Bean is ready to play

Bean loves squeaky toys. And if they bounce, so much the better. I caught her one October afternoon playing with a Sprong® dog toy when she saw me, then grabbed the toy in her mouth and paused at the steps leading to the living room, waiting for me to play with her. I had my big, heavy 70-200mm VR with me, hoping she'd stay still long enough for me to get a few shots. To get more light into the house I opened the front door before I started shooting.

This is a close crop of the best of several pictures that I took as she waited on me. In the original picture I had composed the picture with Bean in the upper right corner of the viewfinder. As she was standing beyond the end of a wooden cabinet I wanted the bottom edge of the cabinet side and the lines of the hardwood flooring to draw your eye to Bean. I had to burn in the background behind her to make it less distracting. I donated a print of this to a greyhound event for their auction.

I can't help but think of how Sadie and Bean might have gotten along had Sadie lived long enough to have met Bean. I bet it would've been good, even though Sadie was over 10 years older than Bean.

(Shot with the Nikon D600 and 70-200mm VR zoom; matrix-metered; aperture-priority with aperture set to f/4; shutter speed 1/30 second at ISO 900; auto white balance; normal JPG.)

The Puppy Bean Roadtrip, part 4

We originally planned on starting the long drive back home on Saturday, but talking to my parents on Friday changed all that. There was a late-season snow storm forecast to hit Colorado, so we couldn't be sure if the pass and the Eisenhower tunnel that cross the Rockies would be open or not. We just didn't want to have driven all the way from MN to CO, only to be stopped by snow at the pass. So we asked Aimée if we could hang out another day with them before heading home. She was more than happy to oblige, as who knew when she'd see The Bean again...if ever?

She had another day trip planned out: a nature hike at Taylor Falls and the St. Croix River on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin. It was a beautiful day for a hike:

After we returned to Aimée's house we spent some time out in her backyard with her greys Boo, Dazzle, and Flower. Bean grabbed onto the sleeve of Rachel's hoodie to get her to play:

To this day Bean does this, and I don't think she'll ever completely outgrow it.

I had to get a few photos of Boo as I think she has one of the most extraordinary Greyhound faces I've ever seen:

While Rachel and I were anxious to be on our way with Bean, it was a bittersweet moment for Aimée. You can't foster a Greyhound puppy like Bean for more than two months and not grow fond of her.

The next day we would begin our trip back home.

Meanwhile, down at the farm...

(Shot with the Nikon D600 using the 24-70mm f/2.8 lens; shutter-priority with shutter speed set to 1/250 second at f/22 at ISO 800; auto white balance; matrix-metered; normal JPG; processed with Lightroom.)

Pain and Remembrance

I don't know if anyone is still reading this blog or not; I haven't added anything to this blog since a couple of weeks after Sadie died on St. Patrick's Day. I am sorry if you've been holding out and waiting for the past three months for something new from me. Her death had stolen most, if not all, of my motivation to write about pictures I have taken of Greyhounds and their owners. Oh, I do have plenty of pictures to share and give you a little background about them...but writing about it had seemed pointless without her (or Katie, for that matter).

We were without Greyhounds (or dogs) in the house for the first time in twenty years. That span lasted for two months, and it was the worst two months ever.

Fortunately I had planned to join two of my friends on an East Coast roadtrip to see a third friend run in the Boston Marathon for the first time. And I was lucky that I had photo shoots to do with a customer in Williamsburg, NY, and at the Greyhounds in Gettysburg event in late April. It was a great distraction for me, but still I caught myself weeping several times (like on the Amtrak train that we took from Boston to New York, or on the Metro in New York) because I missed her so much. My two traveling companions understood, and helped me a great deal.

And shortly after returning from Gettysburg our daughter and I prepared to drive to Minnesota and back to pick up a seven-month-old female Greyhound puppy (who our daughter named "Bean"), fostered for two months by my friend Aimée and her husband.

I promise to write about how Puppy Bean came to join our family in the very near future.

It was early this evening that Puppy Bean was lying on the front lawn, and I was sitting and watching her while holding the end of her leash. And as I watched I was suddenly reminded of a picture I took of Katie eleven days after her leg amputation. So I took our my smartphone and tried to get a picture of Bean as I had done with Katie.

As I tried to frame the picture it then occurred to me that tomorrow (Tuesday, 8 July) will be a year and a week since Katie's operation. It again saddened me terribly that she was no longer here, and those feelings of loss overcame me anew. I remembered what I told her at the end:

"I'm so sorry, Katie, that we could not save you."

As I have told some of my Greyhound friends who let me vent and hug and cry on their shoulders about Katie since her death, I will forever resent the fact that we did not even get the chance to treat her for the lymphoma that eventually took her so swiftly from us. If we just had the chance...