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Queen

Have I ever told you the story about how I ended up with a dog when I was a kid? We had a couple dogs in Seal Beach when I was little (Mutt and Twerp as I recall). Don’t know where those dogs went when we went to the Carroll Park house in Long Beach when I was eight. I don’t think I noticed they didn’t go with us. Maybe they were gone already. Anyway, no fenced yard in Carroll Park. No dogs after Seal Beach until I got Queen. The story is: I got excited about sled dogs. I wanted to escape to the Alaskan wilderness when I grew up, so it only made sense to start the sled dog team while I was still a twelve year-old, stuck in the city. I researched the different breeds. I went to dog shows. I settled on Samoyeds. I was going to have an entire sled dog team of Sammys. I built a scale dog sled as a school project. I got out the phone book. I located dog breeders. I called pet shops. Not a lot of Samoyed sled dogs in Southern California. All of this with no encouragement from, or even consultation with, our parents. Finally, by phone, I found one. A male puppy at King’s Pet Shop. No papers. $60. I sprung the news on Mom and Dad. Remember how Dad dealt with things he didn’t want to do? He’d say “sure”, then attach impossible conditions to it. I wanted a dog? No problem. I’d found a male puppy with no papers for $60 at the pet shop? Not quite right. If I could find a purebred, that was already housebroken, female instead of male, and for $40, I could have it. I was crushed. I still hadn’t even seen the dog of my dreams at the pet shop though, so I got on my bike and rode to the pet shop at Anaheim and Orange to check it out. Turns out the guy on the phone didn’t know what he was talking about. The dog on hand was actually an AKC pure-bred four month old housebroken female with papers and the price was $40, not $60. Ohmygod! Perfect. I had found the exact dog my father wanted. We called Dad at work. We arranged for the pet shop to let us pick the dog up after hours that very night. To Dad’s credit, there was no waffling. We drove to the pet shop together, confirmed the dog was everything we could have asked for, and drove home with Queen, the dog of my dreams. As a kid, the subtleties of the situation escaped me. I was twelve. I wanted a dog. I got lucky and Dad let me get one. Only much later, in retrospect, do I have a clearer picture of what really happened. And what a good job our parents did that they gave me no reason to figure it out any sooner.
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Sandia

Dicksissel! They’re here all summer. We’re not. We’ve never seen one. Time to go see one before they’re gone for the year. They’re plentiful and easy to spot. They like grassy and fallow fields. They’re small like sparrows and even hang out with flocks of house sparrows sometimes. So off we went this morning to get the dicksissel. We were seventy-five miles away, at Sandia by dawn. We knew right where they’d be. We drove the one-lane backroads at a crawl, looking at every bird we saw. By the time we were a couple hours into it, we had picked up the pace, only looking at birds on fences and wires we didn’t recognize immediately. By noon we were done. No dicksissels. Guess they’re gone for the year. Meanwhile, we got thirty-five birds and saw wood storks and magnificent frigatebirds. Got a picture of one of the wood storks coming in. Neither are new birds, but both are Texas firsts for us. We’ll get the dicksissels next spring. Spent a few minutes at paradise pond watching warblers. Took a walk on the beach. Added to the day list. Counted up the year-list. We’re at 341 species for 2008.