Back by popular demand... Callie

Enough people have left comments and sent me e-mails saying that they enjoy reading about Callie the collie pup to encourage me to continue writing about her. Saturday evening Walt and Callie were outside playing (well, she was playing; he was waiting for her to do her business so they could go back inside). I went out with my camera.

This is one of the cutest of the pictures, I think.

Typical interaction and conversation these days, at least three times a day — Walt, coming in after an outing with Callie, either says "She pooped and she peed!" with great glee, or he says nothing. In that case, I ask: "Did she do anything?" And so go the days.

Poised for play, focused on some movement in the distance.
Callie's coat is getting fluffier, and her muzzle and legs
are getting longer by the day.

So what has Callie learned lately? I guess her biggest recent accomplishment is managing to come down the stairs all by herself. She learned how to go up the stairs pretty fast, in the first days she was here (this is day 11). But it wasn't until Saturday that she worked up the courage, after much preliminary whimpering and some careful coaxing by the human spectators, to hop down the stairs by herself.

Callie on 12 May 2007

And she does hop. She hops up the stairs as well as down. As she gets older and bigger, she'll probably learn how to run up the stairs without hopping, but for now that's her stair gait (as it were). Not graceful, but effective.

Looks like a three-legged dog, doesn't it?

A few days ago I was cleaning out the planter boxes under the kitchen window, getting them ready to receive new geranium plants. I worked the soil with my hands to break up lumps, pull out old roots, and throw out some rocks that were mixed in. And then I started finding big white grubs in the soil.

Evidently, flying beetles of the kind we might call June bugs (hannetons in French; the British term seems to be "cockchafer") lay eggs in the soil in the summer. The eggs hatch, and the larvae, or grubs, spend a few seasons, or even years, living in the soil before they mature and become flying beetles themselves. The grubs can be quite large, and quite ugly, if you ask me. And the worst thing is that they thrive on roots and can end up killing the geranium or petunia or other flowering plants you have so carefully tried to nurture.

Cause toujours, tu m'instructionnes !
Her eyes look glazed over to me.

So as I found these grubs, I just tossed them onto the gravel driveway down below (working quickly, not wanting any more contact with them than absolutely necessary). I figured they would shrivel up in the hot sun and be gone. I must have tossed 7 or 8 of them out of one of the planter box. I think our mild winter allowed then to survive in the planter boxes; a good hard freeze would probably have killed them.

Well, guess who started nosing around in that patch of gravel yesterday and finding delicious white grubs to eat? No, it wasn't Walt. And that leads me to the next thing Callie has learned over the past few days.

Among the things Callie likes to chew on, unfortunately, are fingers.

When she finds something she wants to eat or chew on (I'll spare you further details), she runs like hell and hides under a table or under the hedge so that there's no way you can get to her, fish the disgusting tidbit out of her mouth, and throw it out into the ditch or garbage bin. All dogs do this, I know. But Callie has just started doing it. Isn't she cute?

During some particularly energetic rough-housing in the yard
Saturday evening , I ended up with this grip on Callie with one hand,
and with my camera in the other hand. Snap! She looks a little
like a bat, doesn't she? She runs like a bat out of hell, too.

Just a minute ago, I was sitting here typing when Walt yelled from upstairs: "Help. Come help me! Hurry!" He was chasing Callie in circles around the living room furniture because she had some object in her mouth and he wanted to see what it was. I needed to head her off at the pass. It turned out to be a little piece of charcoal she had found near the wood-burning stove in the fireplace, so it wasn't a big deal. But you never know.