Suburban displeasure

I've gotten into the habit of having The Texan drop me off at the gym when he heads out to school and then walking home once I'm done. It's nice, because it has allowed me to get to know my neighborhood. It blows, because it allows me to get to know my neighborhood.

Actually, I like my neighborhood - everyone I've met has been uniformly friendly, there hasn't been any drag-racing or anything of the sort. But what I can't stand are all the dogs.

Keep in mind, I like dogs - more so now that I'm exposed to one on a daily basis (The Texan's). And I understand that they are a bit more, shall we say, exuberant than cats. Which is fine, viva la difference, and so forth.

But it drives me crazy when I walk down the street and every. single. dog. races to its fence and starts barking its fool head off. WHAT DO THEY KNOW? Why must they do that? Is it the cat fur permanently embedded in my clothes? Do I exude a cat-lady pherome? What?

And to make it worse, there's this one really yippy little dog that's allowed to run free (do NOT get me started on how many people do that here)(are they not aware of cars?)(and don't tell me it's a suburban thing - I grew up in the 'burbs and no one I know would've dreamed of letting their dog outside their fenced-in yard unattended). It's about the size of a Chihuahua and gets just frantic in its barking. It always follows me for 20 feet or so, I guess to make sure that I don't have any plans of staying on its territory. And it irritates the living piss out of me. I've tried scaring it, I've tried ignoring it, I've tried making friends with it. Nothing works.

It's to the point where I'm starting to half seriously consider one of two things: 1) Introduce it to my cat, Shrapnel. If Shrapnel can stare down a full-sized Australian shepherd, he could easily learn a little pipsqueak that's maybe a quarter of his size some manners. 2) Provoke the dog into somehow biting me. This branch of Texas has a serious rabies problem, and so all animals that bite humans are quarantined, no matter what their vaccination status is. Then I would sue its clueless owners - not for monetary damages, but just to scare them into locking their damn dog up. Or I could just let it go. It's just an animal, for chrissakes.

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Another irritant is that I dropped my iPod yesterday and I think that it's gone to the big Apple store in the sky. I've dropped it many times and in many places, but never on such an unforgiving surface as cement. It froze into place and wouldn't respond to my increasingly frantic pressing of a key, any key, just respond for the love of god respond! And when I came home and plugged it in, hoping it would reboot, nothing happened. I'm going to check out Apple's website, but I fear the worst. Farewell, my electronic friend. It's been real.