Pearl Zooming

Mr. Wonderful is out of town and I always try to take pictures of the girls to send him because he gets homesick.  I also set him up with Skype on our extra laptop so he can see them while he is away - how pathetic is that? 

I took my 50 mm lens out in the back yard, this morning, to take shots of the girls.  It was a little overcast and I didn't expect good shots, especially since Pearl did a lot of running and the girls were wrestling.  Still, I was happy with quite a few of them.  

First thing, before I even had a cuppa Joe, Pearl spotted a bunny on the other side of the fence among the Cedar trees (the opening to a rabbit hole is under there).  We ought to be having baby bunnies in about a month so I've been keeping her away from that area since it appears to be a nursery.  The lack of caffeine and Pearl being so hysterical contributed to my decision to open the gate and let them both out to chase rabbits.  Sure enough, Pearl ran under the Cedars, out of sight.  A moment later, I saw the bunny running parallel to her in the yard.  Pearl hadn't seen that the rabbit had abandoned the trees (the bunny was probably trying to keep from drawing Pearl straight to her warren) and she kept racing up and down under the Cedars trying to find her.

Evelyn, on the other hand, doesn't care about bunnies.  It was our big trash pick-up day and she's spotted a garbage truck on the road and was intent on making sure it didn't get too close to "her" fence.  The bunny came barreling through the yard to escape Pearl and ran right into Evelyn (I've seen this before).  Evelyn was knocked back about a foot, gave the bunny an irritated look as if to complain that the rabbit was unbearably rude, then went back to looking at her own prey - the garbage truck.  Shortly thereafter, the bunny came running back by with Pearl on her heels and Evelyn jumped out of the way, then trotted back to me in the back yard.  She wants no part of that stupid bunny.

Even though the bunny got away, Pearl was in high spirits and zoomed around the backyard.  It was at this point that I brought out the camera.   She is pretty much a couch potato but sometimes the puppy comes out in her and she just has to run.  

We call it zooming when she races in circles, belly down, around the yard.  She'll do it from time to time but we've never had a dog zoom the way our Jezebel did.  I swear, we used to wonder if Jezebel was going to set the grass on fire.  All dogs have their unique ways of moving and Jezebel was a smaller Samoyed than Evelyn or Pearl.  She had, as my husband called them, bowling pin shaped legs.  She'd run like a freight train and we used to think she was really fast until we noticed that long legged Evelyn effortlessly glided along next to her like a feather on the wind.  After that, we decided "zooming" was more about attitude than speed.  And Jezebel had attitude in buckets.

Pretty Evelyn, as I said, glides.  In a full-out run, she still looks like she is dancing - she lifts her feet pretty and keeps her ears perked forward.  Even though she is four years older than Pearl, she is actually the more active of the two.  Since moving back to Oklahoma, she has shown herself to be much more of an outdoor dog than we realized.  The temperature doesn't bother her that much and, if outside, she tends to run from place to place rather than walk.  She is so much more active that we've noticed that her hindquarters have really muscled up in the past year.  That will serve her well as she gets older.  She is only six, but I can already see signs of middle age in her coat, teeth and eyes. 

I hate that.  I see it in the mirror, too.

Two year old Pearl has her own running style and I just love it - head up, ears down with a smile on her face - shoulders down and her hindquarters nearly overtake her forequarters.  Her feet look like they ought to get tangled up but they never do.

I'm just learning to use my new camera and am considering getting a smaller zoom.  The 18-200 mm is nice but it is really big to carry around and I am not all that wild about the quality of the shots when it is at full zoom, anyway - unless conditions are just right, of course.  

But this morning, Pearl was so spunky you couldn't help but get some fun shots:

 

  She was full of sass:

 She runs with her tail up, most of the time:

 

After about five long laps around the yard (she'd leap up and try to kiss the camera lens on the way by - all those shots are out of focus) she took a short break:

She's got such pretty eyes:

After catching her breath, she looked around for sister:

 AMBUSH!!!

 Evelyn is a good sport:

But even Evelyn gets tired of the little twit after a bit:

Still, as bratty as she can be - what a face!

Happy Quilting, Penny, Evelyn and Pearl