Pt. Reyes

Point Reyes National Seashore is a place of astonishing beauty. It isn't all that far from me, kynekh_amagire had never been there, and I have been a bit low about the emotions all week, so we made the journey to the point.

It was wonderful. Here, I'll post the vulture shot first, in honor of Kyn. I think that this is my best vulture capture to date!



( You know the drill. A zillion pics under the cut. I got some nice ones! )

Growing a collie: take one seedling, just add time and a bit of your soul.

The thing about pups is that they don't last long. Never get a puppy for his own sake, but for that of what he will become, because that dog will be companion and burden, beloved and mirror. He will be with you for a very long time, and change you, and hurt you in the end, and you want to be careful with decisions that are this large.

That said, watching a puppy grow up is awesome, both in the playful vernacular way and the original meaning that holds awe in its root. Rearing a pup isn't something that one gets to do too often in a lifetime; you get a finite number of real dogs, by which I mean the ones of the sort described above, just as you get a finite set of years. I have seen my first generation of true dogs come and pass, and I see now how they fit in and define eras of life, and how few of those eras there actually are.

When you're in it, you kind of get used to having a puppy, all the work and all the cute and how you get home and there's a puppy with the soft little snout and whatever it was he destroyed in your absence. Every now and then there's the little double take of, 'wait, did the puppy actually grow half an inch overnight? How...?!' and the first time you have to replace the collar because it's too small. Somewhere along the line, that bond starts to take place, until one day, not all at once but slowly, comes the inescapable realization that the cute puppy that might have been any puppy has somehow become your dog. It grew to you, and you're part of each other now, and you had better hope you like what you see.

Bliss Like Chaos is still very young yet; he isn't done. He hasn't even reached proper adolescence (any day; I'm waiting. Seeing something that big pee like a puppy is really funny, though). The progress is something; far more dramatic than sweet little Coba, about whose subtle emotional growth I could go on about for ages but who really didn't take too long to reach his dainty adult size. These pics are reposts, but seeing them all together is pretty neat.

( seedling will become a collie, just add time. )