The Callie series

Walt et Callie : la sieste

Yesterday, after working in the garden and then taking Callie for a walk, Walt stretched out on a chaise longue for a little nap. Callie got under the chair and took her nap at the same time. Except that I wouldn't leave her alone. She ended up posing for a long series of pictures. Here are some of them.

Callie, 24 May 2007 — if only she could talk.

Now Walt is much more parsimonious with his pictures than I am. He doesn't take as many, for one thing. He started doing photography back in the days of film and slides, so he plans and composes his pictures carefully. On his blog today he posted a single picture of the dog.

Keeping an eye — literally — on the shutterbug

I, on the other hand, was never much of a photographer until digital cameras came along. It's hard to believe that I got my first digital camera at Christmas in 1998 — that it has been almost nine years already. Freed of the cost and processing-time constraints of film, I started snapping away.

I'd better keep both eyes open with this guy around.

I learned a lot from looking at Walt's pictures. Before digital, I did have a film camera and took some pictures, but after waiting days for them to be developed I was always disappointed in the result. I guess I like immediate gratification. So I take pictures with abandon nowadays. And I blog that way too.

I'm wide awake now.

This morning Walt was out planting the garden and I was keeping watch over the dog. She can't stand to just observe the gardening process — she wants to participate. If you dig a hole, she digs one too. She also wants to play with your gardening gloves and bark at the gardening tools. So I was dogsitting her, in the house.

My computer is downstairs in our entryway, but Callie wanted to go upstairs to the living room. I was hoping she might finish her kibble up there, so I let her go. After a few minutes, I noticed how quiet she was, so I went to see what she was up to.

OK, this is getting old.

Callie used to have a toy that we call the squeaky rope. It's a rope on one end and other other end there was a big fuzzy sausage-shaped toy that had a plastic squeaker in it. Callie learned how to make it squeak and within a few days she had torn the toy open and extracted the squeaker. It's made of clear plastic, and now she plays with that, loving to make it squeak. It's always somewhere on the floor.

Maybe if I make a silly face he'll go away.

So I went upstairs to see where Callie was and couldn't find her. I was walking around the sitting/dining room, looking in every one of her usual hiding places, wondering where in the world she could be, when I stepped on something and it let out a loud squeal! I jumped sky high, thinking I had stepped on the poor dog's foot. My heart skipped a beat!

I had of course stepped on the plastic squeaker toy. And then Callie emerged from the bedroom — we had neglected to close that door this morning — to see what all the fuss was about. She was all innocent, of course. What's the fuss about? I still don't know what she might have been chewing on in there. Probably a shoe.

I'll just ignore him and go back to sleep.

Yesterday afternoon, after the photo session, we drove the four miles over to see our friend Gisèle. Walt drove, and I held Callie on my lap in the front seat. We had to take a long detour because our usual road was closed for construction. The road we ended up on wound through the vineyards, with lots of curves, and of course Callie threw up. I was lucky enough to be able to aim her head away from me and she puked on the rubber floor mat between my feet, so no great damage was done.