Barley, a dog, sniffs along the left, grassy edge of a gravel road with lush greenery on either side and leafy branches hanging overhead, casting pleasant, gentle shadows. Quite a few of the neighborhoods near work are crisscrossed by city blocks that remain unpaved. These “Roadway Not Improved” blocks are a remnant of a bygone era in which it was up to property owners to build the roads that would connect their unincorporated parcels to the rest of the roadways. Today, they feel to a townie like myself as though someone forgot to “finish the town.” Giving it a bit more thought, however, I suspect these roads have remained unimproved for decades because of more than just homeowners trying to avoid the considerable extra expense. Provided you’ve got a car that can handle a few potholes, these unpaved side streets are kind of nice. They get a lot less traffic, so they feel pedestrian-friendly (which is good, because they’re also usually too narrow to support sidewalks), and the road’s substrate is such that, if a car does pass through, you can hear them coming. Beyond that, there’s a rustic “less is more” aesthetic that appeals to me about these blocks. Just let stuff grow, growing things are easy on the eye! Replacing this scene with an entirely forgettable asphalt surface would no doubt have some advantages, but I’d consider it a visual downgrade.

Barley, a dog, leaps after a yellow seahorse toy that has been thrown. Both Barley and the toy show signs of motion blur, as well as a more subtle halo of “unenhancement blur.” Picking up on last week’s theme of “photos of my dog that are blurry,” I revisited this older photo recently and noticed something interesting. Barley and her seahorse Stella are blurry - this is unsurprising, since both are in motion. However, look carefully at the areas around them both, in particular the carpet. The ‘radius’ of blurring caused directly by Barley’s motion looks to be within 16 pixels or so, as judged from tracking the blur on her collar. The carpet in the background around Barley, however, is blurry to out to four or five times that distance. Go ahead and zoom in, see if you can spot the weird halo effect in the carpet around Barley. It’s at though parts of the camera had more time to get its act together, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was looking as it got closer to the action. I suspect this is a tell regarding just how much post-processing a camera phone does before presenting you with an image. I bet this camera took a lengthy burst of captures from its CMOS sensor, did an analysis of which regions were sufficiently stable to keep, and stitched this photo together from a mix of high-data/low-speed sampling from the periphery and low-data/high-speed sampling from the objects in motion. That…

Juniper, a dog, hangs out in her crate with her beloved stuffies, watching out the open door from within the shadow cast by a crocheted blanket draped over its top. Juniper will (approximately) play fetch, but when she runs to get one her plush toys, it’s almost always to carry it to safety in her crate. At any given time, most of her toys are in her crate. If she’s going to play with one of her toys outside her crate, it’s usually because she’s already very relaxed. Toys + excitement = the “gotta get them to safety!” game. It’s a game she seems to enjoy; she’s not distressed by her toys being out and about. But she does like to decompress in there when she’s overly activated, so one presumes she’s looking out for their wellbeing.

Barley, a dog, sniffs at the base of a spiky ball of a shrug, about as tall as she is. Since dogs seem to have a collect agreement as to which landmarks are suitably appealing to become places to leave their mark, Barley’s investigations make her seem like some sort of shrub snob. She is not interested in your flowers, get out of here with flowers. Give her them shruuuubs! I feel like I’m watching a kid pick out the lima beans from their plate of mixed canned vegetables. “No to those, but yes to this!”

Barley, a dog, is out of focus in the foreground. Above her is a piece of driftwood, balanced precariously over blue water atop concrete wave breakers. At the tip of that piece of wood sits a tiny, barely discernable bird. Unlike yesterday’s photo, the subject of this photo is in focus: That tiny brown raptor sitting way out on the end of that balanced piece of wood. It remained perfectly still on its strange perch, apart from some small head movements, even after I spent a while waiting to see what it would do. Barley, for her part, never even seemed to notice the bird, being much more preoccupied with smelling and tasting the salt-water air.

Barley, a dog, stands in front of a striking tree. She is both out of focus and blinking at the time of the photo. I’ve certainly taken plenty of bad pictures of Barley that I’ve deleted, but I’m impressed by how perfectly I failed with this one. We have a nice, stable shot of the wrong subject, with Barley just out of focus enough to feel like an interloping defect in her own photo, and I somehow caught her mid-blink! It just goes to show, no matter how much the camera loves its subject, there’s always going to need to be a photographer who isn’t asleep at the wheel to ensure that the resulting photo is any good!

