Barley, a dog, peeks over the top of a sofa to peer at the camera through a window. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase looms in the background. Barley has spent enough time scoping out my parents as they garden that she isn’t willing to assume that someone merely being in the yard should be treated as sufficient reason to think they’re about to come back in the house. Here, we see a wary hopefulness: She’d like for us to come back into the house, but her excitement doesn’t kick in until we’re in the right part of the yard.

Barley, a dog, climbs up a shallow set of concrete stairs that follow a gentle curve. An environment with a lot of hills presents some clear complications to those fixin’ to stroll. The essence of a comfortable stroll, I think, is to be able to lose track of what your feet are doing, and this is precisely what you do not want to do while descending a staircase. I figure these steps are just about as long as they can safely get: Any shallower a grade, and the steps would be longer than a comfortable stride length, with the eventual risk of a rounding error and a lip misjudged. Barley, being as close as she is to the action, of course has this fully under control.

Barley, a dog, rests on a sofa with her Christmas mouse and black rubber toy. The sofa is protected by a holiday-themed throw, tucked into the cushions. I am given to believe that my parents use their sofas without covers most of the time, but it’s getting genuinely hard to imagine the living room without a rotating array of throws and blankets tucked into the cushions to protect them from Barley’s paws. For her part, Barley partakes of the furniture enthusiastically, the better to hang out with us up close and in contact.

Juniper, a dog, is curled up against her husky toy, forming a smaller dog orb resting upon a larger dog bed orb. Juniper is no stranger to doing a big lean against someone and getting a big hug, but she’s plenty crafty enough to make use of her surroundings to be gently snugged from all sides. I think, if she could manage it, she would welcome the opportunity to float weightless in snugspace, hugged by the universe.

Barley, a dog, stands next to a hedge shaped into a t-shaped tetramino consisting of roughly one-meter cubes. I’ve mentioned before getting a kick out of people giving their yards a very Minecraft feel by shaping some bit of shrubbery into a cube. This, however, is on a whole new level. I suspect it will be a little less cube-ish when all it regrows all its leaves, but seeing stuff like this in the wild makes me want to check whether I’ve got any hedge in my inventory to fill in the gaps.

Barley, a dog, lies on a bed next to a squishy Christmas mouse toy. Barley stomps the Christmas mouse right on its face while vigorously worrying at one of its ears. Despite making out like a bandit in this year’s gift exchange, Barley’s favorite new toy is also one of the cheapest, a deeply discounted Squishmallow knockoff, an elastic egg of a thing. It’s just big enough that it’s a real mouthful to try to chomp, and it’s so squishy that it seems as though Barley can’t get good purchase on anything other than its few minor extremities. So, it’s holding up pretty well so far!

Barley, a dog, stands beside a row of oversized Xmas bulbs arrayed like flowers emerging from a flower bed. No doubt this is to do a bit with my own frame of mind, but my impression while walking Barley during the last month or so is that Xmas decorations went up pretty late, only really seeming to materialize in full force about a week before the federal holiday itself. As a matter of pure speculation, I wonder if this is partly to do with how historically warm and wet the winter has been so far. More than just not being the most pleasant weather to be out in, I feel at some level like December snuck up on people a lot more easily this year than is had done historically. As such, I feel confident that people are going to leave their decorations up until pretty late into January to compensate.

Barley, a dog, is nervously parked under a desk on a hastily improvised dog bed made from a towel. Barley’s become slightly less nervous about certain kinds of Sky Noise (upstairs footfalls are very run-of-the-mill these days), but thunder and fireworks both remain sources of vexation. The trouble is that they’re both quite infrequent, so Barley has no real hope of habituating to them. Unfortunately, this made for a predictably fraught New Year’s Countdown. We made her as comfortable as we could, since she could hardly be coaxed out from under this table.

Barley, a dog, pins down a dragon toy with the year “2023” written on its foot as she chomps on its floppy horns. As much as I’m grateful for my good fortune this year, it’s hard to ignore how awful this year has been for so many people. While my sober assessment is that the turning of the calendar page will result in more of the same overall, it is my pledge to you all that Barley will continue to radiate a blissful, blameless innocence for all to enjoy. Best wishes and warmth for the coming year.

Barley, a dog, is photographed in extreme close-up as she lies on her side. Her eyes have gone wide a moment before the photo is taken. I’ve made much of how tricky it is to capture Barley’s most relaxed states photographically because, like the electron, she is very sensitive to being observed. I think her eyes have gone comically wide here because she needs to open her eyes wide for her left eye to see me clearly over the ridge of her snoot.

