Pandemic dog walks
Lamont visits every building at Carleton University in the summer of 2020
Lamont
Lamont is a little beagle that I adopted in July 2019 from the Potsdam Humane Society in northern New York. I found him through an ad on Petfinder.com. After mourning Gordon, my previous beagle who died a few months earlier at 15, I was looking at beagles within 100 km of Ottawa and fell in love with his photo. He's a happy guy, but was not without his problems. I didn't have a valid passport and emailed a request for information and started the process to obtain a passport. The shelter advised me that he was a lovable guy, with some behaviour problems that led to him to be rehomed multiple times and returned. According to the records that the shelter sent me, it seems like he spent more than half his life up to when I got him in and out of the shelter. The first thing that I did was sign him up for training at PetSmart and he went through three courses over six months with two different trainers. He still has seperation anxiety; he still has a few accidents in the house and he still tries to steal food from the fridge, but he is doing well. He makes me crazy at times, but I'm glad that he's in my life. He's not Gordon, just different.
Clicking on a thumbnail will bring up a full-sized image of him outside of one of the buildings. The buildings are displayed in the order that they were completed.
Jenn
I'm a researcher with the federal government and a Masters of Arts student at the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa Ontario. I completed an Honours BA in Political Science in 2018. Going back to uni in my forties was life-saving after my parents died. My friends and family are great support and my co-workers are like family. At university I could be a lot more anonymous. Except for being the age of my colleagues' parents, I could be normal and I could address one of my big insecurities, dropping out of uni.
The walks
Being an indeterminate student at Carleton gives me a lot of satisfaction and miss it now that we're in the pandemic lockdown. The campus is basically abandoned so I've been walking the beagle around. Since I took Lamont to his school, I know it. He doesn't know mine. So, with some coaching, I began to take a photo of him outside every building on campus. Driving to Ottawa gets us out of the house and the campus is so large that no two walks are the same route.