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.

Barley, a dog, stands attentively in front of a dog gate in a doorway, peering down the hallway with ears on alert. For the most part, Barley does not spend office time right up at the gate. She prefers to nap a bit closer to me and a bit farther from the gate, though still oriented in such a way that she can spring to her feet and greet someone who has come to say hi. Sometimes, however, there’s simply too much going on in the hallway, and an inquiry must be launched to keep an eye on events as they unfold!

Barley, a dog, lies on her side on a futon, with her head supported by a larger and loftier pillow than is strictly ideal for this position. It’s unclear to me how Barley makes the distinction between “toy” and “pillow” but I’m grateful that she does not consider the pillows in her environment to be manipulable. They’re just the knots and whorls of the softness landscape, about which nothing can be done. This attitude of simply taking pillows as she finds them finds her, not uncommonly trying to snooze in positions that give me a crick in my neck just looking at them.

Barley, a dog, stands in front of a suspiciously perfect-looking pile of large stones, heaped neatly in a pile. Walking through residential neighborhoods will give you lots of opportunities to reflect on the types of personalities that get externalized through the choices people make about their yards. Some yards reflect a kind of tattered, unkempt mind, not quite wild but definitely letting itself go. Others feel neat and controlled to the point of being alarming. This heap of rocks falls onto the latter end of that continuum. It looks fully like a single asset purchased from a menu in The Sims. One gets the feeling that, having bought a bulk order of gently smoothed stones from a home goods store, the owners found themselves with extra on hand, and needing to satisfy their need to keep everything neat, bundled them together into this incongruous have-a-penny-leave-a-penny display.

Barley, a dog, stands happily with a large expanse of green grass stretching out behind her. During the first few weeks of owning a dog you have rescued, there’s a push-pull process of taking measured risks to find out who, exactly, this dog that you’ve welcomed into your life really is. Barley seemed very attached (following us from room to room), so it seemed plausible that she might be the sort to stay close in general. So it seemed reasonable to see how she would behave off leash in a mostly-enclosed courtyard behind our apartment. We figured that would be a good place to reinforce her recall and get her doing so on verbal command. So, cautiously, we unhooked her, at which point she sighted a gap between the buildings and sprinted, ignoring our shouts and racing out of sight around a corner almost immediately. In the Yakety Sax montage that followed, it all came into focus: Indoors, Barley preferred not to be left alone. Outdoors, however, it’s up to you to keep up with her.

Barley, a dog, sleeps on her side, with legs extended straight out and belly exposed. Barley’s enthusiasm at the start of any walk is always full-bore - leaping, scurrying, grabbing a toy because she just can’t contain herself, etc. Her energy level after a walk varies quite a bit more, because for all her enthusiasm she has always had mediocre-to-poor stamina. Here, we see Barley after a longer-than-average walk, the last 10 minutes of which consisted of her putting one heavy foot in front of another like a runner who has opted to walk the last leg of their very first 10k. Within moments of my putting up her leash and sitting down, she had flopped onto the carpet with belly out to shed heat, and was snoring hard.

Juniper, a dog, watches television. The closed captioning reads, “You deserve happiness, as do I.” Watching television is a consistent part of Juniper’s routine. After a busy day of (a) scoping out the front yard though windows and (b) patrolling the perimeter of the back yard, she enjoys calm, talky, colorful television. Action & science fiction tend to stress her out - she’ll slink off and chill in a quieter room if things are too dynamic. If there are Screen Beasts, well, it’s back into Protec & Intimidat Mode. But she seems to find sitcoms, cooking shows, and character dramas soothing, and she seems to attentively follow along for long stretches of time.

Barley, a dog, glances somewhat meekly over her shoulder in front of a copy of the book “Wild Animals I Have Known.” When happening upon this book at the Free Stuff table at a potluck, I immediately thought, “Oh wow, I know a wild animal! Let’s get a photo of you two together!” Because of all the people around that Barley wanted to spend the whole event saying hi to, however, she was quite reluctant to sit for the photo, and was clearly doing so under protest while I was cajoling her and lining up the shot. Now, viewed without context, it feels like she’s being sort of sheepish in the face of the unattainable standards of wildness depicted on this cover. Don’t worry, Barley, you’ll always be my wild animal.

An extreme closeup of one of the front paws of Barley, a dog, with pads and nails seeming to glisten. During the multi-day periods of triple-digit temperatures this year, Barley’s paw pads were starting to look pretty rough. Even though I did my best to keep her from spending any time on blacktop, sometimes you just need to cross the street. Thank goodness for Musher’s Secret, a literal wax for dogs. Liberally applied to her pads for about a week, and their alarming dryness cleared right up before it could devolved into a more complicated condition. The “misjudged the specular map” levels of shiny visible on her feet and nails was an amusing bonus.

