Our next door neighbor has beware of dog signs posted all over her fence. In the three months that I’ve been here, I’ve never actually seen a dog there so I have since dismissed the idea that they own a dog at all to the fact that my neighbor is a paranoid schizophrenic pretending to have a dog in an attempt to ward off would be robbers.
Today I stood corrected when I found myself face to face with the dog that I have been warned to beware of for the past three months and it turns out they do have a dog, except it’s a basset hound which is probably the antithesis of intimidating watch dogs–as far as intimidating watch dogs go.
A basset hound is, If I remember correctly, the dog from the loony toons cartoons who was so incredibly lazy that he couldn’t even physically turn around, but would instead stick his head back into his body and it would pop out where his butt was so he could walk in the opposite direction.
Also, Droopy was a basset hound, but from the looks of this dog–he’s got nothing on Deputy Droopy.
Neither of those dogs could keep me from breaking into her house, although I guess her security cameras would. Also the fact that she has the local police department on her speed dial would dissuade me from even parking my car on her curb.
She hasn’t had a neighbor living on the other side of her in 5 years and there were three times that many people who have lived there before that and moved away because living next door to this lady is such a drag. The only reason my family never moved is because–even though she was a pain in ass — we mostly just never answered the door when we saw her through the peephole–so she only managed to annoy us a quarter as many times as she did everyone else.
Of course, she called the cops on us a lot. For adding a side porch, for adding a car-port, for building our wooden fence attached to her wire fence–which she then picked up her entire fence and placed it down 2 inches away from ours–thus making her yard smaller, but so long as she wasn’t touching our fence.
She’s the kind of neighbor that peers through her blinds all day, just waiting for something suspicious to happen to report to the police and when nothing suspicious happens because we live in a boring middle class neighborhood, she calls the cops because the black man that lived on the other side of her walked past her house and came over to our house, so naturally a drug transaction must be taking place.
In reality, said black man was coming over to our house to introduce himself as a new neighbor and ask us if we have as many problems with her as he did. Three months later–she placed another call to the police when he came over again, this time to say good-bye because she had finally drove him away too.
She even managed to drive away our neighbors on the other side of us. She used to complain their music was too loud–when I’m not entirely sure they were playing music at all.
Anyway, today - I so badly wanted to take a picture of their dog, next to the beware of dog sign because the irony just needed to be photographed, but I didn’t want to be accused of being a Soviet spy plotting the kidnap of her precious canine.
But
I vow, before I move that I WILL walk past her 6 foot fence one day when her and her husband are sitting outside and I WILL take a picture of the two of them sitting on their lawn chairs side by side guarding over their precious kingdom, because they’re both incredibly overweight and the way the lawn chair looks like it’s going to weaken under their weight and split into fours is what award winning photography is made of.
Stay tuned…..
