Max & Merlin: What We Did On Our Christmas Vacation

Eat. Sleep. Play.

Max: Oh, you wanted more than that? Okay, here's the scoop. Our sister Emmy, and cousin Maggie came to stay with us for a few days while their humans went vacationing without them! I reassured my sis and cuz that they would have loads more fun at my house than stuck in the back seat of a pickup truck for hours and hours.

Just think - Four Corgis against one human - the one human who can open the giant magic food box, where she hides the turkey and treats. Four Corgis with the awesome power of cuteness should have no problem mind controlling a mere mortal.

L to R - Emmy, Max, Merlin, Maggie

(Open the magic kitchen box. You know you want to. Give us treats. Give us turkey. For doG's sake, just FEED us! We're starved...)

When we weren't eating and sleeping, we were playing. I introduced my cousin to Snow Ball. The object is to get the human to throw the half deflated basketball out in the yard, where I will retrieve it while trying to ignore my annoying yappy brother Merlin. Maggie didn't quite get the rules. It's MY ball, therefore I always get it. Silly girl.

















For some reason Maggie thought she could rewrite the rules of SnowBall, and tried to convince my brother Merlin to play her way. They argued a while...


















Then Emmy decided that she's rather be inside where it was warm. How strange...



















Using Corgi mind powers, she convinced Maggie that an inch of snow on the end of your snout was a bad thing...



















So we all went inside and practiced telepathically linked Corgi Mind Tricks on the human.
(You will give us many treats, and drop some of that turkey on the floor...)


















After using our incredible Corgi powers, we were tired and took many naps, then spent the rest of our time going in and out and in and out the dog door until the human began chanting "Make up your minds already" over and over again. We'll need to work on retraining her to appreciate our rampant indecisiveness. It's a gift, really.

Emmy got a little homesick for her people.


















Apparently her humans spoil her a lot more than my human spoils us. We had some talks on how to train our humans to better serve us. Emmy also taught us the Zombie Corgi Treat Stare. I'm happy to report it works like a charm, many homemade treats were forthcoming after we combined the Zombie Stare with the Corgi Mind Trick.
























All in all it was a good Christmas vacation. We ate lots of food, tracked lots of muddy paw prints on the kitchen floor, and managed to destroy at least four chewies, destuff two toys and give them a squeakerectomy, and let the human know through various expulsions of gases that the food was pretty tasty. I do have some work to do with my brother, though. Merlin still thinks a cute smile is all he needs to get by.

























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Close Encounters, Government Style

Just when my job gets mundane enough to make me want to wrap myself like a mummy in a roll of governmental issue red tape, I get something out of the ordinary to do. This time it was travel to the distant reaches of Crook County to do an alien labor housing inspection. Aliens? Devils Tower? A day out of the office? Count me in!

My colleague drove her four wheel drive pickup, instead of us taking our state issued Ford Taurus. Good thing, too, because it was a 75 mile (one way) trek on many dirt roads.


She also knew where we were going. Good thing, because the directions I got were basically, "Go past Devils Tower, hang a left... you'll find it.










Of course no government-sponsored jaunt would be complete without strange, somewhat close encounters. My first inkling that we weren't in Kansas anymore was when I saw things in the road ahead of us. Things that refused to yield to the forward momentum of a 2500 pickup.















Turkeys.


Big tom turkeys were everywhere, in the road, alongside the road, in ranch yards.






They weren't afraid of the truck hurtling at them, but let us stop and try to take a picture, and they ran, gobbling, for the tree line.

Stupid turkeys.

One field had 70 to 100 Tom, Dick, and Harry turkeys in it.


















The good thing about traveling on these doG-forsaken back roads, is that you can't really get lost. (Well, I could, but that's another dyslexic story) As long as the cow hadn't moved, or the dead, lightning struck tree didn't fall over, we were good. Oh, and the signposts helped too.



















When we left on our expedition, it was very cold, but not too bad - the skies were blue, sun was shining. By the time we were ready to make our way home, the temperature had dropped at least 20 degrees, and we could see the weather rolling in.
















After a quick lunch in Hulett, we only stopped to take a few more pictures of the Tower and surrounds, wanting to make it back to our hopefully warm office before anything nasty happened.

Missouri Buttes and Devils Tower

Watching Whitetails

Black Hills, Red Rocks

Last glimpse of the Tower

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A Corgi Guide to Cold Weather

Saturday it was a frigid -34 (with the wind chill). Sunday it climbed up to -19, and Monday it warmed right up to -7. My back porch door looked like something out of the movie The Day After Tomorrow, when the ice creeps down the building and frosts everything it touches. I had to point a space heater at the dog door to keep it unthawed enough for use.

The longest either furball stayed out on Saturday was 6 minutes, by Monday they were sitting on the top step of the back porch and basking in the sun, -7 notwithstanding. Of course afterward they would come in the house and want to shove their frozen noses into my hands. I thought about putting the nylon and velcro booties on their feet, but when I pulled the footwear out of the drawer, both dogs mysteriously vanished. Since when are warm feet unfashionable? Apparently, for a Corgi, cracked pads are a risk they are willing to take over the embarassment of sporting red and blue booties. ("All the neighbor dogs will laugh at us!")

Maybe I'll tune in Animal Planet and show them how sled dogs wear their booties with nary a long-suffering look. Or mention how cold, icy feet are really not welcome on my bed.

Like the Corgis are going to believe that.

After a few minutes of tearing about the frozen yard, barking up a storm with the neighbor dogs - 2 schnauzers, a pomeranian, a min pin, two West Highland Terriers, a husky, and two labs, one black one gold (Yes, we like dogs in this neighborhood, that's five yards, 11 dogs...) Max and Merlin decided they had worked enough and it was down time.

Here is Max in Corgi Power Nap Mode™.

Going...

Going...

Gone



















And Merlin? Wallowing in toys and chewies.

"Mine, all mine I tell you! All the hedgies belong to me!"

*Insert world-dominating cackle*




















... "uh, at least until Max wakes up..."


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Sunday Poem - Poem A Day Misfit

This poem doesn't fit my overall theme for the Poem A Day Project, but it appeared anyhow, so I offer it up for Sunday dinner. I'm attempting to whittle my poems down into some kind of coherent whole. I may have to backfill with a few older poems to make the 10-20 themed poems for the PAD Chapbook Contest, we'll see. Oddball poems like this are okay, they break things up in unusual ways.

Canis At Rest

by Constance Brewer

The vigilant border collie

likes to grab a quick sleep

with black head propped

upon my booted foot. One

ear keeps cocked for work

or trouble, the blue eye flicks

behind closed lid, attentive

even while dozing. Sprawled

to the side, a mud-caked paw

twitches in anticipation—

stalking movement from dream

sheep. I'm reluctant to shift,

needles pin my instep to the floor.

I wait, on edge, until the nap

is finished, when the house

wolf will rise to groom the dark

fur with sharp, white teeth.

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