Other people's dead dogs

Well, I think I'm officially done with my homework.  My first of four classes in pursuit of my state school principal certification will officially conclude next week.  But, for right now, it's all done but for the grading, and the turning-in of my final project, which I'll do sometime tomorrow.

So we've enjoyed a nice quiet evening together tonight, sitting around as a family after dinner, listening to folksie seasonal music on Pandora (a nice mix based on Rosie Thomas+holiday) and looking nostalgically at a few familiar pictures of our good old dog.

There's a higher-purpose to our reverie tonight, however.  You see, our favorite local bagel shop, Biffs, makers of the finest bagels in the northland, and one our regular weekend breakfast stops is, oddly enough, themed around a vast collection of individually framed pictures of hundreds of other people's dead dogs.  It sounds a little morbid, but it's not.  Dog-people will understand, I think.  It's really kinda touching.  Anyway, we dig it.  So we always imagined, once Shadow was gone, we would be just-so-pleased to hang one of her pictures on the wall at Biffs, where we could see it now and then, whenever we visit.

But it's taken us a little time to find one we all like enough to place into Biff's permanent collection.  We've got thousands of pictures of Shadow.  Literally thousands.  But we didn't look through all of them to find just the right one.  We did, however, scrutinize several dozen looking pretty carefully for just the right one among the 190 favorite-photos of our good old dog in a set of her pictures we've kept for years on flickr.com.

We think the one we picked captures Shadow as perfectly as any photo could.