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I originally posted this to Facebook last Saturday.

OMG, you guys. I just had the weirdest experience of my life, to date. And I have done some WEIRD shit.

Anyway. As you all know, I have a 4-month-old puppy. Puppies have small bladders, and thus need to pee pretty much every 14.6 minutes. I take Piper out, let her pee in the front yard (which she prefers for short trips), and bring her back in. 440 times a day.

So far, so normal, right?

This past week, I’ve been feeling pretty icky, which means I’ve been wandering out with the dog while wearing just my sweatpants and my grungy blue hoodie, with my [unwashed] hair bundled back into a haphazard ponytail. I seriously look like I’m about to be homeless.

Around 4PM, I took Piper out. My neighbor, who is an older, retired sort of guy was in his car getting ready to go somewhere. He waved at me, I waved at him, it’s what neighbors do. As soon as he pulled out, his wife comes STORMING out of the house, yelling “can you walk that dog somewhere else?”

Um, okay, fine - we were a bit close to the 2 feet of grass on the side of their driveway that borders our yard. Fine! Not a problem! I didn’t grow up with neighbors (my parents’ nearest neighbors are a quarter-mile away) so there are some neighborly sensitive things that don’t always occur to me…. but….

This is where it gets weird. She comes over and starts yelling at me. “Is your husband home?” Um, no, is there something I can help you with?

Her: I see what you’re doing. Every time my husband comes outside, you bring that dog out.
Me: Whuh? What? She’s a puppy! She’s outside ALL THE TIME.
Her: The whole neighborhood can see you running after my husband.

[note - her husband? NOT HOT. He’s at least 70 if he’s a day, and think about what Dwight Schrute will look like when he’s 70. You’re welcome.]

So.

Me: Um…. Are you serious?
Her: You stay away from my husband.
Me: No problem!
Her: I’ll get a restraining order!

At this point, Piper was done peeing and I was about to laugh, so I took her in and decided to go over there and see if there was something that could be done.

I knocked on the door and she’s all “what do you want?”
Me: Can we talk about this? I don’t understand what’s going on.
Her: I’m calling the police. I’m getting a restraining order because you are after my husband.
Me: I think you’re being ridiculous. Please come over, we’ll have coffee and figure this out.
Her: Get off my property! [grabs the phone] He’s old enough to be your grandfather!
Me: You’re crazy!
Her: No, you’re crazy!

Well, duh.

At that point, I just threw up my hands and left because she was freaking DIALING THE POLICE. I put shoes and a jacket on Jillian and we took Piper for a LONG walk around the neighborhood. I was hoping my one friend would be home, because she’s lived in the ‘hood for a long time and knows my neighbor fairly well, but she was out. So we talked to some other people on our street and they were all “yeah, that lady is nuts.”

Is there anything I can do at this point to salvage this situation? My plan is to ignore ignore ignore ignore ignore but… MY GOD. I’m half-tempted to make it worse by watching for the husband and deliberately going out with the dog when he’s outside, but I’m concerned that she’ll poison us somehow. The previous owners of our house actually accused her of trying to poison their dogs at one point, so I’m thinking it’s not a ridiculous fear to have.

What should I do? Should I do anything at all? When Freddie gets home tomorrow I will tell him this whole thing and see what he thinks - he’s a fixer so I’m sure he’ll want to go over there to see what’s up but… I’m so confused and having a whole bunch of WTF moments all at once and I feel really weird, like the world has tilted or that I’ve been drugged without my knowledge. That’s how weird this is to me.

I’m so baffled by this, I barely have words to explain it. It really does call for an interpretive dance.

I know!

I spent the rest of Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday feeling really weird and out-of-sorts. Uncomfortable. Uneasy. Discussed it with my Facebook peeps and my JGz family and between the jokes and the re-telling, I started to feel better. I even feel a bit sorry for Edna (the neighbor), not least because her name is Edna. I’m not sure how old she is, but they are the original owners of their house, which was built in 1960. So… she’s getting on in years a bit. There is doubtless something mental going on there.

I haven’t changed my behavior much since then. Well, I showered. It was necessary. And I keep Piper off of the 2-foot strip of their property, even though that is P’s most favorite place to poop in the whole wide world. The other evening, I was out with Piper for the 5234th time and Bob (the husband) was bringing his trash out to the street. We did the whole “what’s up” thing that one does to be neighborly, and that was that. So I’m even more convinced that Edna’s got some mental thing going on that has nothing to do with me. I’m 100% sure she didn’t mention the incident to Bob, even though I bet he’ll hear about it eventually because I talked to A LOT of people on our street.

