K-9 TKO

The neighborhood dog alarms went off at 3:30 a.m. last night.

www.microsoft.com: This clip-art is probably free because it depicts an obsolete scene, eh?  Who has a TV antenna these days??!

This is unusual - we can easily go two months here without hearing dogs barking at night; so far, it's more peaceful than other neighborhoods I've lived in.

In one sense, this is inconvenient for us because our dog alarm sleeps in a crate in Cayley's room - harder to ignore than an outdoor dog. I actually didn't hear her raise the alarm, but she woke Cayley up and I subsequently heard Cayley come in the room and whisper to Lawrence, "The dog is growling and I don't know why."

I was awake for quite a while trying to figure out what was going on. The trouble with dog alarms is the lack of specificity: the offending intruder could be anywhere on the seriousness continuum from an Armenian terrorist to a traveling tortoise (for some reason, tortoises really piss off dogs, and they do seem to migrate, squeezing under fences and generally proceeding in a straight line no matter what the deterrents).

By the time 6:30 a.m. rolled around, I had discovered nothing wrong with our property, but there was one outdoor dog still continuing to bark up a tirade. I did notice that a child's scooter had been left at the side of the street behind our house - not a location where I would expect a child to leave it (too dangerous - they ride on the interior streets, not the thoroughfares). So it's possible that we had some criminal mischief going on, people pilfering stuff from back yards, as that type of activity does plague this little city.

As for our dog alarm, she may yet justify her existence.