the destroyer of vices and bringer of joy

There is a new member of the clan...straight from a sold-out set at Caroline's in New York and the Lawrence Humane Society...won't you please give a big hand to the little lady...I give you...BEATRICE. I'll post pictures soon.

Beatrice is a Great Pyrenees and is just the tiniest bit larger than Finnegan. She's all-white and has the double dewclaws, so we are assuming that she is a pure-breed. Which is not necessarily good news, barking-wise.

Anyway, we picked her up yesterday and she's (knock wood) settling in just great. Slept through the night, no housebreaking accidents. Go figure. Finnegan is not being territorial at all, which is a bit of a surprise. They're not bestest friendsters, but they've achieved detente. Beatrice appears to be more or less the Eastern Bloc (having staked out the austere, utilitarian yellow and blue rooms) while Finnegan is more like NATO (claiming the flashier, gadget-rich kitchen, TV room and stereo room).

Anyway, we had this list of names to try out and we did that, and after getting no response whatsoever to Annabel, Agatha, Frances, Fionnuala, Georgia, Olivia and Jemima, she perked right up when we tried "Beatrice," which is a name I have always liked, what with its connection to The Divine Comedy and "beatific" and "beatitude" and all that. And by inference, the Beats. Not Kerouac. More like Ferlinghetti and Snyder, McClure and Lamantia. So...Beatrice it is. The destroyer of vices, the bringer of joy.

In other news: I have had an idea for how to revise the book, so posting will be light for the next few days. Between this and acclimating a new dog, I'm going to be a bit tied up. But there will be pictures of the new dog soon! Beatrice, like her namesake, looks rather less like a beauty and rather more like she's ineffably kind. And that's exactly my style.