Pyewacket Growing UP!!

Enjoy this puppy-perfect timeline of Pyewacket growing up. She is just over 9 months old now!

Baby Pye - during the first few weeks home

Looka da face!! aww!

Ears up in the backyard

Puppy time at the training center

Recess at the training center - so happy!

Playing with the other corgi puppy at the center - tail and no-tail!

Pye's Princess Crown - we taped her ears for a few days when she first started teething.

Bring your dog to work day

First time at the park!

Lazy park day

Rainbow Pye

Meeting friends at Greenlake Park

Corgi butts drive me nuts!

Meeting *more* friends at the park!

Cuddle pile with Familiar

Bring your dog to work day - all grown up and able to stay awake

Hard at work!

Car rides curled up in the puppy hammock

Digging? What digging?

Camping - King of the Hill

Going for walks with my *almost* grown-up pup!

Lunch Breaks and Love

 
It was so nice outside I decided to take a stroll around the building at work. Along the way I spotted what looked like a pair of garden spiders trying to mate. The smaller one, which I'm assuming is the male, waved its front arms and tried to alternate between petting the female and dodging being lunch for her. Talk about a lunch break!

For the female's part, she tapped her back legs, almost impatiently, and stayed still otherwise. The male occasionally tried to 'bop' her in the lower-middle, but most of the time he just kept up the wavy arms dance.

I thought it was still too Winter for spider-mating...but I'm not expert on these things.

She was very beautiful. Much more red than the other garden spiders in the area. I made a mental note to mark each garden spider I noticed on the way back to the office and they were mostly yellow / golden colored. There were a few in the trees which were more brown. Perhaps it makes sense that she was red - I found her hanging off the light post near the rose garden. Do spiders take on the color of their surroundings?

 

Monday Puppy Cuteness

Just in time to perk up those Monday blues - Pyewacket photo bomb!

Story of these photos - Pye and I were walking in the University Village Mall and, since my favorite color is mulberry and I dress my dog, we kind of dress alike. This gets all sorts of adorable attention, on top of the attention Pye gets on her own, and a photographer asked if he could take some shots of us there on the street.

At the time I was enjoying an ice cream from Molly Moons and Pye was sitting next to me hoping to heaven I'd drop some. When I'm doing things with both hands I usually put a foot down on Pye's leash just in case anything really catches her eye and she decides to jump - with my foot on the leash she won't pull me over.

We used some of the vanilla ice cream and sample spoons to help Pye pose for the photos.

The last one is Pye in the back of the car. She always falls asleep in her hammock during long car trips!

 

The girl who rode through fire

Summer break is over and I'm excited to get back into the "groove" of blogging again!

I had a new experience recently - riding my bike through a wildfire.

My commute involves a trip on the I-5 highway. There's no real way around it, well there are several ways around it that I'll consider when we have an earthquake, but there's no real sensible way around it that would get me home at a reasonable time. So I headed from my work to the highway like usual. Traffic seemed a little heavy - but it is rush hour, so that's not unusual. Unusual was the double helicopters flying low so close to the landing path for the airplanes at SeaTac airport.

Also unusual was the yellow haze...

The area ahead was mostly residential so I figured someone's house was burning. I rode forward figuring I'd pass the house and the smog would lift. As I got closer to the highway the smog got thicker. People were out on the sidewalk looking around cautiously. Everyone was walking to the highway overpass. At that point I figured "car fire" and drew down my clear visor on top of my eye-shade visor to keep the smoke out.

Then it got a little surreal.

I rode slowly with traffic, sweating like a pig the whole time, and it started to snow. Little bits of off-white ash drifting down all around me. There were little pieces like snowflakes, but also large pieces that looked like they shouldn't be floating at all. I watched a chunk of ask the size of my hand float by slowly and felt that I was momentarily trapped in an ancient sno-globe.

Standing under the sun, a hot engine blowing at me, looking out through my helmet at a sepia world where gravity didn't seem to work quite right - surreal.

I continued to ride.

Traffic took me to the highway and I passed the firetrucks fighting what turned out to be one of Washingtons many many wildfires. All traffic southbound on I-5 was parked. Traffic going northbound behind the on-ramp was parked.

I rode north on a very empty highway thinking 'I'm the girl who rode through fire.'

-pic from internet