You folks have been sufficiently introduced to our dogs to know they like to kill things, and they consider our entire neighborhood, and particularly our street, their personal property. They have a doggie-door so they can come in and out of the house as they wish. (Security note to any potential burglars: Go ahead, give it a shot - try coming through that doggie-door. I double-dawg-dare you. ;)
They can often be heard from our back deck chatting over the fence to some poor guy walking down the street, telling him things like "Just keep it movin', pal. Don't start none, won't be none. That's right, get the heck on down the road. Go get a flippin' job! Next time you come this way you'd better be throwing a burger over the fence - with extra pickles! You Bastard!"
That's usually our girl. Our boy rarely talks. He prefers to let silly things wander into range, then say "hello" in a rather touchy-feely manner.
Whenever we leave for a while, we know there will be some sort of death and carnage to sort out when we get home. Even with a pet-sitter checking in daily, dead things simply pile up, usually outside. Yesterday as I made my first walk through the house, I kicked a heavy pillow as I walked through our dining room. No, we don't keep pillows on our dining room floor. It turned out to be the biggest groundhog I have seen in many, many years. He must have thought our yard looked like a good place to pop up.
He was wrong.
Thankfully, it was a still relatively fresh kill - no rotting-corpse smell yet, just the smudges, smears and fur-bits on our hardwood floor that you would expect after your two hundred-pounds of dogs have just finished using a groundhog as a hockey puck. Another part of the house looked like a tornado went through, and we found the cause - a dead mouse told the entire story. It must have been an epic battle.
Anyway, and this ties into our weekend at Brock's, believe it or not, Holly and I have been listening to the usual chatter from the back deck today as our dogs remind people they live elsewhere and should go there. For some reason, today our dogs are ending many of their sentences with "...you Kentucky F*cktard!"
By the way, there will be a few haiku coming to public life in the near future that are absolutely guaranteed to vapor-lock NSA for at least a week. ;)
Stay safe.
K
