My stand-ins for Bogart.

Since I won't be able to play ball with Bogart this Christmas, I have been compensating by lavishing attention on Joe and Amanda's dogs, Brinny and Duke (which for them means surreptitiously feeding them food from my plate). It's hard to get a good photo of Duke because he apparently thinks that cameras emit death rays and will run away from them. Brinny, on the other hand, has no such neuroses, but is a little trigger happy about attacking dogs that are not in her pack (though she is incredibly friendly toward people and has been known to bruise people with the force of her wagging tail).

Brinny prefers to sit on your lap, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you (see photo with George), but she will happily wedge her ass in between two people to maximize her contact with the humans (Lisette and Dave, in this case).

At Thanksgiving this year, Brinny patiently put up with my attempts to get a decent self-portrait of the two of us.

As a side note, Joe wouldn't be able to adopt Brinny if he lived in Ontario because of a province-wide ban on pit bulls. While some pit bulls are obviously trained by their owners to be psychotic killers, Brinny adores humans and I've never gotten anything but slobbery licks from her.