Mom: January 2008 Archives

If you like shiba blogs, boy, have I got something to share with you.

I was looking at one of my absolute favorite shiba blogs, which belongs to Hikari & Strawberry, and noticed a little button that they had on their site. The button allowed you to vote for their blog, and, since I LOVE their blog, I clicked it. To my surprise, it took me to the most enormous collection of shiba blogs known to mankind (or dogkind)! One-hundred and eighty-three (183) shiba blogs, to be exact!

And, after much struggling with the Japanese registration system, Yoshi & Tsuki's blog is now listed on the site. Currently, they are at #144 in the ranking, but that seems to change pretty frequently.

Even though the site and blogs are in Japanese, I've found that you can get by pretty well using Google Language Tools.

So, if you enjoy following Yoshi & Tsuki's adventures, please take a second to click the button below and vote for their blog.

Thanks for voting!

ランキングに参加中です。

We've certainly gotten our money's worth out of the pet bed in our office. Actually, the pets love this bed so much, that we put two more in different locations around our upstairs. They are constantly in use, but the one in our office is probably the busiest. Here's the photographic evidence:

First, we have Yoshi, the master of ridiculous sleeping positions.

Then, sometimes we have Willie, who is frequently found belly-up. Good thing he's not a fish!

It's as if he's saying, "Mom, can't you do something about him? He's hogging my bed!"

Unfortunately, I see the bed as being a first-come-first-served sort of thing, so Yoshi sometimes has to rough it on the floor (or, he could walk 10 steps away, and sleep on the exact same bed out in the hall).

It's also a place for Tsuki to snuggle with the stuffingless husks of her Teddy Possums.

Or, chew them a little more.

...which is exhausting business.

And, last but not least, is little Desi. Out of all four pets, she's the only one who will consistently allow any of the other pets to share the bed with her.

For anyone who takes pictures of animals, eyeshine can be one of the most vexing problems, and can ruin an otherwise beautifully composed photograph. Over the years, I've tried numerous trial-and-error methods of getting rid of it using Photoshop, and have had some success. Unfortunately, because I never took the time to write down what I was doing, I always found myself reinventing the wheel. Well, today, I finally decided to look up the problem on the internet and see how other people were dealing with it.

I am happy to report that I actually found a pretty good set of instructions. I did have a couple of places where I got confused, so I created another version that includes some comments in the places where I ran into trouble. I hope you find it helpful.

Here is an example of how well this method works (with some additional tweaking to make the eyes look more natural):

Before.

After.

Photo Credit: Stuart Bayer/The Journal News

A happy ending to the tale of Sato, a 2-year-old shiba who left his owner with nothing more than an empty collar and some memories more than a week ago. But yesterday afternoon, they were reunited in the same spot where life went wrong.

Click here to read the whole story.

Here's the PDF, in case they delete the article at some point.