laid up

I hurt my back this weekend, or rather an old problem sort of flared up.  It’s taking a long time to get to the point when I can do strengthening exercises (the lack of which lately is probably the main reason it reminded me of itself) to keep it at bay because I’ve been busy in the shop this week and can’t just lay around being useless.  Or else I have a pinched nerve.  It feels like that some too.  Really, though, I was being so careful lugging those 4” x 4”s and pavers and slabs of stone around.

Out at the country house, my neighbor to the east is gone much of the time for long periods.  He’s an exotic welder and he’s been working in Africa this year.  He has had two dogs that stayed in the fenced part of his yard while he is gone but sometime during this year, one of them died and the other disappeared.  We don’t know if he knows about the disappeared dog.  The dog got out and we saw it run by and that was the last we saw of it.  This would usually be of no consequence to me except when Montreal’s dog was in the yard, it kept Jimmy’s dogs out of it.

I mentioned in one of my previous posts that Mama Dog is alive and has a new litter.  They’ve been under Jimmy’s house across the road until the last couple of weeks when she has brought the pups out.  The dog pack now consists of Leo (the alpha male), Mama Dog, another adult yellow dog which I guess is Big Puppy.  Little Puppy hasn’t been seen for months.  There are three more, I think, left over from the litter at the beginning of this year.  And now 6 new puppies.  That’s two litters this year.

Now that Mama Dog has moved the puppies out, she seems to have moved them into Montreal’s fenced yard.  When he was gone last spring, the pack moved into his front yard since the dead dog was decaying under the trailer, their usual hangout in Montreal’s big side yard.  Weekend before last I saw them all back there behind Montreal’s house and shooed them out.  This past weekend it looked like they had moved in to stay.  I was not liking that one bit.  I’m pretty sure Montreal wouldn’t want Jimmy’s dogs taking up in his back yard but besides that, I didn’t want them taking up in his backyard.  Because the next step over is MY yard.  And I definitely don’t want them in my yard.  They run like the devil back to Jimmy’s when you throw fire crackers.  And two short pieces of 2” x 4” slammed together works well too.

Well, last Friday, I decided that I was going to shore up the fence and gates so that those dogs couldn’t get back in.  First I ran the dogs out except the puppies went under the house.  I snuck up on them later when they were all cuddled up in a puppy pile in a place they couldn’t easily get away from me (except for one that was under the house) and I dropped the puppies over the fence.  But before I did that, I plugged all the holes and squeeze-through places.

The puppies were not happy.  They kept trying to find a way to squeeze back in.  I guess the last one managed to squeeze out somewhere because I kept my eye on the yard, I didn’t want to trap one of the poor things, and I never saw it.  Mama Dog didn’t seem too concerned either.  Well, I guess I’ll find out Thursday or Friday how well my fence shoring held, if they managed to get back in Montreal’s backyard or not.