She's Very Happy To See You

Barley, a dog, sits with a large box of goldfish crackers and an enormous plush turtle. She does not seems to consider either to be worthy of chomping. The size of an object appears to be pretty essential to Barley’s understanding of their function. Her default understanding of plush toys, for example, is that they are very likely toys for her to chomp, but this ceases to be true if the toy in question is sufficiently large. She has never, for example, evinced any hint that she considers this huge plush turtle to be viable prey, and instead appears to think of it as a pillow. She also doesn’t seem to know that this box of goldfish contains delicious crackers. Thank goodness, because she certain has the tools to get into the insides of both of these friend-shaped objects.

Barley, a dog, sniffs at the base of a metal fence, beyond which is a lawn that definitely consists of astroturf. Some time ago, I expressed confusion about the uncannily perfect grass in this yard. Turns out, not only does this lawn consist entirely of astroturf (horror!), it turns out that such astroturf lawns are increasingly popular in this neighborhood (double horror!). I struggle to wrap my head around this decision. To be sure, lawns are an expensive to maintain, but there are yard options that don’t feel like being stuck in the model home diorama from Bettlejuice. Plastic grass also feels bad, whether to walk on or to sit on. So I find myself coming back to the question: Who is this for? This can’t possibly increase the property value, can it? This doesn’t look good from the street, so surely it also looks bad through the windows, right? How does this become a popular options, with a half-dozen yards done up this way within a two-block radius? Truly, humans are a mysterious species.

Barley, a dog, enjoys her dinner at her designated feeding station, complete with multiple layers of splash protection. For several years now, at the advice of my vet, Barley has received her meals with water. The trouble, it seems, is that she’s not especially fluid-motivated, and so often seems to forget to drink enough water, and we can ensure she stays hydrated by making lapping up a bunch of water a prerequisite to collecting every last morsel of food in her dish. Given this approach, however, steps need to be taken to establish a splash zone, because she’s not going to eat her food any more calmly just because it’s floating in water!

Barley, a dog, grips the base of a stick in her paws as she gnaws at it, having turned her head almost 90 degrees to do so. A subtle but substantial change that Barley has displayed over the years is a growing manual dexterity. While still entirely outclasses by all of nature’s beasts with genuine hands (such as raccoons), she is, today, able to position her paws in ways that consistently stabilize objects of interest and provide appropriate counter-pressure to her chomps. When she was first rescued, she really couldn’t do so at all and instead relied entirely on her mouth to accomplish things. This isn’t limited to objects, either. In those early weeks, she would gently nip at you to get your attention (a bad habit we had to train out of her right away, since it could be easily misconstrued). Today, she will instead prod you with her paw if she feels she’s not getting her due attention, which she never used to do. Granted, this aptitude has grown very slowly over many years, so it was easy to overlook, but the contrast today with how she used her paws back in 2018 had become really clear.

Barley, a dog, lies on a very familiar dog bed amidst the scuffed legs of a hotel room desk. Barley doesn’t spend all that much time in truly novel environments. On any given day, she is either at home (maximally familiar), or in my office at work (also very familiar), or hanging out in my car while I pop into the store for something, or walking the street in a neighborhood she’s now been exploring for most of her life. Even her vacations are, generally, a return of one sort or another, such as visits to my parents. So I don’t have too many occasions to see how nervous she gets in new places any more. I figure, better safe than sorry, so I generally bring one or two of her dog beds, so she can have an island of familiar scent if she wants one, as she did in this photo of us spending the day in a hotel room.

Juniper, a dog, is photographed up close as she sleeps, a tiny blep just barely visible between her lips. Not every dog who is asleep looks contented. It’s often not too hard to spot a dog who has fallen asleep nervous, or cold, or otherwise guarded. By contrast, it soothes the soul to see a truly relaxed dog, who feels safe in their environs and has allowed their bodies to entirely relax as they fall into a deep and dreamy sleep. Given her nervous disposition, my heart is especially warmed to see Juniper experiencing such contented rest. No doubt she is pictured here dreaming of knowing the perimeter is secure so she can watch her favorite baking show.

