Houdini

When Lucy was a young puppy, we had to crate her to keep her out of trouble while we (Penn Pal and I) were at work. When left to her own devices, she would climb the baby gate to get out of the kitchen, eat candles off the kitchen table, tear up books (that never did anything to her) left on the couch, and poop in the corner -- always in the corner (so much so, in fact, that we started to learn that she needed to go out by her pacing from the door to said poop corner in a movement later referred to as "the poopy dance" -- as in, "Lucy is doing the poopy dance and needs to go out."). So she was crated. The only problem was, she learned how to get out of crates. She learned how to unlock her first crate from inside. It was a lock that you would lift and move to the side to open up. Lucy figured out that if she pawed frantically at it enough, it would move over and she would get out. So we put a twistie tie on it. She gnawed at the twistie tie and subsequently injured her nose from the metal piece scratching at it. So we padlocked it. Retrospectively, that seems really unsafe, but it was somehow necessary at the time. Not to be outdone by two college graduates, she figured out how to force out the tray on the bottom of the crate so she could walk around the apartment (and tear up some carpet) from within the crate. We moved the crate into the laundry room to keep her from the carpet and put a second padlock on to the keep the tray in place. What did Lucy do? She banged out the two ends of the crate to break out -- even with two padlocks on it. That's when we got a new crate.

We've never had to crate Lucy since that apartment. At our (Wes and I) first home together in Charlottesville, she was either in the laundry room, which had a door to it, or the kitchen, in which we learned to successfully babygate her, during the day. This way she could sniff and roam without destruction. At our last apartment, the furniture was gated off, and she had her run of the main room. At our new apartment, we gate of the part of the main room that houses the furniture and the entrance to the bedroom. It was working effectively until recently, when we kept coming home to find Lucy behind the gate. Meanwhile, more and more of my underwear was miraculously escaping the laundry basket in the bedroom and becoming crotchless (which sadly I often did not notice until wearing them to school -- don't ask me how). Usually, though, we could see the gap between the couch and gate that allowed her to slip through. The last two days when Wes and I came home, though, we were truly baffled. Tonight confirmed our suspicions -- she's jumping the back of the couch. The way our furniture is situated here, the back of the couch is exposed, and Lucy's vertical is pretty good.

Mama mia, that dog is inventive.