renovated by the previous owners, who had intended to live in it for a good long time. Because their project was no fix-and-flip, they had outfitted the place with top-of-the-line everything, including gorgeous, luxurious shag carpets (it was now 1969) that were at least three inches thick. They were the most wonderful carpets I’ve ever seen, before or since.
Lemme tell you something about cats: anyone who thinks they can be relied upon to use a cat box labors under a false impression.
Once a cat decides to pee and poop outside a cat box, nothing will bring it back to the cat box. Ever afterward, it will urinate and defecate wherever it pleases.
And yes, the cat boxes were kept meticulously clean. And yes, we had several cat boxes to accommodate this tribe.
They decided the dining room — an absolutely beautiful room — was the new loo. And they destroyed the carpeting in there. The stink defied belief, and absolutely nothing we did to discourage them or to try to keep them out worked.
We are talking about thousands of dollars worth of high, high, high-end carpeting.
They did a lot of other damage, too.
I used my pregnancy to persuade my husband to let me get rid of the effing cats. But by then they’d pretty well trashed the place.
Some years later I rescued a kitten from the irrigation outside an office where I was working. This cat, we decided, would be an outdoor cat. And, let me add, it is another myth that outdoor cats will immediately keel over from feline leukemia, be eaten by coyotes, and be run over by garbage trucks. Well. Some of them are run over. But this cat lived to be around 15 years old. One of her offspring made it to around 18.
Our neighbors hated us. They hated the cats, to be specific. And one of them used to come over regularly and complain about the cat turning the planter in his house’s front entryway into a stinking toilet. I expressed empathy, suggested he set mousetraps around the plants to scare off the cats, and quietly declined to bring the damn things indoors. What a bitch.
The more I’ve learned of cats, over the years, the less I like them.
Domestic cats devastate native wildlife. In the city, a single outdoor cat kills more than twice a week. They kill off lizards (which, my friends, eat mosquitos and any number of other annoying insects and biting spiders), birds, and small mammals. Some of the most charming birds in North America are being decimated by pet and feral cats. The cat is, IMHO, truly a nasty creature.
Nevertheless, I don’t want to kill Other Daughter’s cat, upon which she professes to dote. Nor do I want a confrontation with Other Daughter. But sometimes I wonder what on earth is the matter with people.
In the past several days, Cassie and I have come upon the remains of two cats — coyote kills. A coyote leaves little but a pile of ripped-out hair. Interesting. We’re coming on to whelping season, and so of course the coyotes are hungry.
Other Daughter was all upset when one of the neighbors’ stray cats was, indeed, run over by a car in the alley. What a shock! But…if you let your cats run around the streets, what do you think will happen to them sooner or later?
Please. If you love your cat, keep it indoors! If you don’t want to be bothered with cleaning up after your cat and with replacing damaged carpeting, flooring, bedding, draperies, and furniture, don’t get a cat. And even if you don’t love your cat but simply must own one, have a little consideration for the environment and for your neighbors!
SEVEN brand-new corgi puppies, born last night of their mom, Saydee. Think of that: seven!
That means for sure Cassie and I will get some dibs on this litter. We were number 8 in the list of prospective corgi servants, and five pups were born in the group that came into being last month.
Another of the breeder Lindsay‘s excellent dams came into heat a week or two ago, so they bred her, too, to their radically expensive, meticulously tested, outrageously genetically perfect sire. So if for any reason I imagine that the Ideal Companion for the Queen of the Universe is not in this litter, we should be at the head of the list for the next.
This litter has four males and three females. I had been thinking that I’d like a King Consort for Her Exalted Highness, since tradition holds that it’s best to bring a male dog into the house when you have a female, males being more submissive and so less likely to get obstreperous with the resident owner. However, some corgis can get pretty hefty. At 24 – 25 pounds, Cassie actually is a fairly petite corgi — and the males do get significantly bigger. In my old age, the whole idea of getting a smaller breed than the beloved German shepherd is so that I can lift the critter. The back pain sure isn’t gonna go away at this stage, and so it probably would be wise to try to keep the new royalty’s size on the smaller side. So…maybe we really want a Duchess to take her place as lady in waiting and vice-regent to the Queen of the Universe and Empress of all Time, Space, and Eternity.
