Break in the Rain

After several days of rain, we woke up to clear skies and slightly warmer temperatures. We'd turned the heat off and had the doors and windows open by 11 this morning. The weather gave us and the cats a chance to spend some time in the yard. Poor guys have no way of knowing that we've pretty much decided to get a dog. This has something to do with how things are going in the neighborhood.

Most days you can watch school kids doing and selling drugs in the street outside our house, a couple weeks back someone was held up at gun point walking from her car to her house, and a week ago someone pointed a minivan down the hill we live on. The car ran into a parked car in the driveway of the house next to ours; took a few hours for the police to show up. Oddest detail to me was that the bumper of a another car was in the back hatch of the van.


So we're thinking dog. Didn't want a Chocolate Lab, too yuppie. Didn't want a German Shepard, too many fascist associations. Looks like we're gravitating toward a Boxer. Implicit in all of this uncertainty is that we're living in a home for the first time, no neighbors living in the same structure.

Still, as we put tarp down over the weed-infested front yard today, more folks came by and introduced themselves. A woman who shares a studio apartment in a building on the corner, a guy who is refurbishing a 4-unit building that "looks like a swiss chalet", a guy who lives one block over that clutched a leaf the whole time he talked to us.