Photo shoot today

Lily heads back to school tomorrow and will not be back home until winter break.  We took our Christmas card photo today; it was a beautiful and sunny day.  It takes a lot of work to wrangle two wild pugs to sit still for a minute or two.  In the end, we had a lot of really good pictures to pick from for our card this year.

Below are some pictures of the wildness before the photo shoot began.



Wild guys




Abby is all smiles




Running off some energy




Captured Pug




Wild dog!



The set-up





Silly Dolan



Thanksgiving Day 2010



Rosie (angry because she didn't get enough Turkey!)




Monty and Frank



First Snow

The first snow of the season is the prettiest!

Winter Lily

Winter Garden

Look up

and down

Sir Curtain Burton

I was thinking about CB today. 

Sir Curtain Burton’s celebrated birthday (adoption day) would have been last week; he would be 19 today. I still remember the day Lily and I adopted him.  She was three years old and we decided that it was time that we had a pet.  While walking through the Human Society Lily went straight to the kittens and I walked the perimeter of the room looking at all of the dogs, so many of them where black lab mixes.  In one of the large dog cages was a huge tom cat.  He spotted me, ran up to the door and started mewing.  I opened the door and he went straight into my arms – so starved for attention.  He was so sweet, easily 25 pounds, and had beautiful blue eyes.  Poor guy also had terribly matted fur and a cough. 

I had to tell Lily that we wouldn’t be getting a kitten, because Curtain had just picked me.  She was okay with the change in plans after learning that she and he were the same age.  We were told that the woman who owned him previously had found him as a kitten roaming the streets in Oregon or maybe Washington.   A few years later she moved to Minnesota with a boyfriend and it was the boyfriend’s dog that couldn’t handle Curtain and that is why Curtain ended up in a grey concrete cell waiting for Lily and me to show up.   

It took days to brush his out fur and in many spots all I could do was shave it off.  We also added Burton to his name – we wanted to change it completely, but didn’t want to confuse him.  The vet told us that CB was 27 pounds - too heavy for a cat, but not flabby at all, he was solid and strong.  And that he was a Siamese and Main Coon mix with lynx points – a beautiful cat.

He was a friendly cat, greeting all visitors at the front door (and then trying to coax them over to his food dish in hopes that they would fill it up).  He was a sentinel, lying on the back of the sofa keeping an eye on the neighborhood.  He was a playmate for Lily, and Abby, and Dolan.  

Sir Curtain Burton was beloved.  1991-2008.