Heh. Don’t you love that Saydee? She looks like a little cowgirl to me, kinda spunky and outdoorsy. We may have to call the pup Dale Evans. 😀
And of course, that will require us to have a Ram 1500 SLT. Right? With the six-banger and a nice gold-plated gun rack…
Awwwwww! The puppies are born!!! Lindsay of Corgi Corral sends pix of the first litter:
Girl puppy!↑
Girl puppy!↑
Girl puppy!↑
Boy puppy!↑
Boy puppy!↑
More to come. A second litter by another mom has been examined in utero: five or maybe six pups. Since I’m eighth on the waiting list, presumably Cassie’s new puppy will be coming along with the second batch.
Back in the Day, my mother had a long-haired Chihuahua. She’d coveted Chihuahuas for quite some time, and while I was still in high school in southern California, she’d managed to bring herself to buy this little dog from a breeder. The pooch was chocolate brown all over, and my mother called her Penny. We brought Penny with us to Arizona when my father retired to Sun City.
Well, Penny was quite a little number. Unlike many of today’s specimens, she wasn’t especially aggressive, although in her tininess she could be alarmed by large moving objects and humans. Though she didn’t bite or threaten to bite, she yapped incessantly. This dog would bark at the sound of the sun rising and going down. She barked for no other reason, as far as anyone could tell, than to hear her ears rattle.
One December, I had come home from the University of Arizona for winter break. My father had gone back to sea, claiming he needed to earn some more money to make their retirement secure but really, I suspected, because he’d found full-time shore life less than the paradise he’d hoped for. So it was just me and my mother.
It was New Year’s Eve. My parents’ old friends, Capt. Karl and Mrs. Mabel Brunberg, had recently moved to Sun City, trailing my father as did a number of his other friends and his brother. They invited my mother over to their house to ring in the new year. Since a fair amount of drinking would be done and I was not of age — I was only about 17 then — I was left at home with the dog.
So, along about 11 p.m., when my favored TV shows went off the air, I climbed into the sack, with the dog ensconced on the foot of the bed.
Down the road was a grody little burg called Surprise. Today this town, having fallen into the clutches of the developers, is a middle-class suburb of stick-and-stucco look-alikes, but in those days it was largely an immigrant labor camp. It was small and quite a ways from Sun City, maybe eight or ten miles off. But real people did live there.
Well, along about quarter to twelve, the locals could no longer restrain themselves. The car horn-blasting, the firecrackers, and the pistol shots in the air began well before midnight.
The celebration was way, way in the distance, so far away it was barely audible to me.
But Penny could hear it. And she didn’t like it.
She started to yap at the first faint sound of a horn blaring into the black sky.
I figured she’d have a little frenzy at midnight, when everyone went outside to shoot and holler, and then she’d calm down and I could finally get to sleep.
Uh huh.
Right on one count. Wrong on the other.
Once she got herself wound up, she stayed wound. Along about twenty to one, I finally gave up and went into the living room to await my mother’s return. Figured I sure wasn’t going to get any sleep in the bed. And maybe a change in venue would quiet the beast.
So now we’re perched on the living-room sofa. It’s a tiny house, no bigger than any of the two-bedroom apartments where my mother and I had lived over the previous six years. The living room, which was too small to accommodate a dining area if the residents wanted to devote space to a television set, was demarcated from the galley kitchen by an L-shaped wall that created entries to the kitchen from two ends.
Parked on the sofa, Penny has calmed down a bit. I pull an afghan over me and hope to catch a few Z’s.
Wrong.
