Category: Pets

My Familiar

Our cat Sam looks at me from my futon as he rests beside my pillow

How many hours have I spent with Samwise sleeping on me? A million? A million billion? It’s in the right ballpark.

Looking Up at Scout

A portrait of Scout as I look up at her as she sits on the dresser in our bedroom in our house in Portland, Oregon in May 2007

Lots of exciting camera news around this time as Nikon and Canon finally get serious about mirrorless cameras. I’m thankful for the capabilities of modern cameras, they make it so much easier to take even simple portraits like this one of my beloved Scout at six years old. But even my basic setup of 2007, the Canon 20D and 24-85mm lens, was so much more advanced than the film setup I started with in the 1990’s. Whatever camera you have, shoot the things you love with it, the memories will mean far more than whatever technical flaws exist in the image.

The Empty House

Our cats Templeton and Scout on the hardwood floors of our empty living and dining rooms

Templeton and Scout on the empty hardwood floors of our living and dining rooms in our house in Portland in 2004. We weren’t moving in, we had been there a couple of years. We weren’t moving out, we’d be there fourteen more. We just never had furniture in the front two rooms of the house the entire time we lived there. It was a bigger house than we needed but all of the smaller houses we looked at weren’t as good a fit in other ways. For all of that this house was much smaller than our previous home in Keizer which was ridiculously large for what we needed but again in other ways was the best home for us from what was available. That house was completely carpeted while this one had hardwood throughout but both cats quickly made adjustments to avoid running into cabinets and walls.

Templeton Says Goodbye

Our gray tuxedo cat Templeton watches the dying light from the gate in our backyard late on a summer evening in 2007 in Portland, Oregon

Memory is a fickle thing. I’ve been editing old images in with the new so I can bring some old blog posts back online and was ready to update the picture of Templeton watching the dying light late on a summer evening in 2007. I was a bit dumbfounded to find I had never put the picture online, though I seem to remember doing so. I even remember the name of the post! I looked at the old site though and it was nowhere to be found, I guess I meant to post it, wrote the post in my head, but never got around to it. Better late than never.

Vibram

Our dog Ellie lies on the tile with dog shoes on all four paws, the soles are made of Vibram like my hiking shoes

We’re trying out a couple of types of dog shoes for Ellie, I was amused to see this pair has the same Vibram soles as my hiking shoes. They are designed for outdoor use but we got them for indoor use as her arthritic back legs are bothering her more now and she can struggle on the slippery tile. On Wednesday she couldn’t get up after we came back from our walk and was clearly anxious about it so my wife took her to the vet. We’ve been trying out some additional pain medication, the vet took her off one and switched to another and Ellie showed immediate improvement. She’s moving about more normally and has rolled around in the little patch of grass in the backyard a few times. We’ve only had her wear the shoes for short periods so far and she tolerates them OK.