Ash: "In me you see a dog divided."

We love our dog. It's true. He's such a sweetheart. Whenever I'm sitting in the "internet chair" by the front door (the only place that Comcast was willing to put an access point), He always sits either between my legs or right next to me so as he's sitting on my feet.

And a more persistent dog I truly have never seen. Well, okay. There's Sheri's grandpa's dog that climbs trees to get her frisbee, but that's just sheer determination. Ash is more of a puzzle solver, and he'll go to great lengths to get what he wants, especially when it comes to his own physical comfort, and he'll do quite literally anything to spend the day lounging on our beanbag chair (the poof).

We block off the living room with chairs, he skirts around them. We cover it with boxes, he sleeps beside them. We cover the entire poof with random objects, he pushes them off. We decided once that it might work to vacuum him every time we found him sleeping on the poof, but he just seems to weather it. When we adopted him, we expected that he was beaten pretty severely on a regular basis, so nothing we could physically bear to do to him phases him in the slightest. I swear to you I can see the disdain in his eyes when I come after him with a newspaper.

"You," he says, "you swing that thing like my grandma! Give it your best shot." Then he laughs and pees on the linoleum. If we're lucky enough to have gotten him off the carpet in time.

Our latest devices to keep him off the poof involved:

1) Not one, but two dining room chairs, one on the floor, one on the arm of the couch
2) a coffee table so he doesn't hop over on the mantle in front of our fireplace
3) my backpack wedged between a chair and the leg of the couch
4) a large, heavy box so he doesn't crawl under the chairs
5) our air purifier under the couch so he doesn't crawl under the couch
6) and just for good measure I puffed up the poof really high so that he'd think twice about jumping up on it.
7) oh, and I put his bed right in front of the heater so that he'd have a good, warm, comfortable alternative.

So today we come home from church, and he's trapped himself in the living room. He was smart enough to hop off the poof before we walked through the front door, but he couldn't extricate himself from the incriminating area. He just sat there, blinking at us innocently.

"What? You didn't bring me back a bone?"

Then he trapped himself under the couch trying to crawl out and lick our faces off.

Anyway, happy third, Ash, as far as we can figure.