She just settles down, and YAP!!! She’s up and barking. Settles down again and YAP YAP YAP!!! and settles down and…
Damn. This is going on and on. I begin to wonder if maybe someone is actually outside in the darkness.
Not being the brightest of young things, I open the front door. Can’t see anything, so I step outside to investigate.
A light breeze wafts past and whistles through the fronds of the Mexican fan palm in the front yard. And YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP!!!!!
Holy cripes. She’s barking at the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves.
I go back inside and we take up our position on the sofa again.
Penny has just settled down when BING-BONG!
The doorbell rings.
Whaaa? YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP It’s now one in the morning. YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP Who the hell is at the door at one o’clock in the morning? YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP
I look out and see the neighbors from across the street. Open the door. They’ve come over to wish us a happy New Year. I return the compliment and say my mother is at the Brunbergs’ house. They, probably noticing that I’m a bit pale by now, ask if I’m OK. Stupidly, I say everything is just fine. They go away, leaving me with my nerves unraveled and the dog vibrating like a gong.
This, I think, is getting out of hand. Enough is enough. I decide to call the Brunbergs and ask my mother to come home.
But they haven’t lived there long enough for their number to have been published in the current phone book. (In those days, the Internet had not even been dreamed of.) I get out my mother’s address book and find it is just chuckablock full of scribbled names and addresses. It’s so full that she no longer can list her entries alphabetically. I can’t find the Brunbergs’ number.
So I decide to call information. In those days there was no 4-1-1 (nor was there a 9-1-1). You dialed “0,” got an operator, and she would use the phone company’s records to look up the number you needed.
So I dial “0.” The phone rings and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP rings and YAP YAP rings and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP and rings and rings and YAPYAP YAP YAP rings and…. It’s New Year’s Eve. Everybody and his little brother, sister, and yapping dog must be calling their relatives long-distance. The operators’ lines are maxed, and I can’t get through.
I consider calling the sheriff, but think better of it. What am I going to say? My mother’s dog is yapping, please come protect me from the wind blowing through the palm fronds?
I consider walking across the street to the neighbors’ house, but…what if someone is out there? Walking around in the near pitch-darkness does not present itself as a wise idea.
Penny barks her way fiercely toward the kitchen door, but she’s afraid to go near it.
Finally the adrenalin load subsides enough to restore a modicum of common sense to my addled young brain. I realize that while we were on the sofa we had a clear view of both the hallway and the back door. No one could have gotten into the kitchen without my having seen him. And it’s not very likely that a burglar has been hiding in the kitchen all night.
I work up the nerve to creep over to the kitchen doorway. There I see…
A decorative holiday liquor bottle lid — one of those fake cut-glass lash-ups — has somehow fallen off the countertop and tumbled to the floor. My mother and her friends must have finished off the booze, and she evidently left the lid to the empty bottle sitting there.
But WTF? The counter tilework, as was the style at the time, had a border of lipped tiles that formed a little barrier to keep water from dribbling over the edge and small objects from rolling off.
I actually heard this thing slide across the counter before it fell to the floor. The sound was not CRASH but r-r-r-r-r-CRASH. How the hell did it move, on its own, and cross the lipped tiles to tumble off the counter?
That is a mystery I have never solved. Possibly it was the vibrations from the dog’s high-decibel yapping.
I figure she called up a poltergeist. After all, I was a teen-aged girl, and we know poltergeists are drawn to adolescents. And poltergeists are great tricksters. The spook must have thought it would be very funny to see what the little wind-yapper would do if a real, credible noise set her off.
She’s SO TINY at five weeks: no bigger than my shoe. In this photo, she looks like a sable (fur with two or three colors on each shaft) or a tri-color (red, white, and black), but Lindsay believes she’ll be red and white. Corgis change color dramatically in the first few weeks and months of life.
Puppy. Kill. Starfish!
Puppy. Kill. Finger!
Whew! Hunting is hard work!
She found a cave and took it over as a nest, where she promptly fell asleep.
Back in the den with brothers and sisters!
