Our first corgi was a rescue. He had been dumped in the desert where he could have been killed by coyotes or a mountain lion. Fortunately, someone found him and left him at the local shelter. He was almost completely blind from an eye infection, which thankfully cleared up. We had him for 6 wonderful years and then he became ill and we lost him. During this time, x-rays and ultrasounds turned up just how severely he had been abused over the years. He had also had cataract surgery the year before and his eye was so scarred, they could not implant a new lens. He was fine without it and we were so lucky to have known Wellington.
A few months later, completely by accident, my husband ran across a breeder on the internet. The woman lived near some friends of ours in Texas and had a litter due to be born in a few weeks. Ree Salter lives on a cattle ranch. Her corgis have their own barn, they herd the cattle and ride around the ranch with her on a daily basis. She also runs one of the best breeding programs I’ve seen. Wellington was a good sized corgi, so I told her I wanted a large male from the litter. Well, his mum had mostly girls and there was someone on the waiting list before me, but the moment I saw the picture of Arthur, I knew he was ours. The other folks chose his brother and two months later we headed to Texas to pick Arthur up. I was hoping to travel a lot with him, but he turned out not to like it much. So we have a great house sitter when we go away together and he has his collie companion and his two cats to keep him company too.
There are incredible breeders out there. Ree is very careful of who she chooses to be her puppies’ human parents and many of us bring the dogs back for visits to Wit’s End Ranch on a regular basis.
:’)
this is where i got tod. i’m going to say he’s a medium male. when i went to pick him up, ree made me first help her feed the cows. i was happy to do it. now tod drives me.
‘…Todd, trust math. As in Matics, Math E. First-order predicate logic. Never fail you. Quantities and their relation. Rates of change. The vital statistics of God or equivalent. When all else fails. When the boulder’s slid all the way back to the bottom. When the headless are blaming. When you do not know your way about. You can fall back and regroup around math. Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality. The syllogism. The identity. Modus Tollens. Transitivity. Heaven’s theme song. The nightlight on life’s dark wall, late at night. Heaven’s recipe book. The hydrogen spiral. The methane, ammonia H20. Nucleic acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevitability. Caius is mortal. Math is not mortal. What it is is: listen: it’s true.’
“
| — | David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest |
Death (Tod) - Käthe Kollwitz, c. 1934-37
From the German Expressionist Digital Archive Project by Heather Hess:
Death was one of the most persistent themes in Käthe Kollwitz’s work. It continued to exert an inexorable pull on the artist near the end of her life and served as the subject of this, her final print cycle. Ten years before completing the portfolio, Kollwitz had noted in her diary, “I must do the prints on Death. Must, must, must!” She chose lithography, her preferred technique for creating emotionally powerful images with universal resonance, as the medium, but struggled to shape her ideas, only executing the first five prints in 1934. She added three more lithographs to the series in 1937.
