Crow with Broken Wing

I saw a crow with a broken wing on the way to work today. He stood on the side of the road and, for some reason, I knew that something was wrong with it. It looked kind of depressed and less lively than it should have been. It turned to hop away and I noticed that it was dragging its wing. It tried to hop up onto a branch on the ground and stumbled because its wing hit the branch. Regaining its balance, it turned around to look at me. It had a fluffy looking head, and I'm quite sure that it's a younger crow. It's funny because I had seen a crow just like this on the weekend. I had driven by and pointed it out to my friend.

The crow watched me, and I knew that it was scared. In earlier days, I would have caught him and taken him to the Wildlife Rescue to get fixed up, but today I didn't. All my past rescues have been put down - including one other crow with a broken wing. They had told me that the wing was beyond repair and the crow would never be able to fly again. I had felt angry that the crow hadn't been given the chance to try and survive without the ability to fly.

As I turned to walk away, I hoped that the little crow would be alright. Yes, he has a broken wing and, yes, he's kind of clumbsy, but maybe, just maybe, he'd have a better chance at life being a little broken than being made whole again.

Hungry Squirrel

I felt like taking a break yesterday so I spent some time in the garden after work. I have discovered that I can cut stems from impatiens, stick them back into the soil, and start many, many new plants. I just need to keep the soil moist so that the new cuttings have a chance to root. I've been slowly expanding the number and coverage of impatien plants that I have in this way.

While I was working on this, I noticed that a large female squirrel was watching me from off the wall. She clung to the wall like spiderman and stared at me. I said hello and kept working. Sensing that I was harmless, she worked her way down the wall and began to rummage in my garden for tasty things to eat. She began her feast by eating all of the juicy, young tips off of my pumpkin plants. Munch-munch-munch! She made those pumpkin plants looks so tasty, that I began to wonder if I should be eating them myself. A little concerned that I was staring quite so much, she snapped another fresh shoot off and scampered off to the stairway to eat there instead. I peeked at her from behind a tomato plant.

Soon, she was back. Noting that my supply of pumpkin plants was dwindling, she scaled the building wall. She explored my balconey, hopeful for a bag of garbage to puncture and rummage through, and then she explored the balconey upstairs mine. Chased off by my angry neighbor, she finally scampered away into the forested area. It was just in time too. A local cat and my neighbor's dog must have caught scent of the little critter, for they both came over to examine the damage the squirrel had left behind.

I got up and looked over the pumpkin plants. "Hm," I thought, "Mum won't like this..."

Saving the world - one baby bird at a time

Unrelated to Mytutorlist.....

I found a baby bird on the way to work today. I was running along to try and catch the bus and saw a bump on the road. It looked like a large curled leaf. I paused, leaned down and yelled, "Hello! Hello!" It didn't move. I noticed a dark stain underneath its head. I decided to keep running.

As I stood at the bus stop, I began to wonder if the bird was alive and just unconscious. "It could get run over by a car!" I thought. So, telling myself that life was too short to worry more about getting to work early than saving a life, I ran back to the baby bird to see if I could save it.

Unfortunately, it was clear as I moved in closer to inspect it, that the baby bird was long dead. In fact, there was a large hole where its brain should have been. I scooped up two paper transfers and attempted to move the bird off the road. I figured it deserved better than to be run over and flattened on the road. It was relatively heavy for such a small thing, but the paper transfers held strong and supported the little body. The little bird having been successfully moved to a shady spot under a tree. I scrambled to get back to the bus stop again, hoping that I would still catch my bus

- Marie

Making Mytutorlist.com better

I had the fortune to talk with Craig from Craigslist via email the other day. I've always really admired how well that website works and I wanted to know how to make Mytutorlist just as good. Craig wrote back and simply told me that the secret to his success was to listen to suggestions, make changes, and to listen some more - to treat the users the same way that I would like to be treated. It was a simple bit of advice, but it occurred to me that I don't do enough listening.

I decided to do more listening this week. The first bit of advice came from Rob. Rob felt that Mytutorlist desperately needed a search feature. Now, there is database being built right now and searching won't be a problem once the database is ready, but I decided that it was important to listen to Rob's suggestion. Although it is very work-intensive to manually sort postings, I decided it was necessary to start now.

Mytutorlist tutor postings can now be sorted by 6 subjects, and 4 locations. I will be adding more search options soon.

The second thing Rob commented on was the curious feature of a used stuff section. He felt that if the site was named Mytutorlist, it should be about tutor listings. This made me think about whether Mytutorlist was actually serving its purpose. I decided to start a tutor directory section to make browsing easier for users (I pretended to be a student and I found it hard to browse for what I wanted). All listings in the tutor directory will run for one calendar year from Jan to Dec. I also decided that the tutor directory should be a paid service.

Now, there are many reasons why I decided that the tutor directory should be a paid service. One of the reasons is because Rob questioned the need for both ads and a donation option. The goal of Mytutorlist.com is to become self-sufficient in costs. However, the site is currently not self-sufficient. I don't want to cover the site with advertisements or to ask for donations, so my option is to charge for some of the services. As Mytutorlist is currently not-for-profit, directory listing fees will go towards the costs of running the site and to purchasing advertising to help Mytutorlist get the word out about all the tutors posted with us.

We want to help you succeed, and we need to listen more to our users in order to become better for you. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve, please do email us.

Cheers,
Marie

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