I spend too much time on the cats and not on the pups, the big girls. Ruby (Figure 1) will turn fourteen years this August, while Dreamboat Annie (Figure 2) turned seven back on Valentine’s Day.

I’ve been a dog person a lot longer than I’ve been a cat person. My first experience with a dog was when my wife and I were dating back in the early 1980s. She had a big goofy male Yellow Lab she’d named Rhett Butler, because at the time she was living and working in Marietta, Ga. And living in the south at the time she gave her Yellow Lab a proper southern name. When we got married later in the 1980s and moved down to Orlando, I got my very first personal dog, a female Black Lab whom I named Catherine (Katie) Scarlett O’Hara, called Katie, another proper southern name and fitting in with Rhett’s naming convention. Over the years we would come to own a number of male and female Labs, each one arriving when one of the priors left us.

And so we finally got to Ruby. When Ruby’s companion Max left us in 2015, we set about looking for Max’s replacement. Annie, being a Doodle, was a bit of a surprise to us because we wanted another Lab companion for Ruby, and we were looking to adopt a rescued Lab, but we couldn’t find one without a lot of drama. Then one of the vet techs working at our veterinarian knew about a litter of Labradoodles that had one left, and needed to find a forever home. Thus were we introduced to Annie, who arrived to live with us when she was five months old. The two have bonded and are quite close, as you would expect.

Today I was out doing some basic water exercises in the pool and the girls were out with us poolside sunning. I was able to photograph them both while they were still.

If you look carefully you’ll see a lot of white on Ruby’s muzzle. Annie’s coat now has a lot of silver highlights, which really shows off her naturally curly coat. She still has those touches of ginger on both sides of her upper muzzle. Yes, all the cats and dogs get along just fine.

Commentary on the Photos

As with the last post, these photos were taken with my iPhone 11 Pro, except this time I used the telephoto. These were also taken outside in afternoon sunshine. With a different lens and good lighting, the results are quite acceptable. No distortion whatsoever. As I’ve written before, careful use of the iPhone camera system can produce acceptable results as long as you stay away from the wide angle lens in any light, and try to use good lighting for everything else.