I was wandering around the kitchen this evening, talking on the phone, when I looked down and saw Arwen, underneath the kitchen table, fast asleep on the dog bed.

She's taken my running tights from the laundry pile and made a pillow for herself.

This is reason #101 why dogs fill my heart with love and joy.

I'll admit that I have been neglecting this blog of late, for a number of reasons, the main two being a very large, time-sensitive and intensive project in my ''real'' job, plus the fact that this web host/blog platform (zenfolio) offers exactly zero means to block spammers, and I have simply been fed up of having to attend to deleting junk comments on the blog and on the website itself. I've had to go so far as to delete the entire contact information page from the website, which is about the only possible means at my disposal to stop the spam from coming. Unfortunately, this also blocks any interaction with legitimate blog commenters as well as with possible clients, so that is a very big point of frustration, and I suppose it's a factor in me neglecting the blog these past few weeks. I do want to thank the very small handful of people who subscribe to this blog and/or follow it; you mean the world to me, and I continue to post because of you.

I have been continuing to work on art and photography, though, and I have some nascent ideas about future projects and directions, but being my indecisive, unconfident self, they are still at the idea stage and will require some coaxing along. I did just finish a children's book project, a very special one indeed, and if you'd like to have a look at it, you can go here. I have a book of poems that I would really like to submit somewhere, but poems are so incredibly personal, the prospect of shopping them around is akin to offering your firstborn up for sale. I want to get into taking commissions for drawings and paintings of animals, but I can't find the gumption to sell myself. I have flirted a bit with facebook and instagram; social media can be powerful sales tools. However, Facebook is more and more a place where trolls run free and many friends disappoint by showing their true colours through comments and conversations (we could get into a whole discussion about what actually constitutes a ''friend'' these days, and how we can come to have hundreds of them on the Internet, but relatively few in real life. But that would involve a whole other tangent that I'll leave for another day). As for Instagram, on the surface it is very beguiling with all of its pretty pictures and its rigorous sanitation from trolls and politics. But dig down just a little bit and you realize that not only is it little more than grown-up show and tell, it appears to be a relentlessly sycophantic game of attracting/trading/soliciting followers, comments and endorsements. There are a lot of perfectly ordinary people out there with 10 000+ followers, and I just don't get how that kind of façade can be accepted as genuine, and I don't want to be a part of it. 

So here I sit, resolutely on the sidelines, refusing to play the game...until I find a way that will work for me.

For now, a series of paws and balls, for your viewing pleasure.

...I am nursing/scratching my first black fly bite. They are late this season, as is the season itself. Spring just does not seem to want to commit this year, and we have seen cool temperatures, wind, an inordinate amount of rain, and when it's not been raining, it's been gloomily overcast, or else sunny but tempered by an unpleasantly strong and raw north wind.

There is a TV commercial running right now trumpeting the reminder that ''summer is just 95 days long'', with the implicit message to make the most of it. Whenever I see that commercial, I have the urge to throw heavy things at the television. Up here in central Ontario, we are all too aware of how brief the good weather is, and further to that point, how much every good day counts. We have leaves on the trees for just four months...one third of the year. The maples and oaks have only just this week birthed their bright green baby leaves, and by late August those leaves will already be taking on autumn colours.

All of this to say that the late spring, or lingering winter (depending on your glass half-full/glass half-empty perspective) is depressing.

However, the first crop of dandelions has already peppered the grass, and unlike most other people, I love their cheery yellow punctuation, followed by the puffy white snowballs of the dandelion clocks. They are beautiful to photograph in closeup, and they make a lovely bokeh when they take on a background role, as in these photos taken today of the dogs at the park.