Happy Thanksgiving to all. We all have a lot to be thankful for even though sometimes it seems otherwise.

In the spirit of giving thanks greyhoundsthebook.com will donate 10% of each book sold from 11/25 – 12/07 to the Friends of Polar Fund.

Racing Name: Polar Pass (GH Data)
Offspring of: Splishin Vallie x Rebecka Ann
Sex: Male
Birth Date: 8/2/06

Polar has severe vasculitis of unknown origin. He has been at the Chicago Veterinary Emergency Services and Family Pet Animal Hospital since Sunday AM.
He has been receiving impeccable treatment from the staff in both facilities and his condition today has finally changed from critical to fair. Everyone is guardedly optimistic.

Greyhounds Only is setting up a special fund to help defray the cost of Polars medical expenses which will be ongoing.

Polar has benefited from the all the Greyhounds Only dogs that are some of the generous blood donors at the ER Vet.

If you would like to donate to the Friends of Polar Fund please go to greyhoundsonly.com. We will be setting up a daily blog to record his progress now that he is almost out of the woods.

We will also post the address next week.

On a cheerier and far more light-hearted note, if you are looking to do a little holiday shopping for your hound check out the snobhounds website:

Have a wonderful holiday with your loved ones, hound and human alike.

Well, we’ve done it- we’ve gone and gotten ourselves a Facebook page!

Please feel free to look us up…

Our cover model Slim is feeling festive so we wanted to take a moment to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY to KATHERINE of The Grillo Group!!

Katherine is one of our favorite graphic designers, her contribution to GREYHOUNDS has been extraordinary and we hope she’s having an awesome B-Day!

In addition Slim wants to ROO out two more November HAPPY BIRTHDAYS to JORDAN and JULIE, two of his favorite cousins!

Hope everyone is having/ had a great birthday! You guys rock!

We’re still on our “get the girls a greyhound” kick and so we’ve nominated Lee on the A Puppy for the President website.

Follow this link to vote for Lee.

He may not be a puppy chronologically but now that he’s off the track, he’s entering puppy-dom anew!

We are excited that Michael Wolf is speaking tonight at Columbia College. He is discussing his recent book The Transparent City and his body of work shot in the central downtown area in Chicago. Wolf has been

“focusing specifically on issues of voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux. Whereas prior series have juxtaposed humanizing details within the surrounding geometry of the urban landscape, in The Transparent City, his details are fragments of life–digitally distorted and hyper-enlarged–snatched surreptitiously via telephoto lenses: Edward Hopper meets Blade Runner. The material resonates with all the formalism of the constructed, architectonic work for which Wolf is well-known, but also emphasizes the conceptual underpinnings of his ongoing engagement with the idea of how modern life unfolds within the framework of the ever-growing contemporary city.”

Natasha Egan is associate director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago and is one of the authors as well as Geoff Manaugh.

We are going to be scrutinzing those wonderful images looking very carefully for a greyhound in one of those windows!

As mentioned last week, we are extremely excited about our write-up in this month’s Reader’s Digest. Since our post last week, we’ve had a few requests to see the inside of the magazine. Voila:

The write-up reads:

The Who/ The How/ The Now

“What happens when a dog is downsized? Barbara Karant’s photographs of retired racing dogs in Greyhounds (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) make you want to run right out and adopt one. In the spirit of the season, some of the book’s profits will go to a rescue fund for the royal breed.”

The chilly weather here in Chicago already has us reminiscing about warmer, sunnier times!

With this in mind, we’ve revisited some photos from the Greyhounds Reach the Beach event last month in Delaware that Photographer Ray Wong was kind enough to share with us…

Photographs © Ray Wong
More on our flickr site…

Barbara is pleased to accept the honor of receiving 1st Place in the Personal Work Category for PDN’s annual Digital Imaging Contest!

The winners are also featured in the November 2008 issue of PDN, on stands now!

We’re sad that one of our favorite models, Garvey, is moving to Seattle.

Garvey is seen here in a few of his book pages:

And here’s Garvey on his road trip:

Bon Voyage, Garvey (and Jordan, Dina and Lilah!) we’ll miss you all!!

Over the weekend, 320 people convened at the Warren Park Field House in Chicago for the (lucky) 13th annual Greyhounds Only Reunion…

Barbara with Slim and Fancy at the reunion. Slim is our handsome cover model for the book. He was 6 at the time the cover photo was taken and now he’s 13!

A GREYHOUNDS poster being auctioned off.
Photographs © Sarah Hoskins.

For more photos of GREYHOUNDS the book at the reunion, check out our new flickr site.

Thanks to Laura Dion-Jones Casey, we got some great footage of a group greyhound roo! (That’s the Snobhounds booth featured in the background!)

Here’s what Barbara had to say about the reunion:

“On Sunday, Greyhounds Only had our 13th annual reunion. It was truly remarkable to see how GO has grown from a handful of volunteers saving the dogs, to many many people who were there honoring their wonderful companions.

Some people are superstitious about the number 13, but I have always thought it very lucky. I reconfirmed that theory today, as I looked around and saw so many faces I recognized and just as many faces that I was unfamiliar with. I remember when Greyhounds Only was small enough that I could recognize every dog and every person. However, some things never change: all the dogs looked well groomed and well fed and as always smiling faces both canine and human surrounded me. How can any of us be any luckier than that!

It was a time to make new friends and renew old acquaintances, to think about all the dogs that can be helped in the upcoming year and what we can do to make Greyhounds Only’s 14th year even better than our Lucky 13! My hope is that GREYHOUNDS can reach out beyond the group I work with to help the dogs in other groups across the country.”