Category: Pets

Spread Eagle

Our dog Ellie lays on the kitchen tile with her legs splayed out to her side in July 2013

Ellie shows off her classic spread eagle pose on the floor of the kitchen of our house in 2013. It became her most common sleeping position late in life when getting up became more of a challenge as she could push off with her front legs to compensate for her weakening back legs, but it was always in her repertoire from when we first adopted her in 2009. On this particular morning we had adopted Boo the day before, he was staying with my wife in her office while Ellie and Sam and Emma were with me.

The Squirrel Blind

Our cat Sam looks out the window of the windowed section of the kitchen of our house in Portland, Oregon on Halloween in October 2014

The kitchen of our house in Portland had a little section where the windows extended out of the house, providing an expansive view up and down squirrel alley. Fortunately it was down near the end of the counter, away from the food prep section, as our smallest wildlife watchers found it irresistible no matter what rules existed about walking on the counters.

The Handsome Fellow

Our cat Templeton looks into the camera with his green eyes while resting in our backyard in Portland, Oregon in the evening of August 1, 2003

I was editing this picture of Templeton from 2003 so I could bring its associated blog post back online only to discover there was no associated post, and it never even made it up onto my old site before then, but better late than never. Templeton was a handsome little fellow with his green eyes and gray tuxedo and had a charming personality to match. I wasn’t a cat person when I met him a decade prior when my wife and I started dating, how little I understood then of how he would change my life. I didn’t get my first camera until college or grad school, the most basic of point and shoots, with my first SLR in my last year of grad school, so I’m thankful I switched to digital in 2000 and began photographing him more often. This picture encapsulates a lot for me, I took it during our first full year in the house in Portland where we would live for sixteen years. I think of him every day as I do all the pets and am thankful for the pictures I have to remember him by, he was a little charmer!

Calm Before the Storm

Our dog Ellie sleeps on her dog bed in the dining room of our house in Portland, Oregon in February 2018

Storms approached both literally and figuratively as Ellie slept peacefully in our dining room in Portland in February 2018. Snow would arrive that evening, making the walk to the train to the airport a little more interesting the next morning as I left for my interview in Arizona. A whirlwind followed as I’d get an offer right away, kicking off a storm of activity for the next month in the mad dash to get here. Through it all one of our biggest worries was her health, she had recovered from some minor issues she was having but we were about to put her through a three day drive. She did great on the trip though, we found a wonderful vet pretty quickly after we arrived, and remarkably Ellie would not only see us to Arizona but into the home we bought a year later. She was such a tremendous blessing in so many ways, this pup.

Calm in the Storm

Our dog Ellie basks in the sunshine with her head raised up next to the dragon statue on the playground at Irvington School in Portland, Oregon on December 10, 2017. Original: _DSC7163.ARW7163

Ellie basks in the warmth of the rare winter sun in Oregon, taken in December 2017 at her turnaround point that morning, the dragon statue at Irvington School. My team had been laid off a month earlier, and though that threw us into a period of uncertainty and stress that at times it feels like I haven’t fully recovered from, I so loved getting to walk her every morning that I sometimes have to catch myself from remembering this period overly fondly. We always started our walks at the nearby dog park but after that I let her choose her path and thankfully since I started saving the GPS tracks of every walk that fall, I can look back now at the routes she chose, depending on what she smelled with that amazing nose and what her body felt capable of that day.