Barley, a dog, bleps for the camera while standing on a sunny deck with her blue monkey. So, maybe that’s too strong; Spring is on the way, to be sure, but it’s still pretty rainy these days. Even so, with a cold snap in the rear view and the sun making itself felt more and more often, Barley can expect to go on some more indulgent, less perfunctory walks in the near future. You know, just as soon as I’m working a bit less hard. But soon!

Barley, a dog, lies in the lap of luxury with her face fully buried in a tub of Nancy’s Probiotic Nonfat Yogurt. It has recently come to my attention that the French word for “barley” is “orge” (pronounced “orj”). This fits, because have you seen how this girl eats her food?! Truly, it’s like no one ever tried to teach her table manners. Plus, she came from a swamp! There are many parallels here to consider.

Barley, a dog, inspects melting snow that is peppered with strikingly clear crow footprints. As the snow began to melt, the varieties of footprint that became visible on the blacktop of the road shifted toward finer and shallower imprints. Coming home from work, I was delighted to see that the local crows had brought their murder to the neighborhood once more, no doubt in search of goodies put out by their local fans. Given the curious effect snowfall has on litter, I have to assume they were discovering all manner of edible detritus as the veil of winter was lifted.

Barley, a dog, inspects a snowfield now thoroughly criss-crossed by dog an human footprints. If walking a dog in freshly-fallen morning snow is an illuminating experience vis-a-vis the trace evidence that dogs are sensitive to, walking a dog later that day makes for a disorienting mess. As a rule, normal pedestrians with sensible destinations don’t wander out onto patches of grass, so most of the tracks here seems to be dog-walkers letting their pooches stretch their legs and do their business. However, once 15 to 20 hours have passed since the last snow fall, everyone in the neighborhood has had at least one chance to walk their dog as part of a daily routine, and deconstructing whose footprints are whose becomes a forensic nightmare. No doubt the rich world of scent provides a much less confusing portrait of recent events, so we see here the point where the tracks-to-smells metaphor breaks down and Barley’s world of smells remains beyond my conceptual grasp.

Barley, a dog, lies on the futon with her head on a pillow, gazing out at a snowy yard. “There’s nothing prettier than new fallen snow on a clear, freezing moonlit night… through a window, that is.” -Bill Watterson, “Calvin and Hobbes” (December 26, 1988).

Barley, a dog, investigates smells near the base of a tree. The recent snowfall reveals that the tree was recently visited by another dog approaching from another angle. A fun consequence of taking Barley for a walk the morning after fresh snow has fallen is that a pretty substantial proportion of the pedestrian tracks you come across are from other dog-walkers whose day started a bit earlier than your own. This lets our puny human eyes see in much starker terms which landmarks have been of interest to other dogs. In this photo, note the human footprints that walk across the frame behind the tree; and note also, the smaller footprints of a dog whose trajectory made a wide swing away from the human footprints to visit the tree before swinging back as they rejoined their person. It was very clear in context that Barley was interested in all the spots where prior dogs had left their footprints, but I don’t think Barley was using the footprints as her guide, her nose already being such a sensitive instrument. So it’s nice to be given a limited window into what she’s sensing from time to time.

Juniper, a dog, roots around inside her hollow cloth log to retrieve a hidden prize. Juniper doesn’t play the chase-and-thrash games with her toys that Barley does, and is generally quite delicate with them, but she loves a game of “pull the critters from the log.” The rules are simple: Someone hides some critters in the log, and then Juniper extracts them with all the haste of a parent pulling their kid out of harm’s way. After a few excited moments, the rescue is complete, and Juniper gets all wiggly and proud as she receives praise for doing such a good job. The cycle then repeats. Not that Juniper find the critters being in the log distressing or anything. Her anticipation as the critters are loaded back in for another round is palpable.