Juniper, a dog, is bundled up warm in a white-and-baby-blue snowflake-themed blankie. As much as Juniper likes to maintain her vigil atop the sofa, watching out the window, even proper double-paned glass can only do so much to keep out the cold. When it’s chilly outside, she quite likes being pampered with something snuggly.

Barley, a dog, peeks her head under an overhanging hedge, thanks to a low wall that elevates it above the sidewalk. As much of her time as Barley spends surveying edges of hedges, she still gets relatively few chances to do on on hedges that are above her eye line. She certainly made up for those missed opportunities here: She was so interested in checking out the full run of this hedge that I was worried she was about to get bopped on the nose by some concealed creature whose scent she was tracking.

Barley, a dog, lies on her side and looks at the camera expectantly as she raises one paw up a bit. Barley is, of course, a fan of belly rubs, but she’s especially a fan of having her pectoral muscles rubbed, from her clavicle down to the base of her sternum. She will invite such rubs explicitly when approached by a trusted human, as seen here. While developed, these muscles aren’t hypertrophic by any stretch, and she is fully relaxed on her side like this, you can feel that they are slack beneath the skin. After a particularly vigorous walk on a cold winter’s day, you can feel them radiating warmth, even as her belly below the ribs is cooler to the touch.

Barley, a dog, seems wary standing beside a tile mosaic of a particularly rotund serpent. SHE BACHI ON MY HEBI TIL I YOKAI

Barley, a dog, grips a soft toy tightly in her paws and squints. Not visible in the photo is the toy’s ear that she is earnestly chewing on with her molars. While Barley is not conventionally destructive with her toys, she does seem to find small unstuffed fabric “ears” and “fins” to be offensive to her sensibilities, or perhaps irresistible in their mouthfeel. As such, she will often isolate these on new toys and try to chew them off. Since her front lower incisors were removed, her best scissor-like option is her fourth upper premolar, right where her cheek ends. For whatever reason, she treats using this to worry her way through fabric like the most intense activity she could possible be doing: She lies perfectly still, her eyes squinted shut, making each little chomp very deliberately and forcefully, as if the fabric will escape is she lets it slip even a little.

Barley, a dog, sleeps on a blue-green plaid bedspread, marked out with white gridlines. The wall behind her is pink. If you’re going to practice tech, it’s important to do so in the training stage in order to get a precise understanding of movement and spacing. Here, we see Barley practicing Rest, a move that consistently blows folks away.

Barley, a dog, sits at the edge of a grassy precipice and looks out over a heap of broken concrete slabs and across a salt-water sound. As much as Barley seems to orient toward the smell of the sea when it drifts inland, she pays surprisingly little attention to it when at the water’s edge. Presumably, walking along the shore, she feels immersed in that salt-water smell. The water itself, its stretching out to the horizon, holds no great interest. She is much more drawn to the specific splashes of specific waves than she is to the rippling surface beyond. I wonder if she looks out at that vast expanse and sees it as featureless, a kind of blue void lacking any of the interesting motions that would signal a nearby object of interest.

Juniper, a dog, smiles while at the vet. It’s a nervous smile. Juniper has always been very well-behaved at the vet, but she does not enjoy it. She is docile, compliant, and (as a rule) shaking like a leaf the whole time. And, given how much less food motivated she is than Barley, she can’t even be bribed with treats into having a good time! Fortunately, as COVID restrictions have lifted, she no longer needs to be dropped off and left behind with strangers. Going through it with a familiar human in the room helps her a lot.

Barley, a dog, lies on the floor surrounded by soft dog accessories. Her face is slightly in shadow from a table overhead. Barley’s pretty good at going to sleep anywhere, but when she’s properly tired at the end of the day, she tends to favor positions that shield her eyes from direct light sources. In this case, she managed to position herself just so under the corner of a table in such a way that just her head has an obstructed line of sight to each of the lamps in the room.

Barley, a dog, stares at a black cat with an arched back through a mesh-covered fence. The cat stares back. I mean, you do what you do, I do what I gotta do. And now that we’ve been face to face, if I’m there and I gotta put you away, I won’t like it. But I’ll tell you, if it’s between you and some poor bastard whose wife you’re gonna turn into a widow… Brother, you are going down.