Space for Fetch

I took Coyote out to the old burial house yesterday to visit the grave-cue the sounding of the lie detector. Actually, I was going out to get some work done. The house is on a double lot with nineteen large oak trees and a totally fenced in yard. The house isn’t much, especially now with all of the holes in the walls and broken out windows, but the property itself would make a great neighborhood natural park.

Too bad it wasn’t appreciated by the tenants. I’ve about given up on trust after my experiences giving “affordable housing” to people. When I started buying properties I heard stories from other landlords who said they’d get a tenant in and never raise the rent and they’d wind up in a symbiotic relationship-everyone gets stability. Oh, the counterpoints I could make. I had one cook from a popular restaurant that had knee high trash with what looked like every cigarette butt he’d ever smoked laying on the floor.

I saw the benefits of giving low rent from the tenant side as well. I dated a woman who had been in a house for 15 years and she often commented on how she never contacted the owner except to give him money. She appreciated her good situation and never wanted to give him any reason to notice her at all. But one needs enough awareness to appreciate the good situation.

Now my life is thrown into chaos, needing to get out to the house to fix it up. As I mentioned earlier, I took Coyote out to keep me company. Dead dogs just don’t do it, you know? I let Coyote out of the van and he kind of tentatively wandered around for a couple of seconds and pretty soon was doing that drag racing thing that dogs do where the rear end stays low and he was peeling out from place to place, stopping and panting for a second before getting a good pouncing start again. That quickly turned into complete circles of the house and yard until he eventually came back in to find me working, and collapsed on the floor in exhaustion, panting on his side with his eyes wide open staring at his dreams as if they were prey being ferreted out.

Seeing Coyote’s joy at having all of that space, combined with my general attitude of always living in the worst one of my rental places in order to fix it up, has catalyzed me into moving out to the house. I’ve put my current apartment up on craigslist and have already made appointments to show it while getting my stuff moved out to the house.

Get ready dogs-you’re about to live in an awesome off leash dog park! I’m looking forward to having the space to build some fun doggie playground equipment-think agility equipment with a circus flair. I have several ideas. Plus there’s plenty of space to coerce *er* “train” the dogs to play fetch.

It also occurs to me that I had Moose out there recently and she was acting almost exactly the same way the original Chickendog acted when I first got her as a puppy and was trying to come up with a name for her. They were both scared of everything in the yard. Great-one more thing to  habitualize Moose to. But that’s the thing about playing fetch, I’ll get her to fixate on the object, and then any new environment will narrow down to playing with the object and interacting with it and our routine of giving it back to me and (from her viewpoint) coercing me into throwing it for her to chase.

These tenants trashing my house is a good thing.  Right? Everybody has a lesson to teach-it couldn’t be as simple as they are atrocious human beings. Right? Gotta make it more complicated. Get ready dogs-you are now taxed with giving those people’s actions some meaning through this chaos.