Who's On First?

Barley, a dog, snoozes fitfully on a bedspread of gray and white.

While visiting my parents, Barley’s favored haunts vary with the seasons. During the summer, she’ll spend quite a lot of time downstairs with my folks, but during the winter, I suspect that she finds the house to be a little chilly, because she defaults to staying in my bedroom a much larger proportion of the time. My room is, after all, the most effective heat trap in the building: It has the smallest window of any room upstairs and is a bit of a doldrums with respect to air flow. Putting my PC through its paces no doubt also makes a meager infrared contribution. As such, not only does this act as her home base, but she’s always the first to settle in for the night, with me joining hours later as a distant second.