We got our second foster on Sunday night. Her name is Sunni, and she's a greyhound mix. She's the most lovable dog I've ever met and I can't imagine she'll be with us for very long! She definitely has some of the greyhound look to her, but she doesn't really act like one! For example, when I let the dogs out, Brooke and Atrayou immediately run out to some trees in the yard and look for squirrels...silently. When Sunni bursts out of the door, she runs after Brooke and Atrayou, barking like a monster the whole way! She is obviously not interested in torturing the squirrels, she'd much rather be wrestling around like a lab. But she is seriously a great dog, even though she has an obsession with walking all over the Scrabble board. Here are a few photos of her.
March 2006 Archives
Well, happy belated birthday. I bet Heidi's glad I decided to post this photo of her dressed up for Halloween last year!
Whenever Kory and I play Mario Party, I always turn off my controller (one of the cordless ones) while I'm waiting for my turn. 9 times out 10 I forget to turn it back on, and this somehow usually happens during one of the mini-games.
The last mini-game of our game today was one where you have to press the A button as fast as you can. I'm so good at these "pressing the button fast" games, but I'm pretty terrible at all the rest! I usually don't look at the screen when I'm playing these games, because I'm concentrating too hard on pressing that A button so I can get a new record. Well during our last mini-game today I looked up at the screen and our (it was a team game) little whatever we were riding in was not going up like it was supposed to! So I said, "Kory, come on! We're losing!" And he kept saying "You're not doing anything, you're not doing anything!" And I kept saying, "Yes I am! Yes I am!" So I just kept trying to press the button even faster, and by the time the game was over and we had LOST, we realized I hadn't turned my controller back on!
So in that picture, Kory is pointing in my face and telling me that because I made us lose that mini-game that I had to press the button to skip through all the dumb screens at the end of the game that tells us who wins, which if you've played any video game, you know is annoying. Here is my "I don't want to press the button!" face.
But don't worry, we still won the game, 6 stars to none!
Oh, and I beat Kory at scrabble today, 230 to 130! And he quit early so he could go to sleep, and I still had so many good consonants left to use!
Here are some photos of the hounds on one of the nice days we had recently. I always tell Kory that he needs to take pictures of me with the dogs because I don't have any, so he finally did...so obviously the pictures with me in them were taken by Kory.
These are Australian black swans (Cygnus atratus) that I saw last week on a field trip for my ornithology lab. They were really beautiful and also very agressive. They would run right up to the fence and try to bite you, honking and bobbing their heads the whole time. Here's another photo I took of one at the Akron Zoo. My lab is really a disappointment though. Part of it is because it's just not a good lab, we really should be doing things that are more educational and hands-on, but instead we do things like ride around in vans and count crows. The other reason it's not a very good lab is because our TA doesn't know much about birds at all. It's not her fault, she got forced into teaching the lab about a week before the semester started. But still, I was really looking forward to this class, and so far it's just been terrible.
I found another person on Flickr who also appreciates "Salamander Night" as much as I do, probably even more! Go look at his photos, they're much better than mine.
Our backyard is a disaster, it's pretty much a big mud pit. Of course the worst part is the area right in front of the stairs up to the deck, where the dogs have to go. After washing the floors a million times and washing blankets and sheets a million times, we decided to wash their feet off every time they come in. The first couple times it took both of us to do this because we needed one person to hold the dog still and one to wash paws. Luckily the pups got the idea real quick, and now I can wash them off by myself. But it's not always just their paws that get muddy! I let the dogs out about 15 minutes before Brooke had to go to the vet to get stitches removed, and she and Atrayou came back up on the deck with mud splattered all over themselves! So they pretty much got baths today!
There is a salamander that lives around here called the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum). The spotted salamander can only be seen a few days out of the year when it comes up from underground and makes its way to small ponds or vernal pools to breed. You have to watch the weather closely to determine exactly what day they're going to come out. The first day of the year that is rainy and warm is the day they'll emerge, and that day happened to be yesterday around here!
A few kids from school and I went with our vertebrate zoology lab TA's to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park last night to look for these guys. At first we had no luck, but after about a half an hour we finally started finding some. We walked around for about three hours with our flashlights, and we ended up seeing wood frogs, spring peepers, two colors phases of the red-backed salamander (under the same log!), and about 11 spotted salamanders. It was very cool! Our professor, Dr. Orr, said we if it would have been raining that we would have seen a lot more them!
We were doing this only with light from our flashlights, so taking decent pictures was difficult, but I got a few that I like. So here they are.
The tie rod on my car broke on Thursday night while Kory and I were on our way to go grocery shopping. The place I had it towed to isn't going to be able to fix it until Monday, so I'm carless until then.
Konshuu wa taihen deshita! ("This week was tough!") I really hope that's the last of my bad luck. Poor Kory has to walk to and from work tonight, tomorrow night, and Sunday night. =(
