* jazzyhands *

::17.5.03::

Lately my dog has a nasty habit of slinking out the front door as I am coming in. She is so wily that it is impossible to stop her especially if you have your hands filled with stuff like groceries or something. Once she is out I normally leave her until she comes back on the principal that she only mooches around the street then gets bored and starts scratching at the door to come back in. If I try to stop her running or go after her then she heads for the Big Road with Lots of Trucks and that is infinitely more scary. She thinks that it's a game and she has to bolt.

So anyway, last night I got home around 11 pm and out the door she goes. I cursed her and came inside to wait for her return. I was in my bedroom reading (Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami if you must know -- brilliant and very much reccommended) when I realised she had set off all the other dogs in the street barking. Ouch. I had visions of a mob of pitchfork-armed neighbours on the doorstep so headed out in my cute paisley pjs to round her up.

There is only one way you can catch my dog. If she goes into a yard or somewhere and realises she is trapped she will sit and look all angelic, like that's what she intended all along. Otherwise she will run for miles and I can hardly run a metre.

So I am stalking her around the street, hiding behind cars like an older, heavy, less groomed and pyjama-clad member of Charlie's Angels. She ran into the yard across the street and I thought 'Eureka! Got her!" The across the road neighbours have a 7 foot front fence that even my high vaulting little mongrel can't jump. All I had to do was wait at their gate for her to realise she was trapped, pick her up and carry her home.

Ok, I am standing there, waiting patiently, in my neighbour's gateway when I look up. The across the road neighbours have around a 30 centimetre gap (yes, I do mix my imperial and metric measures) in their front curtains in the middle. I was really hoping they weren't in bed. Of course the front room is the bedroom because every single house in the Western suburbs is built to a similar design.

This is where it starts getting embarassing. I was trying to position myself so that I was not in the line of vision of the curtain gap but still poised to catch my dog. So I am moving around in the gateway when I saw some kind of movement through the gap in the curtains. I am just praying they didn't see me. I don't want to be labelled as the freaky neighbourhood peeking tom girl. Ooh yuck.

I got my dog and bundled her home. But I notice they still haven't fully closed those curtains.

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