In the left panel, Barley, a dog, sits behind a screen door, her tail wagging fast enough to create motion blur. In the right panel, she looks up excitedly at someone approaching, whose legs are just coming into the frame. Barley handles being left on her own well, inasmuch as she doesn’t whine, doesn’t howl, doesn’t act out or get destructive. There is every indication that she pines silently for the departed for a little while, then goes to sleep. But she never really spends that much time alone - it’s rare for her to be on her own more than two or three hours - and I still wonder whether, in spite of her good behavior, she still experiences sadness when her humans depart. Her enthusiasm whenever anyone familiar arrives, whether they’ve been gone for ten minutes or six months, is always quite pronounced, so because her time alone is actually pretty minimal, I don’t think it’s out of the question that her joy at folks arriving probably adds up to a net positive when balanced against her sadness at folks leaving.

Barley, a dog, walks past a mysterious pile of something that is covered in a heavy green plastic tarp, the entire perimeter of which is weighed down by large, flat stones. Look, I know this is probably some pile of boring raw materials that, for whatever reason, need to avoid getting rained on while some project is in progress, but I for the life of me cannot get the thought out of my head that a shrub got in over its head with some loan sharks and is now getting violently iced by blocking the rays of the life-giving sun. What kind of racket has this yard got going on?!

Barley, a dog, stands on a wooden deck in the late afternoon and faces the sun. Barley closes her eyes and extends her tongue, making a little blep. Barley looks away from the sun and extends her tongue more fully, touching her nose. Barley will quite often, stop and deliver these thousand-yard stares that appear very thoughtful. It’s only by watching her nose and the subtle rhythm of her ribcage to see that she’s probably not looking at all, but is instead smelling. Indeed, she almost always does this facing into the wind, it’s just that the air motion can be so subtle as to hardly register as a breeze if you aren’t paying attention. Having given a sufficient sniff, the tongue must do its thing, and reset her sniffer for maximum acuity.

Juniper, a dog, rests on her giant dog bed with her beloved and immaculate monkey plush. The extent to which Juniper Is Baby, even as she is solidly middle-aged, is something only witnessed by those she has become fully comfortable around. For all her wariness, all her patrolling of the perimeter, all her barking at passing cars, I think the thing Juniper wants most dearly is for things to be safe and chill. Inevitably, some of the unrest in her life comes from within, but I don’t doubt that Juniper hopes that someone could Take Care Of It and let her unwind.

Barley, a dog, stands before a shallow earthen embankment around a shadowed depression in the ground. It is a sunny day. Here’s what the summer’s multiple heat waves have managed to do to the on-again-off-again pond that offered brief refuge to those ducks I posted about a bit ago. Well, nothing here for a duck right now. This will serve merely as a potential duck getaway for now, until the seasons bring back the rains and pairs of ducks who need some alone time.

Barley, a dog, stands on a sidewalk that extends straight ahead to a vanishing point. Because the surrounding yards are lush in their floral appointments and fencing, this vanishing point is the only one available within the frame. I’m a big fan of “just walking around a bunch,” but the professional grind of adult life has been such that, until I became a dog owner, there wasn’t usually time to do so. My favorite experience of walking around is getting a feel for a neighborhood. Even neighborhoods that feel bad or dull are interesting for their ability to evoke such feelings. I recognize, though, that my ability to turn my experience of a neighborhood into an overall conceptual object I can ponder after the fact, requires a big-picture perspective on the world that Barley probably isn’t bringing to the table. I imagine her worldview is far more fragmentary and disconnected. “Oh hey, I can smell the ocean today, cool (End of thought).” My impression is that she has a pretty poor navigational sense for any space larger than a small house, so it may well be that the idea of “a neighborhood” is already too large for her mental buffer.

Barley, a dog, relaxes on her fluffy new dog bed, her limbs sinking deep into the fluffy piling of the plush texture. For the first week or so, Barley gave the new dog bed a wider berth than I would have expected, and I was beginning to worry that she didn’t much like it, but I think she just needed to get used to it. It’s a little too slidey for her taste, I think, and I might put some of that adhesive webbing for carpets on the bottom to make it a little more stable, but I may not need to, as she’s getting the hang of how much support it provides when she flops down onto it.

Barley, a dog, lifts her paw as she is about to step down from the curb and into the street, because further passage is blocked by a flowering bush. One of the thousand little things I enjoy watching Barley do is evaluate how to navigate changes in elevation. Often, these moments of assessment are fleeting, but they’re not instantaneous. Even stepping down from this curb, a smaller altitude change than a typical staircase step, warrants a momentary focusing of her attention, which I can see from where I’m standing by watching her ears pivot forward to better take in any sounds on her current heading.

