Love/Hate Thursday

We have this dog named Scout.

Do you remember the show Seinfeld? I was a very big fan. In the Seinfeld world, there was this character named Newman and every time Jerry saw him, he said, "Hellooo, Newman." Just like that. With contempt and a curling of his lip. It was great.

Um. Well, that's how we speak of Scout. "Hello, Scout." The subtext is: "You worthless waste of life itself."

Scout is a pretty, pretty dog. Look, here he is as a puppy:

Isn't he adorable? He weighed 12 pounds when my husband brought him home. Now he looks like this:

You are right, he does have a great smile. In fact, that may be the only reason we've kept him around up till now.

He's mostly Border Collie but I like to tell people that we got the worst half of that. We didn't get the smart half. We got the OCD half. The dog is crazy about the tennis ball. There is NOTHING he likes better than the tennis ball--not eating, not sleeping, not being petted --nothing. I am forever stepping on tennis balls that he has managed to sneak into the house in hopes that someone, somewhere might forget about the "no fetch inside the house" rule and throw a ball for him. (Listen, I know you are thinking I'm too harsh, but A) Scout presents me with plenty of work just due to his nervous bladder and B) you haven't walked around my house with a bottle of Softscrub and a cloth trying to take disgusting marks off of the walls where some saliva soaked tennis ball has rebounded.

At any rate, we put up with him because he's, well, ours and all. And he makes us laugh. And because it's not like my floors were that clean to start with. But our neighbors on the left side of us are petrified of him because he's such a manic barker. Little do they know that if they raised a hand to him, he'd lie down and pee all over himself. OR, if they threw a tennis ball for him, he'd follow them home --I haven't lost hope. Anyway, I digress.

So, get THIS: yesterday I got a call from a neighbor (my husband's best friend) who is a police officer. He's just the greatest guy and his position on the police force puts him in the know of all the things that are going down around the city. So he calls and he says, "I don't know if you were wondering about all the police activity in the neighborhood but..."

I felt pretty stupid because I hadn't noticed anything. I felt more stupid when he told me that the police had sent ten units out to our neighborhood. TEN. Turned out that some guy had been shoplifting at the mall --which is a few miles from us and ran for it when the police showed up. So he made it into our neighborhood and ran down the long creek bed that goes behind our house. The police arrested him and took him off to the pokey. Our friend said that it was kind of a miracle that the guy hadn't cut through to this other street by us because if he had, he would have gotten clean away.

I laughed and said, "Well, the only thing I heard was Scout barking in the back and I thought maybe he was barking at the afternoon deer passing by."

A little while later, my friend called back. He was laughing. He said, "I was just talking to the arresting officer and judging by the streets and all, the criminal ran toward your house but then changed direction and ran the other way. I said to him, 'Wow, it's a good thing he didn't cut across that street because he'd have been home free.' The arresting officer said to me, 'Well, I think he thought about it but there was this dog going absolutely CRAZY out there and apparently, it changed the guy's mind.' So, Barb, I'm calling to tell you that Scout gets half-credit for the arrest."

I'm so proud.