Barley, a dog, wades through a sea of green ivy alongside a street. Decorative ground ivy is perhaps Barley’s ideal ground cover. It’s soft (unlikely to contain any pokey or sticky bits), and its low density provides ample cover to conceal goodies, but it also doesn’t generally grow deep enough to impede Barley’s movement. As such, if we walk past some ivy, you can bet Barley’s going to want to check it out (which I’ll allow, under close scrutiny). It is also, to my occasional chagrin, a popular zone for bathroom breaks, which can leave me really having to do some spelunking if I’m to live up to my neighborly responsibilities and pick up after my dog.

Juniper, a dog, lies contentedly in a yard of patchy grass with a tennis ball between her front paws. As a dog with a well-defined turf and a duty to protect the homestead, Juniper shows a clear preference in how she relaxes in the yard. She keeps the house to her back, such that she can glance back only if needed. This lets her scan the yard to her left and her right, while keeping her front view faces towards a potential Wally encounter.

Barley, a dog, view up close in profile, with a mossy tree as a backdrop. Even during a week in which my workload keeps Barley’s walks short, she inevitably meets at least a few new people. The overriding theme of these encounters is (a) how sweet she is, and (b) what a good looking dog she is. It feels very silly to “be proud” of her winning good looks (truly something I had nothing to do with), but when some rando standing on a balcony shouts, “Hey, that’s a nice lookin’ dog!” from 100 feet away, I can’t help but feel my heart swell as if I somehow deserve a share of the credit.

Barley, a dog, sniffs at a bulky, chainsaw-hacked tree stump. If one looks closely, one can see that Barley is sniffing a concrete birdbath nestled amid the stump’s lumpy form, mostly occluded from the camera’s view. I was quite struck by this “statement stump,” which I presume was once a noble tree that fell sick and died (the newly-planted sapling beside it is no doubt a long-term investment), and Barley seemed quite taken with it as well. It was only after having taken the picture and advancing another few degrees around the stump that I saw a birdbath filled with very stagnant water, at which point I was much more discouraging of Barley’s curiosity.

Barley, a dog, rests on the futon, with her head beside her blue monkey toy atop a throw pillow. I’ve mentioned before how Barley has brief, intense “play” periods in which she thrashes the ever-loving dickens out of some soft toy, which end as abruptly as they begin in a big flop onto the futon. Here, we see Barley in the immediate aftermath of play, her heart still racing. What she seems to really love is me getting real close to her and the toy and just sort of hanging out for a bit. I suspect this is tapping into some primal instinct she has to “share the kill” following a successful hunt, which here presents as a sort of sit-down post-play debrief.

Barley, a dog, sniffs along the fringe of a concrete footpath. Just past her in frame, beside the path, is a body of standing water. On balance, smellier is better, particularly measured as the plurality of smells. Sure, there are specific strong smells that Barley isn’t wild about, but even “bad” smells warrant some level of investigation. All of this to say: Barley is absolutely down to investigate a murky pond. With floating greenery, ooh baby, even better. This requires some vigilance on my part, as she will get herself elbow-deep in some very viscous mud chasing down an olfactory lead if I let her.

Barley, a dog, speeds past a bench without giving it a second glance. This is a pretty bad picture, but know, dear reader, that it captures the chaotic energy of Barley setting off on a walk. She would certainly sprint through the halls like a lunatic if allowed to, so great are her dreams of the possibilities of the Outer Place.

Barley, a dog, stands amid a mostly empty expanse of gravel small rocks, and very short greenery, only to be dwarfed by a decorative pot large enough that she could curl up inside it. It’s perfectly reasonable that this yard seek out some planters, as the soil is very rocky and quite poor (probably because the surrounding terrain is very hilly), and I think this is quite a fetching object! I especially enjoy how it makes Barley look like she’s been hit with a shrink ray, or perhaps that she stumbled into a tavern for giants on Shots Night. Just so long as they spring for another couple planters when they’re able.

Juniper, a dog, holds one of her tiny toy chipmunks in her mouth. Two others lie beside her, as does the “hollow log” that the ‘munks can be stuffed into. Juniper remains a big fan of her trio of chipmunks. She has now learned how to play “rescue” with the hollow log that te chipmunks came with. She will watch intently as the chipmunks are stuffed into the log and, upon being given the green light, she then enthusiastically paws and snuffles about to extract each of the chipmunks in turn from inside the log. I presume this satisfies some deep, inscrutable hunting dog urge to pursue prey that have gone to ground, but she remains adorably gentle with her ‘munks otherwise.

Barley, a dog, stands on a staircase beneath a sunny window. A series of bottles and glasses, all made from different colors of glass, line the windowsill and capture the light. It’s very funny to me how most dog toys use bright, vibrant colors, given that dogs have very limited sensitivity to chroma along a blue-to-yellow spectrum but are otherwise colorblind. I know Barley has basically zero interest in or conception of human aesthetics (I feel quite confident that she’s never had a thought analogous to, “Hey, that looks pretty!”), but it tickles me that the appeal of this array of brightly colored glass is probably doubly inscrutable to her.

