Boolie

Snow Day

I had some time off coming in December but took one of the days a bit earlier than expected when I woke to snow coming down. I sent a quick email to work to let them know I wasn’t coming in as I wanted to take Ellie out in however much snow we got. I always enjoy seeing Ellie in the snow, as it reminds me of the day I started thinking about getting a dog while playing with sweet Porter from next door.

The snow stopped falling right after I decided not to go to work, so there wasn’t much on the ground when we went on our walk to the dog park in Irving Park, but we had a good time nevertheless. I brought my camera (the little EOS M, just stuck it in my coat pocket) and took a few snaps of Ellie enjoying one of her favorite activities, snapping sticks in half with her jaws.

Chomp chomp!

The Bed Thief

While Sam would occasionally sleep in one of Ellie’s beds, particularly the homemade one, the thieving of dog beds began in earnest in late July. Coincidentally, this is also when Boo was given free reign of the house. This is Boo on his first day out after a couple of weeks in isolation in my wife’s office in the basement. That week began his gradual introduction into the house at large, we’d let him out for a while but at night or when we were away we still kept him isolated.

Boo was shy and nervous when we adopted him and you could see on his face how exploring the house and meeting the pets was both exciting and exhausting for him, so we paced his introduction even slower than normal. Several times on this first day he’d go up and explore the ground level and meet the other pets and then come back down to Ellie’s dog bed for a little rest. The bed was right outside my wife’s office so he could enjoy a taste of his newfound freedom and yet easily scoot back in to his comfort zone if needed.

He showed little fear of Ellie from the start, and for her part, she was nonplussed by the arrival of the little fellow. So when he stole her bed, she laid down beside it on the hard floor, making life a little easier for the kitten as he began to understand what it meant to be home.

The Dog Bed

Ellie has always enjoyed sleeping on our bed but age has taken a toll on her legs and the other day my wife came home and discovered Ellie had jumped onto the bed but couldn’t jump back down. So after helping her down she took the bed and box springs off the frame and put them on the floor, where they’ll stay.

Spooning

Peace, love, & understanding.

Turnabout is Fair Play

My wife picked up a couple of cat beds to hopefully reduce the cats taking over Ellie’s dog bed, but instead one of the new cat beds got an unexpected guest.

“I Bet My New Dog Bed Sure Is Nice”

Every time I read the headlines of the day’s news, I wish I could sprinkle a bit of Ellie’s personality on everyone around the world. We replaced one of her dog beds but the cats took to it before she had the chance to try it out. She settled for the carpet rather than drive the interlopers out.

They don’t come any sweeter than our Ellie.

HypnoCat

Don’t look directly into his eyes!

Me & Sam & Boo & Who

Sam and Boo snuggle up on my legs as we watch Doctor Who.

The Unexpected M

I’ve mostly used SLR’s for everything I shoot but for a while now I’ve suspected I’d be happier with multiple cameras targeted at different uses. Most of all I wanted something less obtrusive than my SLR for shooting the pets, or possibly something with better quality in the low light I shoot them in. There were a number of potential candidates amongst full-frame cameras, quality fixed-lens compacts, or mirrorless cameras.

On the day we adopted shy little Boo I could wait no longer so it was time to choose. That choice was Canon’s EOS M, surprisingly so since I was rather disappointed with it when it launched the previous year. But the price had plummeted to less than $300 for the camera and its 22mm pancake lens, and at that price the flaws of the camera suddenly became easier to bear. I’ve never spent so little on photography and received so much in return.

I’ve rarely shot with my SLR since. I still use it for wildlife shooting and anything that requires fast camera work, but for nearly everything else it’s been the charming little M.

Am I glad I waited so long to order it? Yes and no. On the one hand, the camera’s flaws would have been hard to live with at its debut price. On the other, perhaps I could have gotten a picture of Scout sleeping on me like this. But such is the clarity of hindsight, I had no reason to expect she’d die so relatively young.

I can’t change the past, only learn from it, and so by now I have pictures of all the pets sleeping on me. Sometimes all at once. On this occasion it was just me and Boo, snuggled in between my legs, one of my favorite shots of him.

The Unexpected Upgrade

You’ve by now noticed that updates here slowed dramatically this year, and while there are many reasons for that, one major reason was rather prosaic: my laptop kept dying.

For many years I’ve been a laptop-only user, and while I did add a desktop late last year, I still use my laptop for nearly everything. Unfortunately it developed intermittent failures which were hard to diagnose and it became frustrating enough that I used the laptop less and less as the year wore on. On its latest visit to Apple a couple of weeks ago they started to check it in for repairs, but then looked at its repair history and wondered if I’d mind if they gave me a new one instead.

Would I mind?

I was a little puzzled until I realized they wanted to replace it with a new new one, as in the laptops that were announced just a few weeks earlier. Apple had discontinued the regular MacBook Pro like mine so they wanted to give me the newest Retina model. It doesn’t have some features my old one had, but I didn’t need them, so they custom ordered one for me and it came in late last week.

I loved that old laptop and would have preferred that it had never developed problems in the first place, but given that it did, the timing worked out well. It’s hard to believe that laptops have progressed so far in less than three years.

It’s noticeably thinner, and more importantly, lighter. Faster, yet quieter. With a much better display, and much faster storage. And yet also with much better battery life.

It’s delightful.