Barley, a dog, peers through the ap between two parked cars, both of which are quite thoroughly snowed in and snowed over in the dim light of an early morning. In retrospect, it looks like the town got one proper snow day this year, but at the time, it was not clear how long things were likely to remain disrupted. In the end, I elected to scrape and brush the accumulated snow drift off of my car and drive ever-so-slowly to work, and the roads fortunately never properly froze over. For her part, Barley remains confused by snow. She’s excited and intrigued to explore, but before too long seems to realize, “Hey, it’s really cold out today!” So long as there was snow on the ground, she really enjoyed going out on short walks.

Barley, a dog, snoozes on her huge bed with her caterpillar toy. Around here are multiple potted snake plants. Just before the cold snap hit, I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for months: buying more Sansevieria plants. The two plants I’ve had for the last couple years were getting very long in the tooth, and seemed to be doing poorly (probably some combination of their soil being depleted and lingering root rot). So I’ve repotted two of the plants into fresh soil and added three additional plants. This will hopefully up the oxygen levels in my apartment, because as the old plants got a bit worse for wear, the air in my apartment definitely felt rather more stale.

Barley, a dog, relaxes on a futon beside a window that is illuminated brightly by snow. The resulting contrast plunges the indoor portion of the shot into deep shadow. While photographing Barley exploring the snow is straightforward, doing so from indoors is deceptively difficult with even a fairly good camera phone. It’s easy to forget how good the human eye is at adjusting between dramatically different levels of light. To make this perfectly clear: Barley is not lying in a room with the lights off. That’s a fully illuminated room! The snow just brightens everything up so much that resolving the snowy scene beyond the glass narrows the aperture so much as to reduce Barley to being merely rim-lit.

Barley, a dog, pokes about amid accumulating snow, in a patch where all the plants have recently been trimmed back very aggressively. As the snow accumulation began to make itself felt, the weather’s ominous heaviness was enhanced by the recent decision to very aggressively trim back nearly all of the greenery around all the buildings. The motivation, no doubt, is that when Spring arrives, we’ll get a ton of new, green growth that will be more pleasing to the eye than the thick tangle of crisscrossing shrubs we had before, but for the time being, the flora already had a “my least qualified family member gave me this haircut” feel to it. As much as a dusting of snow makes this that much starker, I think Barley mostly sees it as opening new frontiers. These areas were, until a few weeks ago, wholly impassable, so now she wants to follow her nose and see what mysteries this newly revealed terrain might hold.

Barley, a dog, stands on the grass in her winter fleece as snow begins to stick to the nearby paved walkway. The snow is not yet sticking to the grass. Right at the start of a snowfall, before it’s clear how big it’s going to become, it’s always the paved pedestrian paths where the snow finds its first foothold. Unable to efficiently exchange heat with the earth beneath, they chill and become receptive surfaces. At that point, you’re better off walking anywhere else, especially on grass, which resists for quite a while longer than the paths do.

Barley, a dog, is photographed up close as she lies on an office carpet near some office furniture. While Barley clearly prefers the many soft options that home provides when it comes to sleeping deeply, she would also much rather come to the office with me during daylight hours than stay put while I work from home. That said, I don’t think she has any real concept of “going to work.” Unlike Juniper, she is not a Dog With A Job. Leaving home and going to work is not, for her, a mission to undertaken. It’s an adventure. I figure she sees the office a bit like how humans see a ski lodge: A cozy (it somewhat kitschy) base of operations from which to undertake recreational excursions.

Juniper, a dog, peeks her head out of her crate with a serious-seeming expression, a bit like a moray eel emerging from its hidey hole. Unlike Barley, who uses her crate exclusively as a dark, warm, soft space in which she can snooze, Juniper treats her crate like a general-purpose refuge. She will frequently hang out in her crate, wide awake, surrounded by her many plushies, which she also makes a point to carry to “safety.” Whereas Barley’s toys remain strewn about the place when she’s not playing with them, Juniper likes for all her toys to be safe, and she dutifully brings them to her refuge when she’s not playing with them. You know what they say: If she hides in a cave with the babies she saved, that’s a moray (♫that’s a moray!♪).