Shhh... my dog is trying to bark...

Happy Opening Day of Baseball! Of course, tomorrow is what I’m really looking forward to – the first Yankee game of the season. Baseball brings back memories of living in New Jersey… the trek to Yankee Stadium… the perilous walk pass Boss Tweed’s Pub in the Bronx… sidewalk vendors and ticket scalpers… noise and crowds and crazy energy… giant pretzels and knishes (gosh I miss those knishes)… a vast green field and a cloudless blue sky… and of course, the New York Yankees. Winning games. Always, always winning. (Okay, maybe not always…)

So Rick and I ran a whole bunch of errands today, including stopping by the mall to finally make use of some holiday gift cards we’ve been hoarding. Actually, Rick only had one gift card from this past Christmas, but I managed to find four Dillard’s gift cards lying around the house that I’d never used. Rick’s mom usually gets me one for my birthday and one for Christmas, so I guess that was two years’ worth of gift cards that I’d never used. So I was able to get a whole bunch of stuff that only cost me fifteen bucks total. That was fun…

On the way home, we had to stop by the vet to pick up some food for Echo. We’ve been feeding her this prescription dog food called “Canine j/d.” It’s made with fish oil (so it doesn’t smell too good… at least not to someone who hates fish… but the dog doesn’t seem to mind it…) and it’s supposed to be good for cartilage and joints. So it helps dogs with arthritis, like Echo. But I’m confused about the name – because even when I look at the bag, I can’t seem to find an explanation for what the “j/d” stands for. It just says Canine j/d. The only “jd” I know of is a juris doctor degree. So… is it food for dogs who are hoping to become lawyers? Are there canine crime crusaders out there, ready to fight for the rights of their fellow dogs? How long does a dog have to go to school to earn a canine juris doctor degree? Or, am I totally wrong about this food? Perhaps it’s as Rick suggested – it’s not food for dog lawyers, it’s food made FROM lawyers. It’s recycled lawyers. (Cue Charlton Heston…) It’s people. It’s peeeeeeople!! Canine j/d is peeeeople!! (But wait – that brings up the whole argument of whether or not lawyers are actually people… :))

And speaking of Echo… when we were on our way out this afternoon, we noticed a note taped to our garage door. It was from our next-door neighbor. He was asking if we could stop letting our dog out after 10 pm, because apparently his kids are extremely light sleepers with very thin bedroom walls, and when she barks it wakes them up. He went on to add, “and it takes them hours to get back to sleep.” (It takes your kids HOURS to get back to sleep?? Hmmm… ever heard of children’s Benadryl? Great stuff. Maybe you should look into it.) I was rather annoyed by this note, for several reasons. First, because I have a thirteen-year-old, deaf, arthritic dog who HAS to go outside now and then. And it doesn’t matter if it’s eight in the morning or midnight – if she wants to go out, I have to let her out. You can’t reason with a dog. She’s not going to understand if I explain to her why I’m not listening to her plaintive whining. Second, Echo is an inside dog – she spends very little time outside. When I let her out, she’s out there for five minutes tops – and then she runs right back to the door and wants to come in. It's not like she's out there barking for an hour. Third, she’s not even that loud from inside MY OWN house. She always goes outside and runs right to the corner of our house nearest the bedroom – which is as far away from our neighbor’s house as she can get. I was in the bedroom this afternoon when she was out there, and she barked a couple times and I noticed I could hardly hear her. If I was asleep in my bedroom, and Echo was directly outside the window barking, it wouldn’t wake me up. These houses have pretty decent insulation and double-paned windows. Outside noise usually isn’t that big an issue. (This is why I think our neighbor’s kids must be EXTREMELY light sleepers.) And fourth, our neighbor bought one of the smallest lots in this neighborhood and built the largest possible house on it – he built his house so close to ours that we can practically shake hands if we’re standing on our respective porches. And one of the things we immediately noticed when his house went up was that all the rain runoff from his house collected in OUR yard… after a good rain, we’d have a big puddle of standing water in our backyard for days. We just recently got so sick of it that we spent quite a bit of money to have a drain buried in our backyard to prevent the mosquito breeding ground from popping up again.

So Rick figures we have the perfect solution for this guy – we’ll stop letting our dog out after 10 o’clock as soon as our neighbor moves his house over about ten feet. That’ll work better for everyone – not only will we not get so much rain runoff, but he’ll be at a reasonable distance from our backyard and won’t hear the dog anymore. In the meantime, I think he needs to look into some white noise machines and a few sets of soundproofing drapes for the kids’ bedrooms.

And he’d better watch out, because MY dog is studying to be a lawyer…