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.

Barley, a dog, wiggles vigorously on the futon in a close-up shot, resulting in a mixture of motion blur and low-light digital grain. The camera on my phone doesn’t do justice to the full glory of Barley’s most vigorous motions, and this effect is compounded in low light. Mostly, this means that I end up tossing some photos as too much of a mess to be worth keeping, but occasionally the result instead has an aesthetic all its own. In particular, I’m getting “fan photo of a 70s performance of I Wanna Be Your Dog” energy from this one.

Barley, a dog, looks right past a novelty skeleton jokingly buried in a yard, long after Halloween has come and gone. I definitely dig that some people leave Halloween decorations well into December (I consider it something of a holiday counteroffensive), but the funniest to me are decorations that, for one reason or another, have clearly been forgotten. The house overlooking this skeleton already has Christmas lights and a tree visible in the window, but the skeleton isn’t visible from the house. It’s only barely visible from the sidewalk, and is not on the same side of the house as the driveway. I genuinely think this poor fellow’s mori is no longer mementoed.

Barley, a dog, lies regally with her prey before her, a salmon-pink elephant with light blue lining its ears. On a recent trip to PetSmart to resupply Barley’s dry dogfood of choice, I happened upon these shockingly inexpensive dog toys, selling for $5 apiece, with the promise that for each purchase, PetSmart would donate $1 to its charity offshoot. I’ve not done the research on how responsible PetSmart’s non-profit activities are, but I know a bargain when I see one, and at $5, it’s certainly worth seeing if it’s a toy that can last longer than 5 minutes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Barley was able to breach the shockingly thin material by breaking the pathetically weak stitching within a couple minutes. However! I then removed over half the stuffing and stitched the hole shut with upholstery thread (the scariest of all threads), and the toy has now stood up to Barley’s thrashing for months! Sure, it occasionally forms a new breach that I need to close with a bit more thread, but this toy represents the best value-for-money of any toy I’ve ever bought her!

Barley, a dog, walks alongside a fence, under the partial shade of light leaf cover on a sunny day. Certainly, I would never malign Barley’s lovely orange coat. But what if was more varied? Behold! Through the power of thinking back to a time when the sun didn’t set until after leaving the office, we can give Barley some big splotchy spots. Sort of an incidental calico. Truly one for the low-cost cosplay record books.

Barley, a dog, walks alongside a fence, under the partial shade of light leaf cover on a sunny day. Certainly, I would never malign Barley’s lovely orange coat. But what if was more varied? Behold! Through the power of thinking back to a time when the sun didn’t set until after leaving the office, we can give Barley some big splotchy spots. Sort of an incidental calico. Truly one for the low-cost cosplay record books.

LEFT: Barley, a dog, poses with clay likenesses of herself and Juniper. RIGHT: Juniper, a dog, poses with clay likenesses of herself and Barley. Closeup of Barley and Juniper’s claysonas, with Barley peering from the background. Closeup of Juniper and Barley’s claysonas, with Juniper frolicking in the background. I am happy to report that the absolutely adorable likenesses that were commissioned from Wolf & Ghostling have safely arrived at their respective destinations, and now safely reside with the pups they depict. I remain entirely pleased with the whole experience, and encourage everyone to marvel at their prior photoshoots. Separated as they are by thousands of miles, who can say when these puppers will next see one another in person? But at least they are together in spirit, and in clay.

Barley, a dog, is photographed curled up into a bean. Due to excessive digital zoom, the image looks somewhat smoothed and processed compared to a crisp photograph. I’ve never quite been able to persuade my brain that a low-resolution image has within it as little information as it actually does. Whenever I see something with a low pixel count, an irrational part of my brain insists that the image is somehow just fine, and that all I need to do is remove this mask that’s getting in the way. It’s like my brain thinks the world is trying to trick it with a translucent checkerboard shower curtain. Seeing what happens when machines try to “upscale” noisy images to smooth them out is a useful (if temporary) remedy to this digital delusion. There really is less information there to begin with.

Barley, a dog, does a little steppy as she scopes out a very crowded, lovingly gardened yard. Sometimes, you scope out a yard, and your first reaction is, “Damn, that’s a garden!“ I don’t mean some clinical, immaculate dollhouse of a yard, something that looks like its owners don’t dare set foot in it for fear of leave a blade of grass out of place. I mean a yard in which someone spends as much time gardening as the weather will permit, a space filled with a deep and patient fascination for things that grow. To me, the apex of a garden is not a topiary theme park, it’s not a golf course, it’s a collection. That’s the sign, to me, of someone who loves what they’re doing in that space.

Barley, a dog, presents a rubber chew toy. She does not want you to have it, but she’s excited for you to try to take it away from her. Because she’s missing her lower incisors, Barley is not the most adept tug-of-war athlete. She really relies on pincering the item in question between her canines and hoping that’s enough to hold it. Even so, she really enjoys winning the tug, so you’d be doing her a favor if you pantomimed giving it a solid effort, even though you plan to let her win in the end.

Barley, a dog, hurries past a big lavender bush. I’ve made much of how uninteresting Barley finds flowers in general, but I’ve recently begun to suspect she somewhat dislikes lavender. That might be the wrong word, but her disinterest in it seems more active than it would normally be for shrubbery. If I had to guess, I would speculate that its smell somewhat masks other interesting smells in the area, so she may have erroneously learned that it’s not even worth slowing down as we pass it.

Barley, a dog, stands in a narrow concrete staircase and glances warily at the ocean waves splashing up against the steps a few feet ahead of her. I’m sorry Barley, there was to be no walk on the beach this day. Furthermore, you do not want to be anywhere close that water. It’s pretty doggone cold this time of year. (There was no risk of her getting any closer. She was very wary of how hard the water was hitting those bottom steps, and of the loudness of the splashing thanks to the surrounding concrete walls.)

Barley, a dog, lies in a curved sploot, with her legs projecting back from her hips at a ninety degree angle from the orientation of her head. I continue to be amazed at how flexible Barley’s back is. It’s easy to miss just how far her hips swing during one of her silly upside down wiggles, but when she fully relaxes in a shape worthy of a candy cane, one has the time to really ask, “Wait, how she do that tho?”