Barley, a dog, tugs at once end of a thoroughly chewed stick while her buddy, a golden retriever, tugs at the other. It’s been a good summer for doggy playdates, and Barley has had a number of highly stimulating hangouts with bigger, younger dogs who are happy to test the limits of her modest endurance. What’s been especially nice is that once there’s an element of routine to it all, there’s very little need for the two to re-determine their relative dominance roles. They can instead settle right into important matters, like whose stick this is.

Barley, a dog, curls up under a bench seat and peers outward vigilantly. I’ve written in the past about Barley’s fearful aversion to big badda booms, and I thought for sure that the month of July was going to be a breeze when she handled the fireworks on the 4th just fine (admittedly, it was an uncharacteristically quiet Fireworks Day in my neighborhood this year). So I was caught off guard by her reaction when, a couple weeks later, a major thunderstorm rolled through without much warning. Big, window-rattling thunder sent Barley in search of shelter, and I discovered her trying out hiding spots she’s never tried before! Among others, she curled up in an unlit bathroom and wouldn’t come when called, which led to me wandering the apartment for several minutes trying to find her. Thankfully, the storm was as fast-moving as it was violent, and within 20 minutes the weather was back to normal, but Barley stayed spooky for hours, only really returning to her normal self after she had some dinner. (Full disclosure: This is not a photo from that particular storm, but rather a different ‘take shelter’ incident some years earlier. In her most recent panic, she insisted on staying in very dark rooms, and I figured in that context that it would be a bad time to use my flash.)

Juniper, a dog, gingerly eats a sampling of mixed cooked vegetables from an artichoke-themed bowl. In contrast to Barley (who will eat almost anything), Juniper is a notoriously picky eater. Partly, this is a matter of anxiety: She usually only eats when she feels safe, and as such (a) won’t eat just anywhere (having her back to an open room is not the ambiance she’s looking for) and (b) will hold off eating for an alarmingly long time if things haven’t “settled” (e.g., if there are houseguests). But beyond that, she is also discerning. She loves cheese, but if you hide a pill she needs to eat in some cheese, you need to watch her carefully to make sure she doesn’t eat around the pill and discard it. So it’s quite interesting that she is as interested as she is in the food the humans are eating. There is a social dynamic that she clearly buys into, because if there’s a big dinner with a lot of prep and she’s given just a little bit of the food to sample, she seems to set her standards aside, eats whatever she is given enthusiastically, and then trots off with what seems for all the world like a sense of accomplishment.

Barley, a dog, trots along the earthen ground beside a fence made of spaced horizontal boards. I’m sometimes given to wonder: What’s the best type of fence for dogs? I don’t mean what type of fence is best for dog owners. I mean, if we accept as a given that a barrier must be erected that a dog cannot cross, what properties should that barrier have that best serve the short- and long-term interests of that dog? I think spaced boards, almost certainly, right? If I were a dog, I’d want to see what’s on the other side of the fence, and a nice spacing lets scents come through. Probably, a horizontal spacing would also be preferred, since there’s bound to be a gap that’s pretty comfortably eye-level. So maybe this is the perfect fence?! Much to consider.

Barley, a dog, snoozes atop a bedspread, seeming especially flat today. As a one-time Florida Dog, Barley doesn’t shy away from heat, and even managed tolerate it better than some of her floofier dog buddies. Given some of the heat waves we’ve experienced in recent weeks, a pretty common reaction to getting home from a walk of even moderate length has been to rehydrate and then pass entirely out, sleeping way more deeply than she normally does at midday.

Barley, a dog, walks through a world that, to the naked eye, seems almost suspiciously uniform in its textures. Since my walking-the-dog photos are often very spontaneous, I don’t recall having more than a fleeting notion, “hey, nice yard coming up,” as I fished my phone out of my pocket with my free hand. Looking at the photo now, it’s honestly almost too perfect. What neat and tidy mulch, so uniform in its height and miraculously kept off the sidewalk. What healthy, vibrant plants! Even the sidewalk has a “high-res public domain texture pack” energy to it. What if this is all a simulation, including me?! What if I’m a piece of software written for Barley’s benefit?! (Obviously, there’s no question that Barley is a genuine guest of the virtual space, because all agree that she’s a Real One.)