Queen not-so-Mum

Once upon a time, in a long ago age, there was a phrase that was common and men far and wide quoted it to one another -- though, even back in those days of yore, men knew the phrase was an Untruth.

"A Man's Home is His Castle" was the phrase; and today, those words seem ancient and have the ring of some kind of Olde Joke.  In my home, for instance, I have no illusions that I'm Lorde of any Castle. I live in a house with three females: One of the human variety,  and two canines.  And I am most definitely Number Four in the line of succession to the throne.

Even Leah -- who is MY Faire Lady -- is not Queen of this castle.

No, the Royal Majesty here be Miss Pax, whose pictures I doth post today.

Everything revolves around Miss Pax, Queen of every rug that must be shed upon, every pile of bedding  that requires rearranging, every window that needs nose-smudging.

"Woo-woo-woo," proclaimeth the Queen.

ALL HAIL QUEEN PAXIE!!!

My Valentines

These are pictures of my muses, my Funny Valentines.

Neither of my gals likes to have her picture taken.  When I come around with my camera,  my girls often wrinkle their noses or look the other way.  Sometimes, if I work quickly, a can catch an image of my Valentines, but it is not easy.

These are my Valentines.

Brain Drain

We rented a big pile of movies on DVD during the holidays (“Moonrise Kingdom” was voted Best Picture by the Motion Picture Academy, Kurt Division)  and the one-photograph, one-and-a-half paragraph post I’m doing today shows pretty succinctly what Christmas and New Years looked like at our house: Humans in jammies (dog, not so much,) camped out on the couch near the warm wood stove for the better part of two weeks, eyes and minds melded into TV screen.

Truth be told, this week, post-holidays, it's kind of hard to un-veg, get back to Reality,  and move forward with life off-the-couch.

Creature Pictures

Everywhere I go these days there seem to be creatures...big ones, but tiny ones too.

The creatures eye me quizzically: “Wazzup?” they seem to be wondering.

Something pops into my head -- a bumper sticker I remember seeing:

“I’m trying to be the person my dog thinks I am.”

I believe these creatures I happen upon sense that I’m a human being who means them no harm. The dog, horse and goat do seem to prefer, however, that I spend more time petting them or offering treats and less time taking their pictures.

The newt is pretty a mellow fellow, no matter what I do.

Adopting Wally

Years ago my mother was an elementary school vocal music teacher, and this week I got to thinking about the songs she taught me as a child. It occurred to me that a couple of the songs I remember now, 50-some years later, happened to be about dogs:

There was a farmer had a dog,
And Bingo was his name-o.
B-I-N-G-O
B-I-N-G-O
B-I-N-G-O
And Bingo was his name-o

And there was this:

How much is that doggie in the window?
The one with the waggly tail?
How much is that doggie in the window?
I do hope that doggie’s for sale

These songs came to mind, I guess, because two weeks ago Leah and I adopted a shelter dog named Wally. On the day we moved him from the shelter to his new home, Leah looked after Wally at the house while I went to the pet store in town to buy him a collar, leash, and dog food...but what else do you suppose I saw there?
Why, a doggie in a window of course!

Wally is a sweet but timid one-year-old who the shelter workers said was neglected in his birth home (seeing his extreme timidity, I think he must also have been abused.) He’s lived in the shelter about half of his life, and Leah and I are beginning what we know will be a long (perhaps very long) process of patiently helping Wally understand that he has nothing to fear here. He spent much of the time his first day or two cowering under a table, and Leah and I considered it a sign of great progress when Wally got up on our couch to nap -- though he kept a wary eye on me.

Quite honestly, it was our intention to adopt a "needy" dog that other humans might consider too problematic, but even for us -- knowing that we've taken on a challenge -- there are days we wonder what we’ve gotten ourselves into. We’re learning that patience is an easy word to say, but a more difficult quality to practice. Yesterday Wally peed on the floor in our dining room (the shelter folks told us he is “mostly” housebroken.)

Yes, this will be a long learning process, for Wally, and for his humans.

Home and Away

The last big, Bilbo-Baggins-esque adventure Leah and I had was in the fall of 2007 when we went trekking in the Himalaya of Nepal. For three weeks we hiked and struggled for breath as our guide led us along the trails up into the thin air of the highest mountain range on Earth -- a trip that for me at least was a dream 30 years in the making. As one who has spent his adult life climbing to the mountain summits of the Pacific Northwest, I’d fantasized about what it would be like to one day climb Mt. Everest...but, as the years advanced, the idea of just being in the Himalaya seemed like it’d be pretty damned cool.

And so we went, and the trip was both more difficult than we’d ever imagined it could be, but also way more rewarding. For nearly the entire three weeks of the trek, one or both of us was miserably and even frightfully sick with one malady or another, and, if you read the journals we kept, we spent a lot of time wanting only to be back home. Still, we realize now, through the clear vision of hindsight, how much those difficult days taught us, how rich the experience was, and we’re talking about what we might do for our Next Big Trip.

“The world is big, and life is short,” a friend of ours says, and Leah and I have settled on India as our likely next destination, with a side trip back to Nepal (to revisit friends we made in 2007.) We know India will challenge us and probably give us a hard push out of our comfort zones.

