All posts filed under: Lab Report

The ongoing misadventures of Pu & Bear

The Lab Report – Bath time

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  Living on a subtropical island  has many advantages, one disadvantage however is that there are far more ants, termites, mosquitoes, cockroaches, spiders and other creatures that enjoy living on the island, and consequently in your home, and it seems on your dogs. One trick the vet told us was to buy a bottle of brown sulfurous liquid that turns your bath into your own personal onsen.  The dogs are quite happy to relax in the warm water, and the little critters that have been hiding in their coats are so disgusted by the noxious water they abandon ship (or dogs in this case) and are washed away down the plug hole to have new adventures in the sewage system. You must remember to shampoo the dogs afterwards otherwise your faithful friends will wander around the house smelling of rotting eggs. Delightful.

Pudding makes it into 2009

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Pudding is our 13 year old cream coloured Labrador. When my girlfriend, Seiko,  moved from Hokkaido to live with me in Okinawa  she brought Pudding with her.  Pudding’s favorite thing about Okinawa is getting to go in the ocean regularly. In summer, both Pudding and I could go for a swim together  although this tended to result in me being covered in scratches.    Over the last year Pudding has being sleeping more and more. She is quite happy to relax on the sofa all day while Bear explores the house / sink  / trash cans / laundry basket.  A few months ago we found a lump on her elbow. For a while we didn’t have it removed to avoid an operation on an elderly dog, but when the lump had grown to the size of an egg, it was excised and diagnosed as Synovial sarcoma. Pudding has recovered from the operation and after a few weeks was back to her normal sleepy self.  On around the 30th of December, Pudding seemed to get very old very quickly. She didn’t want to …

Grumpy Bear

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  Another of the idiosyncrasies of still using film (especially professional side film) is that once you put a roll in the camera you need to use the entire roll and process it in a short amount of time. Shoot half a roll of film one day and the other half a few weeks later and your images start to get strange colour shifts. Although I only get 10 shots on a 120 roll of film and 21 shots on a 220 roll of film I am still often left with a few frames left on the camera when I get back home. Rather than waste the film, I usually take a few photographs of the dogs as they are always available and work for dog treats. Bear, however, does not smile for the camera. In fact, Bear only seems to stare grumpily at me until she gets her snack. The perils of being a photographer’s dog.