Barley, a dog, stands in a selection reticle, awaiting the player’s instruction for her next move.    MENU • Move • Action • Wait • Status

Barley, a dog, sniffs curiously, and possible with disappointment, at a Halloween decoration depicting a 2D silhouette of a black cat wearing some flowers. I’ve described in a previous post the unseemly enthusiasm Barley has for cats. She reacts to them differently from any other animal, drawn toward them with saucer-wide eyes and claws digging into the earth for traction. So imagine my amusement when she thought she had her prey in her sights, and charged with vigorous abandon, only to find herself face to face with this Potemkin village of a cat. She sniffed at it for quite a while, and scoped out its edge from the side as if to confirm that, yes, this cat really is a flat sheet of metal and not a cat at all.

Barley, a dog, sleeps exhausted on a blanket in an unfamiliar place. The roughest patch Barley has been through in my time with her began when I returned to my apartment after spending six weeks with my parents. This was during the darkest depths of COVID, and Barley, normally a social butterfly, had only the three of us with whom to bond. Returning home, it was just me and her. And my apartment. Which had flooded in my absence. (Pet medical issues discussed below the fold) The flooding was, in the grand scheme of things, very mild. I’m shocked to this day how few of my possessions were water damaged (the lesson in this: Clean up your apartment before a long trip and get everything up off the floor; it’s nice to come home to a clean apartment, it’s very nice to lose almost nothing to a flood). Still, the carpets had to be completely redone and the drywall had to be sanitized and fully dried out, which meant all of my stuff needed to be packed into a storage container. My apartment complex stuck me in one of their “model units,” used in simpler times to give prospective tenants guided tours; in the Lockdown Era, it had instead laid dormant and unused. From Barley’s point of view, we returned not to a familiar apartment, but to a weird new space full of very uncomfortable furniture, bereft of any contact with the two other humans she had become used to…

Barley, a dog, is honored by a salute given by a sun-faded garden gnome. I’m tickled by the prospect that this gnome believes himself to belong to some form of military hierarchy in which he is outranked by every single traveler who crosses his path. Certainly, this is the first time anyone has looked at Barley and concluded, “Hmm, yes, this one must have an officer rank.”

Juniper, a dog, lies atop a bed on her side next to Barley, another dog. Both are in the same position, their bodies aligned. It’s still shocking to me when I reflect on how long it has been since Barley and Juniper were in the same physical space as one another. Once upon a time, they lived as sisters, as one another’s found family. As different as their personalities have always been, they were thick as thieves. Each has a good life today, rich with creature comforts, and I don’t doubt that we’ve done right by them. Still, I can’t help but wonder: When Barley sleeps, does she remember? Can she in dreams revisit a memory of sleeping beside her sister?

Barley, a dog, visibly pants. A spray-painted arrow on the ground indicates where the pant-zone is located. A dog is here. This is the location of the dog. The arrow indicates the pant zone. Any exposed parts of the body entering the pant zone are subject to above-room-temperature dog kisses. Please exercise appropriate caution in and near the pant zone. Have a nice day.

Barley, a dog, lies on a dog bed with a big, panting smile. It’s cheating, in a way, that a dog who has been worn out by a long walk happens to also look like they’re very, very happy. Quirk of our coevolution, no doubt - we love a species that has a big smile, even if we willfully misread what that smile means. For my part, it’s an extra little treat I receive when Barley gets enough exercise, so even if I know her “smile” isn’t always a smile in human terms, I know it’s signaling that she’s getting enough exercise and is keeping healthy.

Barley, a dog, snuffles around in accumulated dead leaves. With the unambiguous arrival of fall and the onset of Spooky Season, Barley’s odor landscape is utterly transformed and familiar paths become newly interesting. This is driven by two forces. On the one hand, regular rainfall helps to mobilize odorants in what I imagine is a brightening of the odor landscape, an enhancing of its vividness. On the other hand, as leaves begin to fall and inevitably accumulate (whether naturally or at speed due to grounds crews wielding leaf blowers), a whole new collection of Snack Opportunities present themselves. I don’t doubt that Barley has uncovered many a tasty morsel concealed from view amidst the leaf litter, and I need to be extra vigilant on walks so I can notice when she gets a little too interested in any given pile.

Barley, a dog, stands on a log and looks off into the distance. Having committed to posting a photo a day, the need to take more and more varied photos makes itself known almost immediately. For the most part, this has worked to Barley’s advantage, as it’s a good incentive to bring her to different neighborhoods and generally to give her more varied experiences. Sometimes, however, the temptation to stage a photo can be pretty strong. In this case, I saw these logs and thought, “it would be cute if she stood on these logs!” It then proved remarkably difficult to get her to do so. So while I could have easily spun a tale of Barley leaping up to get a better view into the distance, the truth is that she probably would never have stood on this log without a lot of encouragement from me.

