Let's hear it for the noble laptop

I'm sitting in the "keeping room" at Harmony. (That is, we were told, the historical name given to a space that in modern houses is called a "great room." Basically, an open space with the kitchen, a seating area, and a dining area. The only differences are a) ours has a cosy wood stove, original woodwork, and a massive fireplace where people actually cooked 200+ years ago, and b) it's not at the back of a McMansion.)

I'm working on an English laptop computer -- you can tell this because I have a £ sign, and the quotations marks are in a weird place on the keyboard. Mimi is behind me, happily destroying a rawhide bone. We prefer this to her new game of destroying her chenille bedding inside her crate. Unfortunately, she's a very uh, oral dog. We bought her a lovely extraterrestrial-themed toy intended to be thrown by the human and caught by the dog. Well, she's not much for the catching-in-mid-air aspect of such games, but she loved retrieving it and then "playing" with it. I have photos (which I'll save for later) of what she did to it, given that it's made -- or it WAS made -- of black nylon canvas. Mimi shreds stuff. So far, she shreds stuff that we bought specifically for her to play with, but if she gets much farther with her bedding, I'm afraid that she'll be sleeping on cranberry red chenille confetti.

But the beauty of all this is that I'm in a room that was designed for people to do stuff together, or at least in parallel. The original design of the room was that someone could be cooking while someone else could be playing a game while another person could be reading. In the present instance, I'm blogging while my dog is destroying rawhide. And that's virtually the same as what they were doing during the Federalist period, if they'd had Internet access, right?

In a couple minutes, I'll whisk Mimi into her crate for the evening, then go downstairs to continue working on the baby quilt I'm making. Or maybe I'll do some ironing. Whatever. The point is, for right now, this very minute, I'm minding the dog. Which makes me feel virtuous.

[Of course, if a cat walks in the room -- and trust me, they have more sense than to do that -- the jig is up. There's no &%£*#$^ way I could get untangled from the wires fast enough to stop the dog from "playing" with the cat. But I will continue to enjoy the illusion of being responsible while multitasking.]