The dog has been getting kicked out of the bedroom at night lately. He's an old dog, and likes nothing better than sleeping flipped over on his back, on the thick dog bed next to our bed, now that we all live on one floor. He spends most of the day there, when he's not following Giselle around the house--the only thing the dog likes better than his bed is Giselle. I will grant that he has good taste in this. But the dog also likes to pace, and to fluff that bed endlessly, most of the night. The pacing I understand. When I was a temporary stressed-out insomniac, I paced too. What else is there to do at that hour? But I didn't have those long nails that scrape across the hardwood floors here in the Bear Mountain House (floors that go everywhichway depending on the room you're in), and I wasn't pacing around a space that echoed quite the same way. The pacing bounces back off the high beamed ceiling again and again until it's a layered cacophony of pacing, s