kvetching + a cartoon

Random, unrelated things are conspiring to make me very very grumpy:

Yesterday, as I headed off to work, driving by a house a few doors down from mine, I noticed that their garage door was open. Now usually this doesn't signify anything special, but on my street, I'm the only person who actually keeps their car in the garage. The rest are rented out to desperate souls or used as attics.

This particular garage has great significance. It's the office of a drug dealer who has been in jail for several months, and the fact that it was open...Yup, there he was, FAT KENNY, unmistakably. A four-hundred-pound black man holding court, surrounded by his homies. Their version of a welcome-home-from-the-big-house party, no doubt. Oh hell, here we go again.

Worked a 15-hour day, getting home at 10:30 pm, and just as I was falling asleep at midnight, POP POP POP POP POP POP!!! No, not a gunfight. Chinese New Year. I guess it's traditional to start the new year by waking and angering the whole neighborhood. Year of the cock. Yeah, well that's fitting. They too strut around waking people up at god-awful hours, caring not a whit, and have brains the size of peas.

Today, standing talking to the school secretary, I felt a tug and suddenly I was being sucked downwards. Oh ho! The paper shredder had decided to grab the hem of my favorite garment and pull it into its merciless metal maw. Tatters.

OK, if you've gotten this far, I owe you something besides complaints. Hmmm, let's see. Imagine a bulldog puppy playing with a wolf, and you pretty much have a picture of my puppy playing with her best friend at dog park. She teases him into chasing her around and around a segment of old baseball bleachers that act as benches, and just as he's about to catch her fat little rump she takes a shortcut underneath and comes out on the other side, and they start all over again. If people happen to be sitting on the benches, she uses the place between their calves and the bench as a tunnel to run through.

After they finish with the benches they run over to lay down and wrestle in the dirt or sometimes on the grass, where the wolf picks up grass stains on his light fur and gets a greenish tinge to him.

The other day they were doing the bench run, as I sat on it with a friend. An absolutely massive new dog by the name of Duke, part mastiff, part bloodhound, easily weighing 150 pounds, was standing on the sidelines, watching the chase, drooling slightly. Suddenly my friend and I found ourselves flung backwards, legs in the air, shrieking in surprise and laughing as Duke decided to join in the merriment, and pushed his way through our leg tunnel to lumber after them. It would have made a great Looneytoons feature cartoon, ending with my porky little dog saying, " Th' th' that's all folks!"