Yesterday was a nightmare with the dogs, not surprisingly. Yeah, we figured Jesse would go to someone else’s house. I can’t picture him entertaining at all or cooking or whatever.

I’ve noticed a definite pattern with the dogs, and yes, it’s definitely about them not liking to be left alone versus something stirring them up. Anyway, the first time they go off is for about an hour. After that, it’s scattered bursts of barking that usually last 5-20 minutes. Maybe once every hour or two they go on a barking fit. I’m beginning to think they don’t start with their initial hour-long barking spree the instant he leaves, though. Before he went back to work, it’s not like he never left the property at all, yet we rarely got hit with barking spells that went on for an hour or more. So I’m thinking they don’t start until he’s been gone for more than an hour, cuz when I think back on it, he’d usually come and go quite frequently, never being gone for more than 20 minutes to a half an hour at a time.

Anyway, we have until the 1st to decide exactly how we want to proceed. Different things could produce different pros and cons. The only thing I know we’re not going to do is nothing at all. This is way too much to deal with and I think we’ve sat back and dealt with enough noisy neighbors in the past. If I could know it would be 15 minutes a day or something like that, I could live with it. But not barking that mounts to hours instead of minutes.

I forgot to mention that I won a $50 ESPN GC and that Mary made me a Christmas card that’s really quite nice, even though she knows I still hate Christmas with the way it disrupts our lives and brings out the worst in people.

Later…

Less than an hour to go before our hour-long barking spree and I soooo don’t want to hear it! I keep the air cleaner and sound machine on in the living room and bedroom, but I can’t even piss or shower in peace in the bathroom, and of course I can’t do anything in peace in the kitchen either because those areas are too far away from the sound machines. If it were summer, I could put the fan on over the stove, but it’s definitely not summer. I am sooooo sick of having to deal with dogs every single fucking place we go! Every single fucking place! They were a problem in Phoenix, they were a problem in Maricopa, they were a problem in both places we lived in Oregon, and now they’re a problem here in California as well. There’s no way this could be happenstance. This is a definite, definite curse from above. But why???????