Barley, a dog, stands on the wedge of sidewalk at an intersection corner, from which no sidewalk extends in either direction. Given that Barley’s enthusiasm exceeds her stamina, it’s quite common at the end of a long walk for her pace to slow to a crawl, one foot in front of the other, effortfully slow-and-steady. Naturally, if she seems too tired, my inclination is to let her rest a moment before proceeding, but I often find myself walking in neighborhoods without proper sidewalks. These are the sorts of low-traffic residential side-streets where people on foot are at no meaningful risk, but I’d rather not get yelled at for sitting on someone’s lawn and would rather not sit on a curb in a way might make us harder to spot by a car. So usually, we end up taking a breather on these ‘sidewalk islands’ that appear at many intersections. That way, Barley can take a breather until she seems a little less wiped before rounding that final base and heading Home.

Barley, a dog, rests her big block head acros the body of a soft stuffed toy in the form of a blue monkey. I am regularly surprised by what a good investment these big soft toys have been. They were purchased from PetSmart on impulse at the unreasonable price of $5 each, because in spite of the obviously flimsy materials, I figured Barley would at least get a brief kick out of some new toys before their inevitable demise. Instead, they’ve stuck around for months, needing only small repairs from time to time despite getting some pretty heavy use. I’m particularly pleased to see how often Barley uses them as pillows, their friend-shaped bodies apparently having hitherto-under-appreciated ergonomic qualities.

Juniper, a dog, wiggles on her back on a big soft bed. Whereas Barley has taken to wiggling hither, thither, indoors, and out, Juniper has a more delicate sensibility. A wiggle is a matter to be undertaken privately, in one’s bedchambers, on a suitable surface. Less a twist than a sway, less a juke than a shimmy, Juniper’s wiggles are downright dainty.

Barley, a dog, sits upon a stone bench and looks upward, as if thinking deeply. οἱ μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχθροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὼ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.-Stobaeus, iii. 13. 44

Barley, a dog, pulls on the ear of a plush dog toy in the shape of a donkey. Barley’s latest acquisition has a rather strange design: the “ears” are a single continuous piece that threads through the “head,” such that pulling on one ear makes it longer and makes the other shorter. Watching Barley pull on one end thus gives the impression that she is “flossing” the toy’s brain like this is some sort of Saturday morning cartoon. Truly, Barley can get that ass, but it’s a very no-thoughts-head-empty undertaking.

Barley, a dog, snoozes on the couch. The angle of the photograph happens to make her rump appear especially large. Much is made about how both dogs and cats “sleep all day,” and it’s true that both tend to get more hours of sleep a day than would be normal for a human. However, I feel like most people commenting on this don’t look at things from their point as view. I get the impression that Barley snoozes recreationally, and that while she does so as a hobby, she would go pro if she could.

Barley, a dog, stands in front of some mossy rocks that have a prominent outgrowth of ferns. If you’re of a certain age, than your childhood was substantially changed by the 1993 release of Jurassic Park. Dinosaurs, already respectably positioned among “topics about which kids have strong opinions,” rocketed up the charts, and with them came a whole aesthetic. Artists of the time heavily favored depicting dinosaurs living in lush, primordial forests and jungles, in the style of Land Of The Lost. Since flowering plants didn’t come on the scene until the early Cretaceous period, artists instead filled their foregrounds with a much older variety of foliage: Ferns. To this day, every day I come across a yard with a big fern motif, I hear the Jurassic Park theme.

Barley, a dog, lies expectantly near an apartment entryway, fully downstream of a standing fan. Barley is not usually one to wait by doors to signal her needs, but during the tail end of a couple of the summer’s heatwaves, she seemed to realize how nice sitting in the fan’s airflow could feel. Now that temperatures have returned to manageable levels, she has returned to her old habit of sitting directly next to my chair when she needs something, so I think this rare move reflected, more than anything, how badly she (and all of us) needed a breeze.

Barley, a dog, stands in an arid patch of rocky dirt. Behind her, a lush hedge springs up, along an unnaturally sharp border. An unavoidable compromise in procedural generation for open worlds is the division of a design team’s labor into the crafting of biomes, which in turn results in the player discovering “seams” along which those two design languages meet. When we encounter them in games, we tend to politely ignore them, the way we would a theatrical performer flubbing a line - after all, we can only ask so much of those who have labored to make our entertainment. Exploring residential environments, with Barley, however, I often notice that the way we split up the use of space also creates unreasonably sharp boundaries. Here, we see Barley standing in what amounts to an empty lot that has somehow been kept clear of any weeds. Just behind her, at the property line, there stands not only an enormous hedge that extends for tens of feet, but beyond it is the sort of lush, verdant yard that is only possible with constant year-round watering.

Juniper, a dog, looks up very blearily from the back seat before returning to a deep vehicular slumber. Hardly an enthusiastic window-peerer to begin with, Juniper find highway driving to be especially snooze-inducing. On the one hand, she seems to find the imagery whipping past to be a little unsettling, but on the other, the rumbling hum of the road seems to sooth her. The upshot is that I’ve never seen this ordinarily vigilant dog as fully zonked out as she is when the car stops for gas on a long car ride.

Barley, a dog, lies on a couch in a patch of sunlight, with her paws up on the armrest, as if to show you here nails. For the most part, I only ever think of Barley’s feet as unitary parts of her body. Certainly, that’s how she thinks of them - if she’s going to paw at something, it’s going to be a fully ham-fisted bop using the whole of her foot. Every once in a while, however, I catch her at an angle where it’s impossible to ignore that yes, Barley really does have individual articulated toes on dem feets.