Here at home yesterday, I photographed our son’s dog as he enjoyed a morning in the sunshine, watching bugs. Another day I got down on the ground and did up-close pictures of one of my favorite wildflowers, bleeding hearts.

Each day, wherever it is that we find ourselves, there is something to see...but, for most of us, sometimes a trip away offers a needed reminder to keep our eyes open.

Normalcy

Two weeks and a day after Leah’s hip replacement surgery, she has already tossed aside her crutches, doesn’t need pain meds, and has released her nurse (me) from indentured servitude. She started back to work yesterday via her laptop at home, and last evening we poured over a map of India, talking about our next big Adventure of a Lifetime, hopefully this fall.

Life is getting back to normal here, except that “normal” now for Leah is minus the nagging pain she’d had in her right hip and leg for the past several years.

We had stayed three days at the hospital in Seattle for the surgery, and while we were away a friend came out to our place twice a day to feed the barn animals. The two dogs stayed in Seattle with our son, whose apartment is in a tres hip, trendy neighborhood. Thus, we were pleased when the dogs came back to our place without any new piercings or tattoos, and seem content here, down on the farm, after seeing Par-ee.

Puppy High

Call me a busybody, but when I found out that one of our neighbors has five new puppies at her place, I put the word out around here that a mass visitation was in order, and several of us dropped by, Welcome Wagon-style, to say howdy to the newcomers.

Oh man! there’s nothing better than PUPPIES to improve one’s day! I’ve been spending most of my time this week indoors, chained to my computer, not getting much fresh air...and I’ve certainly not had an opportunity to take in the sweetest air to be found on this planet: Puppy Breath!

Throughout our visit, my neighbors and I were nose-smudged and licked to the n’th degree, and today we’re all High on Life. As I sit here typing, there are not enough exclamation points or computer-generated smiley-faces in this world for me convey what a warm and fuzzy time we had, lovin’ up them PUPPIES.

Puppies, you ROCK!!!

Nosey

Our kitchen must be a place of great mystery to the two dogs who live here. Leah and I are adventurous eaters, and in just the past week our kitchen has been filled with the aromas of Thai, Indian, Italian, and good old, red-white-and-blue ‘Mer-kin foods. Even when we’re not sitting down to a meal, our table is always decorated with some kind produce: Oranges from the market, or, this morning, eggs from our own chicken house.

I happen to think that Leah is as accomplished at cooking as Yo Yo Ma is when he draws a bow across the strings of his cello, or Picasso was when he put paint to canvas.

We keep our four-leggeds on their toes because we're forever introducing new scents. I watch with a grin on my face and a camera in my hand as the dog Buddha comes around to check out the aroma of the day. He sniffs from a polite distance, never close enough to get dog goobers on our human food.

He’s like a wine connoisseur checking the nose of a fine Cabernet.

Mister Sunshine

Abell adopted his dog Buddha from a shelter in New Orleans, and, though it’s far too obvious a writing “hook” for me to say this, that dog is Big and Easy, like the city he came from.

Sometimes we call him Big Butterscotch, other times Mister Wrinkles. Buddha knows we all are crazy in love with him and he doesn’t seem to care much what he’s called (“Just don’t call me Late for Dinner,” my grandfather would have said.) As an easygoing, down-South, warm weather fellow, mostly what Buddha seems to want from life is a spot of sunshine for his afternoon nap.

Buddha does love to eat however, so no, don’t call him late for dinner.

Sweet Sunshine

When Abell was just a little guy, Leah and I took him on a three-day backpacking hike that turned out to be much too hard for a seven-year-old. The trip was all my dumb idea and the three of us, thankfully, are able to laugh about it now, recalling how I kept our poor, tired and whimpering son moving along the miles and miles of trail by promising him milk shakes and root beer floats on the drive home...and that, when we did get back to the trailhead and our car after three days that must have seemed like an eternity to him, Abell told Leah: “Mom, I think I’m going to cry for no reason.”

That hike memory flashed into my head the other day when the sun came out and a couple of the critters and I went out on the deck to do some basking. We’d just weathered a period of days and days of rain, and the warmth and the light felt so good.

I think I might have had a tear in my eye, like I was about to cry for no reason.

B, S & T

When I was growing up --the son of two music teachers -- and played trumpet in the high school band, sitting alone in my room and playing scales and exercises (which my private teacher expected me to do) felt like torture. Yes, I wanted to play as well as the members of “Blood, Sweat and Tears,” but, as I listened to the group's records again and again and often even played along with them, I wondered: “When those guys were kids, did they have to practice scales?”

Practicing my trumpet felt SO B-O-R-I-N-G!

It was also while I was in high school, however, that I discovered photography, and, in the 40 years now that I have considered photography both my profession and my art, the search for images has rarely failed to provide some kind of rush.

Every day I look for pictures, and it’s a hugely enjoyable game I play to see if I can find photographs in the most common, mundane places. Even on days when I’m not shooting professionally for a client, I’m looking-looking-looking, exercising my eyes and working to stretch the way I see. Often my subject matter is one of our critters, or something else that is right in front of me all the time, and that offers a visual challenge by virtue of its everyday-ness.

Funny how, once I found my passion, practicing was no longer a matter of blood, sweat and tears.