Long live Dog-a-Day! (kinda)

Back in college I ran a service called Dog-a-Day where I emailed subscribers a picture of a dog every day, along with a fun caption. This was initially a Christmas present for my dad but it spiraled into a full service with some ~200 subscribers 1 And a full mailing list of nearly 1,000 distinct users from people subscribing and unsubscribing. (check out some previous blog posts about that).

As an added bonus, after two years I starting doing an Advent calendar of sorts for the month of December by photoshopping my favorite Christmas character from childhood, Santa Mouse, 2 Rudolph is so old hat, put some cheese out for my boy. into every image.

Pictured here on the cover of his titular book (not hidden)

The full backlog's available at https://alexbeals.com/projects/puppies/, but here's three images from the 2020 countdown if you want to give it a shot. 3 The image captions have hints if you need them but c'mon. Live a little.

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death... This pup's the apple of my eye! It's a cloudy, blustery day!

Closing it down

While it was a blast to run it, it ended up taking more effort to source high quality dog pictures than I thought, 4 Maybe peak first world problems. and over time I found myself more and more often scrambling to pick a dog the night before. Finally in 2020 (where COVID could have been an opportunity to really flesh out that backlog) I instead found myself getting burnt out. Rather than grow to resent it I figured five years was a pretty good run and with one last dog picture (of our new puppy Murphy!) I called it quits—though I left the door open for a potential Santa Mouse cameo return.

Bringing it back

So for five years I left it alone. I'd think about it every so often come November, but the timing usually didn't work out, and I was still dreading it a little. But in the words of the inimitable Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton "the time is now". 5 Maybe my favorite movie opening monologue ever. Just go watch it, and join me in peppering in "patina of shit" to your everyday lexicon. Tom's so so good in this movie. As a heads up, I'm only committing to doing the Advent calendar so don't expect dogs after Christmas. Additionally the previous mailing list was deleted by Mailchimp for inactivity, so if you were previously signed up you'll have to sign up again for your 7am PST dog using this form.

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See you in your inbox!

  1. And a full mailing list of nearly 1,000 distinct users from people subscribing and unsubscribing. ↩︎

  2. Rudolph is so old hat, put some cheese out for my boy. ↩︎

  3. The image captions have hints if you need them but c'mon. Live a little. ↩︎

  4. Maybe peak first world problems. ↩︎

  5. Maybe my favorite movie opening monologue ever. Just go watch it, and join me in peppering in "patina of shit" to your everyday lexicon. Tom's so so good in this movie. ↩︎