A HUGE Milestone!

First, the camera business:
As winter is quickly approaching, and the sun sets earlier and earlier each day, I don't get many opportunities to take pictures with natural light. But that's what weekends are for! (Also: sleeping, laying on the couch, eating, falling asleep on the couch in the middle of eating, etc.)

Badger loves mugging for the camera

Even though we have a big sliding glass door, getting enough light for the photos was still a challenge. The camera kept giving me the "not enough light" warning, but when I reduced the shutter speed enough for the warning to go away, the pictures just came out as giant motion blurs. So I have dark pictures that I tried to "correct" using Snagit.

The original image

The result of messing with the "gamma" slider until I gave up

One of my photography enthusiast friends suggested getting an external flash so the light could bounce off the ceiling and look more natural. Has anyone else tried this with pets?

And now, the happiest day of my life year recent memory:
Some of you may recall that Badger and Mushroom are not the best of friends, rather, they are the squabbliest of siblings. After 9 months, we are still on a crate/rotate schedule and closely monitoring their interactions if they are both uncrated. This Sunday marked a HUGE milestone for us, because we were able to have both dogs uncrated in the apartment for the ENTIRE DAY!

Evidence

Well, we cheated a little. In the afternoon, we went to a nearby lake to practice with our friend and her reactive dog Lilee. We were a little concerned about bringing Badger, because Lilee tends to be most reactive toward large black dogs and has reacted toward him in the past. We shouldn't have worried about either of them, because Badger and Lilee were both rock solid.

Note that I left out a certain little brown dog. As it turns out, Mushroom is highly reactive toward geese, and there was a whole flock of them hanging out on the shore. She wouldn't even take treats at the beginning, but eventually she was able to look at the geese without pulling toward them. I guess I'll count that as a small success, but we'll be going back in the future for some goose-desensitizing.

When we got back, Badger and Mushroom were tuckered out and spent the entire evening sleeping on their pillows. The humans may also have fallen asleep on the couch.

Have you celebrated any successes (both large and small) recently?