There are a couple of different things that I miss about having a permanent address and living in a house. One of those is the lovely long hot showers I could take with a 50 gallon hot water tank. But there are quite a few things that I really don’t miss about living in a neighborhood. The main one is lousy/noisy neighbors. One of my kids recently experienced this little phenomenon in the “incident with the excited dog who wanted to chase a duck”. My granddaughter weighs about 100 pounds soaking weight but is over 5 feet, 5 inches. I know this because the last time she visited she was a inch or two taller than me but would blow over in a stiff wind as she hasn’t gotten an ounce of fat on her. Being a newly minted teenager, however, she believes that she can do things on her own that her mom can do and one of those is taking her two dogs out for a short walk in their backyard. They haven’t lived in the house for very long so haven’t had a chance to put in a decent fence and with the HOA restrictions the back part has to be less than 4 feet tall. Well, I don’t know about you but a 4 foot tall fence is not going to hold a bull-lap mixed dog in when he is excited so they haven’t made that a priority yet.
Anyway, on this particular day a duck wondered over into their yard (there has is on a little pond) and a little bushy-haired dog from next door decided he wanted to chase it across. He wasn’t on a lease. The male of the pair my of daughter’s dogs went for the duck at the same time and broke his collar. The little dog took exception to the big dog and a fight ensued. In the mean time the big dog’s sister was not having any of this attacking of her brother and dragged my skinny granddaughter over to help out her brother. The owner of the little dog came running out screaming and jumped into the middle of the fray. She was bitten for her troubles and her husband came running out also screaming. My granddaughter is yellowing for her mom, trying to keep the female dog back as best she can and trying to get the male to come back to her.
Now comes my daughter and her husband grabbing their dogs and pushing them back into the house while all the while the couple next door is screaming about their off-the-leash dog with a broken back leg, the wife with a bite on her somewhere and the husband demanding that the police be called and he is suing my daughter. Well, the police were called and told the couple that they were in the wrong as the dog was off the leash, out of his yard, and she should have never gotten in the middle of a dog fight to begin with.
Since, the police wouldn’t do anything to my daughter and her dogs the couple next dog have vehemently stated they will sue because my daughter’s husband refused to pay for half of the medical expenses (he never really stated if it was for the dog or the wife or both as the wife required a couple of stitches and the poor dog lost his leg) and have told their side of the story all over the neighborhood. The neighbors have been mean-eyeing my daughter and her family for the last week or so and my poor little granddaughter was beside herself because she couldn’t control the male dog after he broke his leash. And the poor dogs were whining and whimpering in their crates because they thought they were in trouble too. The HOA policy clearly states that all dogs must be on their leash at all times and should not invade someone else’s yard. My daughter now has to use the leather harness on both dogs to take them for a quick potty break. We can only hope that the couple sees that they were in the wrong and calm down but we all know that’s not going to happen. The only people who are going to win are the lawyers.
Now we are all more stressed out than we need to be because the granddaughter called me while this was going on crying that she was “in trouble because she counldn’t keep a hold of the dogs and they got into a fight and it’s all her fault!” Which of course, throws my blood pressure up in high gear because someone upset my grandbaby. My poor daughter wants to move out right now but she hasn’t lived there long enough to have enough equity for a new place. She really wants to move further in the woods with absolutely no neighbors and I really can’t blame her. If we have trouble with any of our neighbors we can just move our RV to a new place down the road. She will just have to bear with it until it passes, I guess.
Till next time…
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