For the time being, I’m going to treat this as an isolated incident. No harm, no foul. I’m thinking of planting some trees, since putting up a 15-foot razor-wire-topped fence is probably not an option. But if it happens again, we’re going to have problems. And if she calls me a whore again, we’re going to have REAL problems. I gave up being a whore over a decade ago.

Didn’t feel like we had much of a summer this year. The first part was cold and damp, the next part was way too hot and overly-humid, and then as soon as Labor Day happened, we ended up in Fall. Bleh.

Could be worse, I suppose. My friends in Denver woke up to snow the other day and that’s just wrong.

Right now, it’s 62 degrees in my house and my hands are cold. My feet, too, but I’m too lazy to go unearth my slippers from the depths of my closet. I should turn the heat on, but I’m resisting! Every day I resist turning the heat on means a potentially lower utility bill! RESIST!

Jillian, Piper, and I were at the park a few days ago. Piper was eating mulch, as is her hobby, and Jillian was climbing and singing and being three.

I was sitting on the bench, keeping an eye on The Jillian and eavesdropping on the two moms sitting next to me, who were watching their kids. One of the little boys started to sit down as if to go down the slide and the mom nearest me got up from the bench, saying “No, Evan! No slide!”

Which, okay, moms are weird sometimes, but the kid looked to be at least Jillian’s age, so I was feeling very “??”

The mom redirected poor Evan and came back down on the bench. By way of explanation, she said to the other mom “I don’t like him to get dirty because then I can’t take his clothes to the consignment. I buy him brand names only because he has to look good but I want my money back on those clothes.”

…

…

Yeah. The suburbs are a strange place.

Eddie Izzard just ran about 1000 miles. I’m a little disappointed he did do it in drag, but Eddie Izzard is awesome no matter what he’s wearing.

I am a lazy beast. This has been well-documented over the years, but lately… things have been changing. Freddie is trying to get me to run a half-marathon with him in April. I’m not quite sure that will happen, but I think I’m going to try.

How much am I running now, do you ask? NONE. At this present moment, there is NO TIME. None. The kid? Stopped napping in the afternoons, which were previously my treadmill hours. The puppy? IS INSANE. I spend A LOT of time refereeing between them. The good news is that having the puppy has killed any crazy desire to have another kid. I think we can officially say that We Are Not Doing That. Of course, we were adamantly against having the first one until we decided to maybe see what might happen if we didn’t prevent it, and look what happened.

Anyway. It can be done, I think, this half-marathon thing. I will have to figure out how to MAKE time, especially if Freddie is running, too. There are not enough hours in the day. I do have a lot of ‘free’ time, but I’m always and forever accompanied by either the human kid or the canine kid, neither of whom are runners.

Hm.

Yes, I’m talking myself into it.

I have the gear. I have shoes. I have a vague, not-quite-fully-formed desire to get out there and go. That’s enough, right?

Last week, Freddie and I participated in the 1st annual John Basilone Fun Run, which is part of the John Basilone weekend held in our town. It used to be just a day with a parade and some ceremonial stuff by his statue, but the Chamber of Commerce looks to expand it and make a whole weekend festival thing out of it, which is good. Our town is teeny and there’s not a whole lot going on here, so to have something like this is a good thing. His story is pretty amazing.

With luck and the support of the town, maybe 20 years from now Freddie and I will still be running it and we’ll be able to say that we have done it every year.

But that’s the thing - I want to run it, not walk it with my mentally-unstable puppy. As she gets bigger, she will want to run more instead of ‘run run run sniff sniff oh a LEAF I need to eat that run run tangle up the leash in mom’s legs ooh, what’s that my tail [chomp] OW’ so that will work itself out, but I need to work myself out.

I used to run a lot. All summer. I so wish I had pictures of the barrels at Holiday Sands, but that was back in the day when we all had digital cameras and cell phones with cameras and all that. There are so few pictures of those summers to go with my memories and it bums me out. But. Those barrels were my home. You could get four (sometimes five) people up there, changing the balance and controlling the speed… it was perfect interval training for a runner. Start out slow, build up speed gradually until you’re sprinting and everyone falls into the water. You had to keep good posture so you didn’t tip over the front (which I did a couple of times and I still have scars, oops). I can’t think of a better way to learn good running form. Elbows in, short strides, quick turnover… I miss those things.

So I’m keeping that in mind as I start to run again. Short strides. Quick turnover. Elbows in. Stand tall. Take walk breaks. The major difference between then and now (besides the seventeen years in between), is my boob situation. I used to be fairly flat-chested, which wasn’t the greatest thing ever for a teenage girl, but now? I would give ANYTHING to have my almost-B-cup boobs back instead of the DD knockers I currently sport, thanks to my lovely daughter. Once I get that under control, I think it will all get easier.

I want to run.

I need to run.

I’m gonna run.