I decided I wanted to have some portraits done of the dogs. This is why I asked in a war update post a few weeks ago for contact info for Larime, which Cole provided. Larime is now back up and running in the making art business after Sylv’s passing last year and all the craziness …
The Dog Lanterns’ Pet Portraits!Post + Comments (32)
Here is Genni, pronounced Jenny. We were just mucking about with the spelling. Genni was the first dog I owned all by myself. I got her just before I started by doctoral program. She was either a greyhound/terrier mix or a whippet/terrier mix. No picture ever did her coloring justice. She was strawberry blonde on top and straw blonde on the belly, had a pink nose, and could run! Larime had to work from two different photos to produce this portrait as all the phone camera pics I had of her are prior to 2011 and, as a result, not particularly high resolution. But Larime pulled it off.
(Genni)
And here is the Flooferina herself, Kylie. Kylie was a black Lab/Australian shepherd mix. She was the single most chill dog I’ve ever had and probably ever met. A woman who lived in my apartment complex when I was doing my doctorate was fostering her to keep her out of a no kill shelter and she and Genni used to play together. We adopted her when she was about one. Kylie was about eleven or twelve in this pic and her muzzle had gone from black to white. As you can see she was floofy. She had a rough and the double coat. When I started looking for a puppy after Genni died and saw that puppy pic of Rosie I decided that if they got along, that was the puppy I was going to try to adopt as they looked so similar. The foster family brought her over, they hit it off, and Rosie joined us about four or five weeks later.
Last, but certainly not least is my big, wild, sad boy Blue. Blue was a purebred blue tick coonhound. In early January 2005 when I was driving back from spending winter break at the family’s house in the mountains of New Mexico, I detoured on the way back to Philadelphia – I was teaching at Temple – to visit an old friend from grad school who lived in Kansas. As I made my way east from KC, about 70 miles east of KC in about 4 degree weather, I see this skeletal looking dog running down the median of the interstate. I managed to pull onto the median and with Genni and Kylie barking, managed to get him into my 4Runner. He was skin and bones and had no tags. I checked all the stores, gas stations, and shops at the closet exit and there were no missing dog signs. I found a vet an hour or so down the road and had him checked for a microchip. There was none. We got to the hotel we were staying in that night and he got a couple of small meals, water, a warm flea/tick shampoo bath, a walk, and joined the family. He was never really sure about the family bit. The vet in Missouri, as well as my own back in the Philadelphia suburbs who was from KC originally, figure he was about two years old and think he probably got dumped after hunting season. I nursed him back to health two times after that first time, but he eventually passed two weeks before I left to go to training to deploy to Iraq. He only made it to five or six, but Genni, Kylie, and I gave him the best life we could.
If you’re interested in having your pet’s portrait done, here’s the link to Larime’s site, to their Twitter/X account, and to their Bluesky account. They also have a YouTube podcast series.
So that’s the pet portraits. I’m thrilled.
I’ll be back later with the Ukraine War Update.
Open thread!