never a dull moment.

There are finally people working on the house! Underneath the terrifying loose pseudo-insulation and rat biowaste--the cleaning company disinfected it after vacuuming--we actually have a considerable attic up there. Snazzy steps pulling down into the hallway replace the previous 3'x3' "access" that required carefully placing a stepladder underneath it and levering yourself up and through.

The attic guys had put proper insulation down, but luckily they didn't glue it or anything, because there turned out to be a lot more knob-and-tube wiring than expected, so what was thought to be some re-wiring along with replacing our terrifying ceiling fans turned out to be quite a lot of re-wiring along with replacing our terrifying ceiling fans. The new ceiling fans, while not artistic, do look nicer, and more importantly do not shake alarmingly. No household appliance should be a memento mori.

The guys have been laying plywood on top of the ceiling beams, so we can store stuff up there; specifically, we will need to empty the garage so it can be destroyed and replaced. This was going well enough until one of them put his foot through the kitchen ceiling (he's fine), and that itself wasn't so bad until in their work to fix that they didn't put up enough plastic sheeting, giving the entire kitchen, and much of the flooring elsewhere, a layer of sheetrock dust. Anna did a deep cleaning, and then had stern words for the contractor: putting a foot through the ceiling is an understandable accident, but trashing the kitchen is not. Anna's stern words are quite stern; I would feel sorry for them, except that they fucked up.

We did a couple days of having Leela confined to the office and backyard, but it was endless barking, so we've been bringing her to the kennel for the day. They call it "All-Day Play," which I'm sure it is for some dogs, but Leela is complicated and mostly hangs out alone or with the humans. She hates going, though not as much as she hates the groomer (she unreservedly loves going to the vet). Something in her little doggy brain re-lives her actual abandonments every time we drop her somewhere, even as she grows more secure and confident with passing years. This has reached its apotheosis this month, as she is routinely "removed" from the general population into a different room, not for behavior problems as would be usual, but because she figured out that each time other dogs are being brought in or taken out is an opportunity for her to escape. (This is a beagle specialty.)

There's a double gate with a sort of airlock-like area in between, which they call the "bubble," just for this purpose; they can't really stop her, so they just stick her in solitary at the rush hours. I happened to see it firsthand on Friday, as I was taking a break from a conference to handle parenting stuff by telephone and decided to look at the video stream for the Small Dogs room. I spotted her meandering in from outside, and then a dog was getting taken out, and I watched her work her way into the press of dogs pushing up against the door, and then...go under them. Her Jack Russell heritage gives her a deep chest, but also a fantastic flexibility, presumably for those times when the rats won't come out of their burrows and you have to dive in after them. She can flatten herself a bit more than your less specialized dog, but what she can really do is flatten herself and then move, in a sort of commando-crawl. She's shorter than any full Jack Russell variant would be, so she goes over to the crowd of dogs, drops herself 3-4 inches, and slinks out under them.

She is also quite gifted at staying in human blind spots, so much so that I'm rarely surprised any more when we're walking off-leash and I look back to find her, only to discover that when I turned to look backward, she went around my other side.

Luckily she's quite charming, and the kennel folks seem to find her a fun change of pace.