Dog Pack Charges Me

I never remember being so afraid that I felt prickles on the top of my head.

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The dog populalation immediately surrounding the house has jumped from two to eight dogs! On the left, a mess of four little yappy ones. I'm training them not to bark at me, unsuccessfully, for the puppies.

On the other side is a nice Mexican guy with 2 aggressive dogs. If I come up to their fence they bark and growl and shout obscenities at me. If they are running loose, the owner warned me that one is pretty mean. Oddly enough, when those dogs saw me while they were off the chain, they were like: "How do you do? Top of the morning to you!" This didn't apply if you were a stranger, and especially if you were on a skateboard.



That household attracted a couple of strays. One was ugly and mean. It's a female. It took up residence in my yard, and then barked and growled whenever I approached "her" property. I showed her my title deed to the place, but it didn't do any good. She drags trash and dirty things like diapers into the yard. The other stray is shy, big and listless. I think it's hungry.

I don't think that the owner was a bad guy, he just indulged his dogs too much. Then he started feeding the mean stray, making her legally his.

I called Kansas City Animal Control, and they came out multiple times, but were unable to capture her. She just ran away.

I got a big scare one day when the neighbor's dogs were out of the fence. I startled the mean stray and the neighbor's dog when I ran out the house in a big hurry. They were snarling and bared their teeth and charged me! They made a racket that would have scared me even if they were in a fence. I shouted "NO!" at them and ran away. Running just made them chase me more. I was so scared and so mad. Until that day, I never remember being so afraid that I felt prickles on the top of my head.

The next day I went to the Animal Control. It does a lot more good to show up in person than just to call. They told me I can start the process to go to court. I decided to give diplomacy one last try. They gave me a flyer in Spanish that explained Kansas City's laws for pets. Another piece of ammunition they gave me was telling me who else had complained about the dogs in recent months. I was the fourth person.

My neighbors found a translator, and we talked for about half an hour. They were very nice about it all. Their dogs stay inside the yard, now.

I called Animal Control again about the strays. I said, "You can't catch them. They just run away. Don't you have some hamburger with something in it or a trap?" So they sent out a guy with a tranquilizer gun! He hunted down that mean girl and shot her! He chased her and found where she had passed out. All I saw after that was the dog paddy wagon racing down the street. They got her.

He set a big trap for the shy stray. It doesn't hurt the dogs. We caught it within a couple of hours, but they accidentally let it go when they tried to get it out! So, we set the trap once more, but I thought it would know better by then. It was caught again by the next morning. The poor thing was shaking with terror both times.

That dog has a beautiful, sweet face. It is probably adoptable, once the owners overcome it's shyness. The other one is so unsociable, I imagine that no one took her. I hate to think what her life had been like. At least her final days she was fed properly.

Mexican Muscle is Back. Is He Typical?

My neighbor's house was fixed up beautifully by a half-hearted remodeler named Tony. He helps out a little, but mostly he just signs the paychecks. Friendly guy, proudly showing me all the work his guys are doing to the house.

He recommended his worker Billy, who is Mexican.

Is this all typical for Mexican muscle?

He gave me Billy's number, who said he would send me his brother Romay (sp.?) but it was Antonio who showed up, half an hour late. At the rate of 8 bucks and hour, oh well, that's 4 bucks I saved. He doesn't have a car, and public transport made him late.

He says that his English, on a scale of 1-10, is a 1.

Antonio set to work with gusto, even before being handed the tools. He worked tirelessly. No breaks except lunch. There were 2 layers of carpet. Someone had used drywall screws instead of carpet tacks to install the second layer of carpet. It is hard work to yank it up, and then there's hundreds of screws to remove. There are staples, too.

(There comes a certain time in an old house's life where it loses its self-respect. It's beauty gets neglected for so long that something simply must be done. But all that its poor self esteem can justify is make-shift work. This is why there were drywall screws in the lovely hardwood floors, only a hand-held shower sprayer, wallpaper on the kitchen and bath counters, wallpaper on the toilet tank and wallpaper on the window sill, and the same lavendar paint used in half the rooms.)