Barley, a dog, gives her nose a big ole’ lick as she looks at the camera, while standing over an abstract bit of chalk art. It’s no rare thing to come across chalk art while walking a dog, especially during a warm & sunny time of year. Typically, however, you expect to either see none at all, or a mixed pocket of chalky sketches, doodles, and fragmentary writing. I hypothesize that not only are most chalk artists children, but they also almost always work as groups, jointly doing a bunch of things at once on a shared canvas. This piece, by contrast, was one of modest size, and was executed in a controlled, systematic fashion, without anything similar in the immediate surroundings. Asked her opinion upon encounter the work, Barley gave it one tongue up.

Barley, a dog, looks up from her sniffing to glance down the wooded path that extends ahead of her a short distance. Barley is generally well behaved on wooded paths, so long as she remains on leash. In general, any furry creatures that find themselves in a wooded area, lurking at the edge of a path, make themselves scarce long before Barley comes a’sniffing, and while on leash, she generally understands not to try to go places I can’t follow. She’s even become quite mindful of staying on the same side of trees as me so the leash doesn’t catch. That said, I’ve seen her sensibilities off-leash and she will absolutely chase prey through the underbrush. So the policy is clear, even far from any roads: Without rock-solid fencing, the leash stays on.

Barley, a dog, has only made it one body length out of her crate before she has flopped onto her side. Barley loves her crate: It’s dark, cozy, and no doubt very familiar-smelling. However, at the height of the summer heat wave, it seems that coziness was too much of a good thing. I do not, after all, have AC. So, one uncomfortably warm evening, I watched her groggily emerge from what appeared to be a deep sleep, take a couple heavy steps past the threshold of her crate, and flop right back into whatever dream had been interrupted by being too damned hot.

Barley, a dog, wiggles enthusiastically on some cool green grass. Barley, a dog, continues to wiggle, now kicking in the opposite direction. Barley, a dog, shakes it off, sending waves down the length of her leash. In many ways, this has been a Summer of Wiggles for Barley. Never has she wiggled so vigorously, or in so various a set of places. Beyond merely trying to cool off by shedding some heat into a shady patch of grass, as she is doing in this instance, it seems that she has only this year mastered the subtle art of giving herself scritches through tactical wiggling.

Juniper, a dog, presents a handsome profile as she looks out the window from a room lit with warm yellow light and into a yard lit with bright, pale sunlight. Setting aside how regal and dignified Juniper is at her most contemplative, I love the interplay of light in this photo. The sharper edges drawn by the sun on her snout fade as we follow the line of her body back into a part of the room less directly in the sun’s path, while the contours of the rest of her body are revealed by the ambient light of the room she is in. The manner in which this both reveals all the details in the photo without being washed out provides some important clues on how to photograph things lit from the side by the sun without losing half their details to shadow.

Barley, a dog, is right-of-frame in a panoramic photo of a colorful painted traffic roundabout themed around rainbow salmon. I don’t think someone can fully appreciate how much of photography is a kind of orchestrated deception until they assemble a panoramic photo by hand. Focal length, in particular, is a deliriously weird concept to deal with. This is just the inversion of the problem of mapping the Earth on a flat map: The world isn’t 2D, so compromises needs to be made to collapse the 3D world onto a plane. For example, at a glance, this photo seems reasonable, but my choice to have Barley be the focal center (despite not being centered in the frame) means that things get increasingly distorted as the eye travels to her left. Note, for example, that this roundabout does not look like the road has the same width all the way around (I assure you, the actual location is sensibly circular).

Barley, a dog, examined her surroundings on a cold, dim winter morning. My sunrise/sunset opinions aren’t especially popular. In my perfect reality, leaving for work should line up just about with dawn, such that you can feel things waking up when you arrive. Then, the sun should set maybe two hours or so after you get home from work. As such, I’m quietly looking forward to the shorter days in the coming months. No shade (cough) toward those who enjoy the sunlight, of course! And certainly, Barley’s got much more solar opinions on the matter, and that definitely counts for something.

Barley, a dog, sits, squints, and pants in the sun amid a big patch of tall white flowers that bend their heads in the direction of the sunlight. We’ve had some hot ones this summer! We capture Barley here, beleaguered but dutifully posing for a photo toward the end of a walk. Her pace for the remainder of this walk will be slow, one foot in front of the other, and her two ports of call upon reaching home will be her water bowl and her bed.

Barley, a dog, stands in front of a monument reading “First house in Tacoma, built in 1865 25 yards from here by Job Carr, Tacoma’s first settler, mayor, postmaster, judicial officer, notary public. Erected 1964 by Pierce County Pioneer & Historical Ass’n Endower, Howard Carr Jr.” Historical markers like this one really tickle me. Setting aside the degree to which this marker was placed and then pretty much abandoned, I also find it very funny that the reason his monument is 25 yards away from the location it is meant to commemorate is that the spot in question is probably dead-center in the middle of a parking lot. Everyone’s got different priorities! Get in there early if you want to place your marker precisely!