In which I am beset by neighbor things

[ritaxis]

So I got home yesterday to find Emma distraught because the dog had mauled the chicken across the street. Let me reiterate: although I live in an agricultural county, I do live in the city. I live in the inner city, roughly, though my neighborhood is being somewhat gentrified.



The lady across the street lives in a house made of an old wooden cable car with added lean-to stuff. She's a masseuse, she manages a CSA (subscription produce) pickup, she has a limegreen VW bus with insufferably saccharine things painted all over it -- she's a vegan and she has these chickens.

There have been chickens in the neighborhood most of the time I've lived here.

Anyway. That boy I don't want to put up on my couch apparently let the dog out yesterday morning and Truffle found the chickens and started playing with one of them and when the neighbor yelled at her to get out of the yard she ran out with the chicken in her mouth (apparently the neighbor never used the words "drop it" or "let go" -- unfortunate, because Truffle has been rigorously trained to follow those commands). The chicken died. I have promised to buy her a new chicken at General Feed and Seed but I'm worried about it because it's not exactly chicken season though it seems to me that General usually has chickens of some variety or another. But since the neighbor's clearly not into the chickens for the meat or the eggs, maybe some other kind of poultry will do as well? They carry a whole panoply of poultry there.

So the capper is that the neighbor doesn't have a fenced-in yard. The chickens run around loose in the backyard: the backyard is not fenced. I;m beating my breast about our fence problems, and she buys herself a pair of chickens and doesn't fence them in.

Oh, our fence problems. It turns out they're not relevant to the episode in question, but here they are: the next-door neighbor is having a bunch of work done -- a new shed ("detached garage" but nobody uses them that way because they're at the back of the property: they're always storage, workrooms, or mother-in-law units), a new fence (which is fancier than the old one, being topped by latticework, which I would not have chosen but I'm not going to argue over details), conversion of a porch to a sunroom, a new roof over her side entrance. So. I said, to her and to her contractor, that I was very concerned about the fence part, because my dog spends half her life in my yard. So the fence being taken out is a real hardship and would they please close the fence back up as fast as possible? Sure, he says, three days at the most.

It's been over a month. They put up a temporary fence but it doesn't work. We're having to keep the dog inside all day and it's a hardship for her and for us. She's going crazy with not being able to go out, and meanwhile she's learned bad habits about escaping and wandering around the neighborhood. Her favorite thing is to go to the dumpsters at the apartment complex next door, but I know she's gotten farther than that because of the length of time it has taken her to return running at full speed, as proud as she can be because she came immediately in dog reckoning.

On another front, the television news says that there are eighty-five roads that were damaged last winter for which there are no plans for repair.

And also, I hate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Comments

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Surely there's a law about fencing in your poultry! Would she sue the city if a fox ate her chickens? You're being good by buying her a new chicken, but maybe you should tell her to put a fence up to keep other dogs from doing it.