Being gloriously unemployed right now, my favorite thing about my days so far is the fact that I can spend some time every morning just having breakfast and doing some reading and generally enjoying my house in its soon-to-be-shattered calm. I've been spending that time at our kitchen table, which means I am sitting next to the screen door that looks out on our back yard. It's so wonderfully cool here in the mornings, so I open the door and enjoy the breeze from the screen. From that vantage point, I have observed some interesting things about my home that I never knew when I left at 7:30 and didn't come back until 5. Here they are, in no particular order:

Birds have fights. We have two bird feeders in the globe willow tree in our yard, and the chaos that ensues every time we fill it up with bird seed is just unbelievable. The birds are beautiful, but I am seriously wondering if we're really doing them any kind of favor by putting that food out there if they have to practically kill each other to get at it.

My yelling neighbors do not restrict their yelling to the evening hours as I had previously believed. No further comment on that except to say that this is all fine and dandy right now, but I think we're going to have a problem when I'm trying to get a baby to take a nap in a few months.

Apparently, we have a dog. The first morning that I was sitting here, I was startled to hear a bark come through the screen door and looked over to find a white, curly-haired poodle-looking dog of some variety yapping at me angrily, clearly indignant that I was trespassing on his territory. I have no idea who this dog belongs to, or how he gets into our yard, which is fenced, but every day, he makes an appearance at the screen door, yaps at me for a few minutes, spends about a half-hour wandering around our yard on some self-assigned patrol and then disappears until the next day. I'm sure he really does view me as an intruder, since he's probably been doing this for months without encountering anyone. Yesterday, we had a showdown because I caught him raising his leg, clearly preparing to pee on the only new object in the yard, the new pot we had just the day before moved our long-suffering tropical plumeria plant into. I yelled at him and he backed away, but he was clearly annoyed at having been prevented from marking this new thing as part of his territory, and just sat there glaring at me for about five minutes. So I took a picture of him. Here is our dog. Anyone want to name him?