The BIGGEST Happy Birthday of them all.

When he was born he was given the fancy dog name, Armani's Cold November Rain, but his first Mom was a young lady rocker who happened to love Guns 'N Roses so she named him after Axl Rose. As he grew up the only name anyone called him was just Axl. After spending seven years working as a service dog his second Mom's home had a bad fire and it was time for Axl to look for a new home and retire. Things didn't work out exactly as planned.

Axl's retirement only lasted about a month. Good service dogs never stop working and it turned out his third Mom, and my own sweetheart for the last 56 years, was just diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Did Axl also know this? Did he sense that he was needed again? Maybe he just liked Jacqueline better than me but he sure did stick by her side every day. And slept by her side every night. Literally.

If you have read this blog for a while you would know that over the years there has been some confusion over Axl's exact birth date. That confusion was cleared up last month when his first Mom, Carey, pulled up his AKC Registration Number and confirmed that Axl was born on October 28, 2001.

Well, besides having an abbreviated retirement, two years ago Old Man Axl, (he has begun to acquire a few new names) was called into duty to help his best friend Ruffin raise a 7-week old female Rottie pup. I think the night the little fur ball walked over to him and tried to play with him, Axl firmly planted his paw down and declared for all the world, "Hell No!" And the little fur ball was swatted across the floor. So Mr. Ruffin had to do it all by himself and Old Man Axl acquired another new name, Grumpy Grandpa. But that's another story.

Well, Rottweilers are a resilient breed and have a natural tendency to want to be loved and to give love, so the Grumpy Grandpa sort of faded away after a year or so and Mr. Axl and his new little girl Bess became good friends. Of course it helped a lot that she was also a very pretty girl, too.

So that brings us to today. And what do you give such a wonderful old Rottweiler? How about a special cake made with a medium-rare Filet Mignon steak covered with globs of mashed potatoes and a beautiful candle? Here it is in all its glory. Thanks to my great photography you can almost taste it.

And he didn't have to share this with any one.

Signs of Love

Kisses. If your Rottweiler doesn't love you will he still give you kisses? Not very likely. Kisses are a universal sign of love. But they are given freely from the heart and cannot be bought or bribed or ordered. They are always free. And I can tell you from personal observation that the skin on my face has absorbed so many slobbery kisses in the last 20-years that my DNA is now part Rottweiler. So sit back and enjoy some kissing photos. And eat your heart out if you never got any.

And, please click on the photos for a larger view.

Sometimes, it hurts.

Anywhere, any time.

Any one.

But especially, us.

When I started to take a lot of photos of my Rottweilers back in 1995, at first I began saving them by scanning the prints into my computer. Then when I got my first digital camera saving the photos simply meant uploading them to the computer. But I never cataloged them. The only smart thing I did was creating a storage file using the model number of the camera. Then a few years ago I actually reached the end of the numerical file sequence for the Nikon D40 camera and had to give it some thought what would happened after image DSC_9999.jpg was created. To my dismay the counter simply went back to DSC_0001.jpg so I needed to create a new storage file so as not to overwrite the original photos. This led to Nikon D40, Nikon D40 2014, Nikon D40 2016.

All these years I always wanted to catalog the ever-growing mass of photos that now exceeds 30,000. One of those catalogs would certainly be by subject and the first one that comes to mind are my Kiss photos. In order to find them I literally have to look though all of the photos. In selecting this tiny sample of Kiss photos I came to realize I must have over a thousand of them scattered throughout my hard drive. I hope I picked the right ones to entertain you today.