What?! No products?!

Sometimes I like to make layouts without products. Here is one of my all-time favorite layouts. I really wanted to focus on the journaling and the photo, so I used nothing but a photo, a couple of fonts and Photoshop Elements. As you might expect, it is a two-page layout.

Blue
(click image for larger view) Title Font: CK Elusive, Journaling font: CK Journaling

The journaling reads:
This is a photo of Blue taken at a dog park at the Alamogordo shows. He is so happy to be running and playing. I love my Blue. He is getting older; he’s 12 now and I know his days are numbered. He’s also getting harder to live with as he ages. He hasn’t aged gracefully; he’s now easily stressed. We know he’s stressed by noise; and we’re not talking thunder, although that bothers him as well. He’s bothered by the beeps of cell phones, pagers and smoke detectors. We’ve picked ring tones based on how much they disturb The Blueser. He was such a good puppy, so easily housetrained. He only had two accidents in the house as a puppy. I tried to get him to pee outside the Hartford airport after meeting him for the very first time. I rmember how the airport workers let him out of his crate and he ran to me happily when we met for the very first time. The workers made a comment about how he knew me and was so happy to see me, but it was the very first time we met. At any rate, I digress. I tried to get him to pee once we got home, but the excitement didn’t wear down enough for him to pee until after we got into the house. I was actually on the phone with his breeder, Joy, telling her that he arrived safely when he started to pee on the floor. I remember telling Joy, “I’ve gotto go, he’s peeing on the floor and her shouting helpfully back ”Don’t let him!” The second accident was the fault of my stupid dog book, which told me that puppies had to go the bathroom 15 minutes after eating. Blue had just had his first breakfast in his new home the morning after arriving, and as I marked the time on my watch so I would know when the “15 minutes” were up, he began peeing on the floor again. That was his last accident in the house (other than those cauced by illness). I’ve always taken such joy in telling people that Blue was reliably housetrained with 12 hours of arriving, but that was due completely to Blue and his iron bladder and had nothing to do with my skill as a dog trainer. He was such a good dog. It makes his current destructiveness particulary frustrating. We had to replace the bathroom door downstairs after he destroyed it. Lucklly we’ve discovered that he will happily destroy carboard boxes when stressed, so we try to leave some out for him. We also think that his deteriorating eyesight causes Blue to stress. Dogs are supposed to be far more adaptable than humans when it comes to losing sight or limbs, but not Blue. His opthamologist says it’s because Blue is an active alpha dog with lightning fast relexes who is used to moving quickly. Poor Blue. It is so hard to see him get old. And within the last month he’s become clingy. In his entire life he’s only wanted to cuddle with me when he was ill. So off we went to the vet to report that Blue was not being his normal independent self. (I almost wrote confident as well, but his confidence deteriorated with his eyesight.) His kidney levels are high, so we’ve reduced his protein. Oh my Blue, it so hard to see you get so old. (Journaled by Angela 2-26-11)


Here are the left and right sides:

Blue's health has actually improved slightly since I poured out my feelings on this page.  We finally realized that he was having a weird type of seizures. He went almost a blissful month without any seizures, accidents or weird behavior after beginning anti-seizure medications. He did have a breakthrough seizure just before our wildfire and evacuation and we had a hard time controlling the seizures while we were evacuated. But things seem to be OK for now. We'll just keep him on his meds and hope for the best.