First of all, THANK  YOU so much for your kind words and congratulations about the baby!  You all made me smile from ear to ear (and I think Young Money did a cartwheel or two out of happiness, too).

___________

So you might remember that we were dog-sitting for our neighbor’s psycho dog, Hope. She was more than a handful, quite a lil’ curfew-defiant dog, and despite the fact that the two humans of the household grudgingly like her (no such concessions made by our dog), she made those three and a half weeks feel like the longest three and a half weeks of our lives:

We gave her back on Sunday.  We waved goodbye in the fragrant dusk and drove away, all the way back to our home two houses down from her, and delighted in the silence.  Ever since then, we have reminisced about those crazy days when we had Hope in the house and laughed about all her exploits, including (but not limited to):

• Messing with our dog until he fought her
• Biting the burglarproofing when we put her outside
• Howling for hours in the night, after she’d been put out for the night, if she so much as heard Mr. Man
• Hurling herself at our glass doors repeatedly at random intervals each night
• Fighting the dog that gets in our yard (which is the nemesis of both my dog and of Hope)
• Escaping from a hole in the fence to fight said nemesis dog in the street (where we found them scrapping after returning from a bike ride one day)
• Escaping from a freshly-made-by-Hope hole in the fence (yes, she chews up holes in our fence!) to follow us when we went for a run and bike ride
• Escaping from the fence to follow us as we drove away
• Competitively eating with my dog so that both dogs kept vomiting from eating their food too fast
• Passing a stomach bug back and forth with my dog for a week
• Taking over my couch and playing dead dog (all eighty pounds of her) for hours each day
• Escaping into our neighbor’s yard and only returning after Mr. Man lured her by shaking a bag of crackers over the fence for half an hour

And who can forget last Saturday, when we were woken up by a ring of the doorbell at 7 a.m. to find Hope chained OUTSIDE our gate, with a bowl of water, having been caught by the neighbor after running up and down the street all night and ripping up all the garbages on our street (which Mr. Man then had to go and rake up for an hour)?

Oh, how happy we ALL were–Umbi especially–to give her back.  If the neighbor had missed his flight, I would have paid for a cross-Atlantic charter to bring him back so he could take her back to where she belongs.

Oh, how naive we were.

This morning, at 7:20 am, as the birds were singing, the sun was shining, and I was delighting in being so nausea-free at the moment that I was heading to the shower BEFORE eating a pound of toast (BIG accomplishment!), Mr. Man called me to the porch, saying to hurry and see the animal that had gotten onto our porch.

IT. WAS. HER.  All eighty pounds of psychotic, door-bashing, tail-thumping Lady Bacchanal.

Well, I found it hilarious, as it demonstrated my theory that she is madly in love with Mr. Man.  He was also amused.  The neighbor was called and he came to get her, relieved to find her after searching the neighborhood for hours this morning.

I showered, I set about making breakfast… and in she bounded again.  The neighbor was called, he puzzled at how she could have gotten out after he roped the gate hole off, and away he took her.

At 8:20 am, we are finally sitting down to finish our Hope-interrupted breakfast and laughing it off when, as if by magic, with no warning, she materialized AGAIN, next to Chris, at which point she proceeded to leap up in a valiant waffle-stealing attempt (she missed).  A moment later, the doorbell rang and the neighbor again took her away–to be chained to his son’s car until he came back with blocks, cement, and barbed wire, for lack of an electrical alarm and a nine-foot wall to keep the dog in.

This dog respects no curfew, no State of Emergency, no laws of the land.  This dog eats metal fencing and bites filthy steel burglarproofing.  Her love for my husband is so great, so overwhelming, so blinding that she will risk arrest and imprisonment in the Brian Lara Detention Center.  She will get run over and fight dogs to get at my man.

I love her (from a distance, of course). As for my man, she can look… but she can’t touch.

This means WAR.  And a trip to Bhagwansingh’s for some barbed wire, though heaven knows she’d probably chew through that, too.

Ah, Hope. Pure evil has never looked so innocent.