How many hours have I spent with Samwise sleeping on me? A million? A million billion? It’s in the right ballpark.
Category: Pets
Looking Up at Scout
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 Visit of the Magi
Two empty-handed magi discuss whose job it was to bring the presents for the infant king.
The Empty House
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
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.
Boo, Where Are Your Arms?
Boo may not have bones but he does have arms. Just not sure where he keeps them.
Vibram
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.
Ellie’s New Kicks
In Memory of Porter
In December 2008 we got an unusually heavy snow in Portland. You can draw a direct line between the day I took this picture and the day we adopted our dog Ellie. Our neighbor’s dog Porter saw me and came running over to say hello as he always did, always with the same enthusiasm, so I took a few pictures then put the camera down and played with him. He loved catching snowballs in the air and I so enjoyed my time with him that it got me thinking about getting a dog of our own. I had never given it much thought as I think our cat Templeton would have been miserable with a dog around. But he had died a year prior, and our three cats at the time had all met Porter and seemed fine with him, so my wife and I discussed it and a couple of weeks later we brought home Ellie.
Porter was always eager to see me the entire time we lived there, old age eventually slowed the speed at which he’d come bounding over but it never touched his enthusiasm. He loved to run back and forth across the yard with me and he loved to be petted. He was well loved by his family and lived a good long life until his health rapidly declined recently. I will always be grateful for this sweet pup, not just for his role in bringing Ellie into our lives, but for every time he made my world brighter just by saying hello.
Let’s Get Outside
“Let’s Get Outside” is an apt slogan for my hiking shoes but not for little Squeaks who, like all our cats, is indoors only. She doesn’t spend much time in cardboard boxes, sometimes I think she tries it just to understand why brother Boo loves them so.