Barley, a dog, stands beside an enormous (and somewhat lumpy) heart sculpture on wheels in someone’s yard. I know I occasionally complain about the yard choices that people make, but I unironically love discovering a yard in which someone not only has art on display, but clearly made that art themselves. One of the reasons that the very idea of an HOA makes my blood boil is because I would be entirely down for everyone making their yard as powerful an expression of their creative vision as possible. Truly, I’m fine with however folks want to customize their patch. If you’re fortunate enough to have a yard, show us what you got!

Barley, a dog, cuts a striking pose as she stands on a shallow uphill slope beside some mossy stairs. I really don’t get a lot of opportunities to appreciate Barley in profile. She’s usually either facing toward me or walking directly away as I hold the leash. Here, we have a rare photo taken by me while someone else is holding the leash, and I gotta say, she’s one good-lookin’ dog. What a statuesque pose, delightful, 10/10.

Barley, a dog, really needs to smell this shrub in particular. In order to replenish my supply of Barley photos, I’ll often just have my phone at the ready, waiting for something to happen. It’s pretty much the only way to capture candid moments, because Barley’s certainly not going to hesitate for my benefit. In this case, I was planning on snapping a pic as she was trotting along, only for her to suddenly become very intense and nearly dislocate my shoulder in order to smell this shrub. After a solid 30 seconds of sniffing, she continued on about her day, albeit still pretty wound up. Moments like these remind me that she’s routinely having big feelings and (one presumes) making major discoveries, about which I will never have even the first clue.

Barley, a dog, sleeps on a futon with her head wedged entirely under a throw pillow. All told, Barley doesn’t have that many sleep poses. She generally falls along a continuum from “belly-out sprawl” to “fully-curled loaf.” Despite this, she manages to get herself into pretty silly positions because when she decides it’s nap time, she’ll make it work wherever she has landed. So I’m aways tickled when I look over my shoulder and see that while I wasn’t looking, she decided that becoming an Object Head was fine, actually.

Barley, a dog, stands on a metal utility hatch, no doubt unaware that some secret lies beneath. I don’t think twice about this style of corrugated steel hatch when I see one along the side of a building, but they’re more mysterious when there isn’t a building near, and even more so at what seems to be an unremarkable intersection. Now, sure, you’ll tell me that there’s probably some piece of municipal infrastructure beneath, like a gas main or an underground transformer, but I’ve seen my share of action hero secret identity media, so I’m still waiting for one of these to open up one day as I’m walking past and reveal some superhero’s VTOL vehicle making its triumphant appearance. Since this hatch is only just about Barley sized, I’d wager that the launch mechanism for Thunderbird 1 should just about fit here.

Juniper, a dog, yawns, inadvertently revealing her mouth full of sharp teeth. I love a good picture of a dog caught mid-yawn, because on the one hand, it’s a completely benign behavior by a sleepy creature who feels safe, and on the other, it’s a reminder of the formidable Natural Attacks that dogs possess. The depicted yawn is a particular favorite, because this squinty, effortful yawn has the look of the full-throated scream of a rock vocalist belting out the chorus, while also being situated in the context of surroundings that are only soft and comfy.

Barley, a dog, is mid-stride as she glances at a staircase, as if considering whether to ascend. Barley has no strong opinion one way or the other about stairs (the ascends and descends with similar ease and enthusiasm), but if she gets within about one body length of a staircase, one of her two “stair protocols” is liable to kick in. This has become automatic enough that I have to be careful when walking her past a staircase I have no intention of climbing, because if she decides to go for it while I’m not paying attention, I need to be light on my feet to avoid accidentally giving her a more-perilous-than-usual yank of the leash.

Barley, a dog, lounges on the futon, with paws tucked under her chin. The camera is close enough to her nose that it creates a fish-eye-lens effect, making her block-head seem even bigger than usual. It’s now a fairly settled scientific matter that domesticated dogs are big fans of eye contact (which, interestingly, is less true for wolves). This certainly seems to be true for Barley, who often gazes deeply in the eyes of her human interlocutors as they praise her sweet demeanor. What I find quite interesting is that, given the choice, Barley is usually more interested in bodily contact than she is in eye contact. If someone sits down on the futon, she turns her face away from them in order to flop her whole flank against their body in a big sprawling lean. I think eye contact is just one of several means to a more global end: immediate and continuous sensory information that she and another are currently Hanging Out.

Barley, a dog, tromps through a park toward a picnic table that is conspicuously positioned in the deep shape of several close, tall trees. I most frequently play host to out-of-town guests during the summer, when the Pacific Northwest’s gray drizzle gives way to a (mostly) really lovely stretch of summer. On more than one occasion, such guests have wondered aloud why the parks near my home all seem to have their picnic areas well out of the sunlight, often in shade that feels oppressively dark, even at midday. Residents of sunnier states are surprised to learn how willing the locals around these parts are to go to the park amid scattered showers. That said, there are limits, and if a table isn’t bolted down, there’s a good chance someone has needed to drag the table under a tree’s canopy to at least keep the food dry.

Barley, a dog, sits on a futon, her fur still visibly damp, with a white towel draped over her shoulders. And just like that, Barley’s clean once more! The big payoff of a Barleybath is a really unreasonable level of softness that lasts 4-5 days. Don’t get me wrong, her fur is always very pleasant to pet. It’s just that most of the time, it has a certain grain to it, and petting against that grain is really more of a “giving scritches” experience (which, of course, she is also very into). In this post-bath window, however, Barley is at her most velvety, and she’s as soft as a toy, every which way you pet her.