Making her bed

At least there's one of us in this family who makes her bed. The rest of us -- well, our bedrooms are small, cold and uninhabited during the day, so we figure what's the point? But our dog has better housekeeping habits. She finds her blanket and pushes it into a little nook, in this case behind a folding chair under the loft steps. Then she spends three or four minutes using her paws and her snout to arrange it, re-arrange it, adjust it, start over again, arrange, re-arrange and re-adjust until it's deemed acceptable. Of course, by then she's usually lost interest in a nap, because we've noticed how cute she's being and all the attention makes her too stimulated and sociable to want to go to sleep.

Oh, her name is now Limpet. We hated the "Baby Girl" moniker she'd been given when picked up as a stray and placed in a foster home. A few years ago Noah went through a Runescape phase, playing the on-line game for hours a day. At one point he mentioned that he had a virtual pet in Runescape, a cat, and he'd named her Limpet. We thought that was very weirdly original, in a cute sort of a way. So when the dog declared herself as having a barnacle-like attachment to various members of this family, the name percolated to the top of the list of possibilities. And then, a week after she arrived, she developed a lame right foreleg. We rushed her off to the vet where she was deemed to be the very picture of health, the xray negative, and diagnosed with a ligament strain. She recovered quickly. But those three or four days of being a "Limping Pet" clinched the name for us. Limpet she be. She already recognizes her new name.