The one where the police show up

So.

Today is my husband's birthday.

Last night we went out for his birthday. I'd arranged for a monitor-sitter to arrive at 7:15, just after we'd gotten the girls down for the night.

I was a little surprised to hear a knock on our door at 7:09, just moments after we'd put the girls down. I opened it, assuming our fabulous sitter had just arrive a few minutes early. I didn't even bother to check out the window to make sure.

You can imagine my surprise when this greeted me at the door:



Okay, so maybe not quite, but there was a police officer standing there.

He explained that one of our neighbors complained about our dogs barking.

Please believe me that it is not an exaggeration when I say that all our neighbors have dogs. Every.Single.One.

So, I found it difficult to swallow that ours were any more disruptive than another.

Whatever. I'm not sure this police officer particularly likes his job, so he wasn't up for conversation.

And. Over his shoulder I could see my sweet babysitter driving back and forth past my house--canvasing to see if it was safe, or not. My phone was ringing too, which was also her, concerned if everything was okay.

In an attempt to keep her from bailing, we brought the dogs inside without further question.

Our sitter said she saw the squad car stop at someone else's house before she decided the coast was clear here---the complaining neighbor---so Brad decided he was going to "have a talk with them" on the way to dinner.

There's nothing that makes me more anxious than confrontation. So, I quickly busied myself on my phone, like if I didn't watch, it wasn't really happening, or something.

After about five minutes, Brad returned.

He told me that the lady actually called the police for animal cruelty. She thought we'd left our dogs "tied to a tree" for hours on end, and that 35 degrees was too cold for dogs to be outside.

Since that wasn't enough reason to send the cavalry, she went with the barking noise disturbance story for the police.

She then said that all of the above was really concerning, because of "all the graves" we had in our backyard--probably other animals we'd left tied to trees in the bitter cold.

Okay, so before any animal lovers go postal on me, our dogs love to be outside on the dog run--they don't mind the cold; they especially love the snow. We don't always have them out there, they are primarily inside dogs. But, when we have people coming over after the girls are asleep, we put them out, because their barks wake the girls.

Alive and well.

As for the "graves":

We are so grieved that we couldn't save you all from the harsh winter frost, especially you, Heirloom Tomatoes. R.I.P.

What we have here is certainly a failure to communicate.

(These are actually our neighbors' graves, not ours, but it was too funny not to photograph.)