Mornings Minus Quiet Times

I'll admit it, I'm not entirely disciplined about quiet times to begin with, but I do enjoy the quiet part! This morning, any chance of having anything resembling quiet was interrupted by a rude contractor in my neighbor's backyard. Our backyards are quite small, so just having anyone in their yard feels too close. However, this annoying contractor brought his dog along and tied him to a tree....

Now, let's pause and evaluate this. If you were a contractor, would you bring your dog with you to a job? I've never seen a contractor do this. Nor did I think it was particularly necessary. It's not like you need a guard dog around our neighborhood or anything!! Let's just say, however, that you are a contractor who absolutely MUST bring your dog to a job. What would you do with him?? Tie him to a tree and let him run all over the neighbor's yard as if it's no big deal???

So he ties this dog to a tree that sits on the property line and, of course, his dog is all over my yard, can practically walk up my back steps and my two little chihuahuas (that's what they sounded like today, so for arguments sake, just imagine this) spent 30 minutes straight yapping away at this dog while he ran around and howled outside. Does this seem right??

Now, any good contractor (human being?) would recognize this is going to be a problem. Not this dufus. He just kept measuring, shaking his head (at my dogs??) and walking around to the front of the house to get things out of his truck.... most of the time I had no idea where this guy was.

Here I was, in my pajamas, not about to go outside and say anything because I'm an INTJ. No, I just fumed inside my house and eventually called my neighbor. They were not home (well, they didn't answer their phone! nor did they call back), so I left a message asking if they could please ask their contractor to tie his dog on the tree that is in their yard because my dogs were going ballistic.

I hopped in the shower for a break from all the yapping and when I got out, it was just as noisy. I quickly got myself ready, then put my dogs in their crates and went outside. I walked over and said, "Do you think you could move your dog over to that tree....." before I could even offer a reason why, this guy whines to me, "Well, if I move her there she can't see me!" Then he huffed off and said he'd tie her to our other neighbor's tree!!!! What??? What I wanted to say was, "Well, if I kill her, then you won't be able to see each other!"

You see, that's what happens when I don't have a quiet time.... and I'm afraid, from the looks of all that wood piled up outside my neighbor's house, that we aren't going to be having many quiet days this week!! UGH.

Seriously, if I posted a picture of our back yards, you would wonder to yourself, "Where are they even going to put a deck?" That's how close our houses are....