MY DOG IS BEAUTIFUL ISN'T SHE

So the other day I was hanging up Christmas lights on the gallery, which I would post pictures of but I don't really have any good ones so you'll just have to wait until I manage to get outside with my camera at night when you can actually see the lights and stuff, when Juno decided to come outside and hang out. Since I had my camera with me and I'm slightly obsessed with how adorable she is, I decided to take some pictures. Here she is in the alley that runs right in front of the building:

...Yeah, she likes to lie in the snow. She's kind of weird like that, but I guess she has enough fur that it doesn't matter all that much if she's lying in frozen water. What interests me, though, is what happened when I decided to take a close-up picture:

If it weren't for the bushes in the background here it would be almost impossible to tell that she's just lying in snow.

This has something to do with the way my camera adjusts to lighting and such. If there's a lot of light stuff in the lens, it makes the picture darker so you can see the details on the light stuff, but the dark stuff becomes, well, really dark. If there's a lot of dark stuff in the lens, it makes the picture lighter so you can see the dark stuff, but the light stuff becomes light. There's probably a fancy-sounding technical explanation for this somewhere, but the point is my dog is dark and snow is light, and the dog was the focus in these pictures so the camera made everything light.

Naturally, I came to the conclusion that I had to do something with these epic pictures. After all, it's like a natural green screen, except after a few minutes in photoshop I realized I didn't have the patience to do the green screen effect all that well, but WHATEVER here's my dog with a purple background:

But why stop it there? After all, I can put her anywhere now! Like in a jungle:

Or on the moon:

Even in heaven:

I have no idea where she is in this one, my dad just wanted a green background:

My mother suggested a church, so here's Juno in a church:

And finally, here she is in the North Pole. Santa's gone a little crazy, so be careful when you open your presents this year:

PS my dog also likes to be adorable while I'm eating:

Daily Story 42 - A Christmas tree and its feelings while it's being decorated

(I asked my mom for something to write about and she came up with what you see in the title.)

The tree had grown in the forest on the mountain for several years now. It was determined to be one of the tallest in the land, but that dream was cut short. By an axe. In the middle of winter. The tree had been chosen, out of all those trees in the forest, to become what the elders called a 'Christmas tree.' To some it was the greatest honor in the world, but to others, it was the most horrible fate a tree could experience. This tree supposed it depended on the circumstances.

Its journey from the forest was an interesting one, to say the least. It rode in the back of a truck to a house on the hill and soon found itself standing inside a warm living room. It wondered what awaited it as several small children ran around with happy grins and colorful balls and figures. The grown-ups draped strings of lights and some tinsel around it, and the children hung their items from its branches. Soon the tree felt weighed down by everything that hung on it, but it soon grew used to the weight. Everyone circled around it, looking up at it in awe and smiling, and the tree felt proud as the people called it beautiful and wonderful.

It loved to see the happy children running around the place, and it loved to be given so much attention. What it didn't love, however, was when they took it out of the house and brought it back to the forest. Its life was pretty boring after that, not to mention short...