Grillin', dog fightin', and monster truckin'

I am savoring the hypocrisy in what I'm about to say like one savors those crappy mints from IHOP, which is to say that I'm getting no pleasure out of it, and I have to spit it out before it kills me: I think my new neighbors might be douche bags.

I don't even live in the new place yet-- I only dropped by today to sign the lease and unload a carload of breakables I don't trust the movers with-- and already I'm making sweeping character judgments. Yes, after neurotically swaddling wedding dishes in custom quilted containers, I am summoning the nerve to pass judgment on another. But bear with me a moment.

I think there's something about a 4:1 vehicle-to-resident ratio that points to douche baggery, especially when one of those vehicles is an ear-splitting, flame-covered chopper, and another is a truck with a lift kit that makes entry and egress a gymnastic sport. Now, sprinkle in two be-testicled dobermans in the backyard (right next to our bedroom window) and a driveway rotisserie pit (can't grill around the attack hounds apparently-- smoking blood drippins' rile 'em up), and you get pretty pungent New Neighbor Gumbo. Plus, the guy has gotten used to using our driveway as overflow parking for his vehicular menagerie. Considering that it only officially became our driveway today, I can let this slide, but I have to wonder where he's going to stash that extra pick-up and car come Wednesday.

Truthfully, my biggest beef is with the dogs, and here comes the hypocrisy: my dog is not friendly. She was not technically bred to tear the neck veins out of children or guard bank vaults, but she's very picky about who she meets and almost everyone gets a "go to hell" bark/growl combo for the first 1200 encounters. She doesn't cotton to most other dogs either, a fact which became painfully obvious when we tried to socialize her into an active dog park in Florida and I ended up feeling like the only mother whose preschooler channels the devil and stabs people for fun. I grew up around golden retrievers, the fluffy Buddhas of the dog world, and Abby's prickliness dismays me. Don't get me wrong, I love having a creepy-smart dog with a huge vocabulary and repertoire of parlor tricks, and I find it touching and reassuring that she guards me like I'm made of blown glass, but the trade-off of not knowing whether she's going to snap at someone is pretty steep.

Since she and I have done a few more military moves together, Abby's come to understand that packing up to move doesn't mean she'll be left behind, and she's actually made friends with one dog in this town and mellowed out a bit. But I'm worried that living next door to dobermans, and being separated from them by a waist-high chain link fence is a recipe for disaster. Even if she spends most of the time indoors, dogs still have to shit. It's going to be like West Side Story in my backyard.