Antonio got most of the screws, most of the staples, most of the carpet tacks. Then I asked him to sweep the attic and patch up the 3 holes in the plywood floor where the AC ducts used to go. He decided to patch first. He really did a good job. I thought I would just lay a big peice of wood over the holes. Instead, he cut back to expose the studs and made the patches go in level with the existing floor. He not only patched the few little duct holes, but scrounged up some board to patch some big holes, too. I think he was trying to stretch the job so he wouldn't have to clean up there.

I praised him mightily for his work, and paid him in cash. Then he came down and watched me mud and tape a drywall corner. He asked for the tool, and tried to smooth out my joint. He mashed so hard that he wrinkled the tape and removed all my mud! I thought he would be messing with the wrinkles then, and looking sheepish. No! He was looking pleased! I shook his hand, got his number, and told him I would call. When he left, I fixed the mud, and looked pleased.

I like him. He can haul rocks and do exterior painting for me. I'll save the fiddley, precision stuff for myself. Cheap Mexican muscle is great! Is this what Jesus meant when He said, "I was a stranger and you welcomed Me?"

There's Always Been Blood and Sweat. Why No Tears?

Well, the tears came with this incident.

I'm in my 13th month of remodeling. I have survived 3 robberies (two were successful), 1 sprained ankle, 3 electric shocks. None of it freaked me out. I have been working 50 hours a week for a long time. I have made some big mistakes that cost me weeks at a time, only to discover that, "Hey, they make a tool for this!" It didn't get to me.

But this did: Graffitti. And lazy neighbors who won't paint over it. They just left it, week after week. The neighbors said about the taggers, "They just come back." Competing taggers crossed out rival graffitti and wrote in their own beside it. The neighbors didn't even call the city. It was looking like gangland in New York. I guess the little punks have more tenacity and resources than home-owning, hard-working adults. How will I recover the money I invested when I have such a neighborhood?

So I went a bought special paint and covered it up. The whole alley. Took like 2 hours in the first pretty day of spring. I increased the value of every home on that block by a hundreds of dollars each. I hated every minute of it. I knew that Jeremy would criticize me. A neighbor came out and gave me 5 bucks. :)

I was wrong about Jeremy. It wasn't just him criticizing me, EVERYONE criticized me. I did more on that day for the good of mankind than I have done in months. Yet I was critcized. "Leave it until just before you sell." But I know it will take several rounds of new graffitti before the taggers give up. I was right. I drove by on Saturday night, and there was a fresh display of graffitti on 3 garages.

The next morning, I went to church and the music was too loud. I sat for a few moments -with my critics- and decided that I couldn't stand the racket. No big deal. I have done that a half dozen times in my old church. But THIS time, I went out and started crying because of the noise. It wasn't really the noise, it was just a tiny annoyance added to my already broken heart. I couldn't stop. Jeremy went out with me and we sat on a bench outdoors. I just couldn't stop. I'll bet it's been 6 months since I shed a tear. He kept his arm around me. I felt less silly.

PLOT TWIST
Then we went back into the building. The music was still playing, so we were waiting it out in the foyer. There was a lady in the foyer with 2 children who were adopted from an orphanage in Russia! She was drumming up volunteers to fill boxes with gifts for orphans in the former Soviet Union. Our friends Pavel and Tatyana were the contacts on the other side there in Moldova, to insure that the gifts actually made it to the children.

I guess this whole fiasco was to get Jeremy to talk to this lady. He got 10 boxes, 10 boxes, and filled them with candy, toys and personal grooming products. I helped pick out the goodies and pack them. He had been saving up 10% of our income for months, and this wiped out about half of it.

I still haven't covered up the graffitti. I think it's good to avoid making a game out it by covering it too fast. It's not increasing and the rivals are ignoring it. I'll cover it eventually or maybe leave a flyer on the front doors of the owner's houses encouraging them to cover it. I recommend Home Depot's shellac based paint (the fine print says "alcohol-based"), formulated for graffitti. It covers in just one coat, and it's thin so it goes a long ways.

I drove by another alley just a block away. It's so ugly, the taggers don't want their names there. Strangely, that made me feel better. After all, these are just alleys.