Saturday, January 24, 2015

Day 1866

The days just aren't long enough. After walking Dot and Dash this morning, I went up to Lewisville to photograph the new arrivals to the Dalmatian Rescue program. We've accepted quite a few new dogs recently and they all need to get up on the website. Gretchen was supposed to be aggressive toward men and I was a little worried about getting bitten. She turned out to be very sweet and I had no problems getting a cute picture. Charlie was one of the most nervous dogs I have ever seen. This handsome one year old pup was surrendered during a messy divorce and had probably spent his entire life listening to people yell at each other. No wonder he was wary of people. Elsa had probably been a breeding dog in a puppy mill and it was obvious she had been a mom far too many times during her young life. Her next home will be much, much better. Starr was another owner surrender, although I couldn't even imagine how someone could take this beautiful, sweet dog to the pound and dump her. We will make sure that all these dogs find a great home where they will get a second chance. It's still very sad though that they were so unlucky the first time around.

Photographing rescue dogs takes a lot of patience and the whole process took longer than I thought it would. By the time I returned home, there wasn't a lot of time left to go get groceries, fill the car with gas, and retrieve some additional equipment from the storage warehouse for tomorrow's photo shoot. The instruction manual for the production camera has been my bathroom reading for the past several days, but I'm still not completely comfortable with some of the more advanced features. I'm charging batteries now and I'm sure everything will work out fine. I only shoot a few of these videos a year now. When I shot and edited a video once a week, my confidence level was much higher. This is not really like riding a bicycle. You do tend to forget things.

I wanted to edit some of the Dalmatian pictures I had taken earlier in the day, but my own Dalmatians were insisting on dinner. I set up a pump on the roof to begin removing some of this week's accumulated water, fed the dogs, and we went on our evening walk. On weekends, I have to keep a watchful eye out for loose dogs in the park. On Saturday and Sunday there are always idiots who let their dogs off lease and you can never tell whether they are friendly or not until it is too late. I've learned from experience to avoid these dogs. If I see unleashed dogs up ahead, I immediately turn and go in a different direction.

It was almost dark before I climbed up on the roof again to finish removing all the water.  It was a very long day. I didn't even get around to taking a shower until after dinner.  I still haven't gotten around to testing the wireless microphones. Maybe I'll take a pair of wired lavaliers with me tomorrow just in case. I guess I've still got some time to test some things tomorrow morning, but I'd much rather sleep in late. I'm very tired.

Holly is today's Dalmatian of the Day
Watch of the Day