I'm trying not to play the victim here, but I've been feeling like the guy at the bottom of the dog pile. Life is a rugby match, and lately I've been the ball.

On the one hand, I have the Boss telling me that Julie (his girlfriend) and Tim (his son) aren't getting along. He's very clear about what's wrong with both of them. Julie is too stubborn to listen to Tim, and Tim wants to play a bigger part in the Kennel. (That's what I'm calling the new project that's taking up so much of my time and wearing my soul away. The Kennel. It just sounds right. To me. For no good reason.)

Julie, on the other hand, feels caught in the middle between father and son. She thinks the Boss is too involved with theory to see what's practical, and she thinks Tim has trouble appreciating anyone else's point of view. She's also convinced that neither of them has any respect for women.

She and I have a lot of fun discussing those two guys. I gave her my impression that the Boss has difficulty pretending he's interested in anyone's ideas but his own. And I said that Tim was born with a silver chip on his shoulder and blinders on. "Boy, do you have those two pegged," she told me.

And so we come to Tim. He thinks the Boss is too slow and should be scrambling to bid on more new projects. He thinks Julie is wasting her time, and that he could do her job better than she's doing it. He hates being told uncomfortable truths, such as the fact that he's failed in his attempts to acquire two other kennels in the last year. (Not just failed, but failed spectacularly, squandering tens of thousands of dollars along the way.)

They all believe the other two resent them. The Boss and Tim, two of a kind, always think everyone is out to get them, even people they're close to. They are major control freaks, paranoid and self-obsessed.

Julie is caught in the middle, but not in the same way I am. I don't try to express an opinion, because I don't have a strong opinion about what they're doing right now. And I don't try to get my way because I pretty much have things my way, a hundred miles from the battle zone and without any direct supervision. That's one boat I'm not interested in rocking, thankyewverymuch.

Here's the kicker. For the last two weeks and for one more week yet, all three of them are living in the same house. It's Tim's house, and it just happens to be centrally located, near the hub of our current business and not far from the Kennel. He's thrilled that his father and his father's girlfriend are living with him, of course. Who wouldn't be? Better him than me, is all I have to say. And I told him that, too.