Good Dog! Bad Owner!

Edison has a habit of barking at every little thing all evening long. Sometimes it's obvious what has set him off: for example, the skunk that comes ambling through our yard at about 9ish every night. Edison hates the skunk, but we can tell it's the skunk that's got him all worked up due to its overwhelming pungency. People three towns over have to be able to smell that thing. He also hates the trains that can be heard through the woods behind our house at 9pm, 11:30pm, 2:30am and 4:30am (sometimes we're even still up for that last one). People walking by on the sidewalk across the street from our front yard are a dead giveaway too, as are the neighbor's dogs. But then there are the nights when he just barks and barks and barks and no one can figure out what it is he sees, or smells, or hears (though we know it's something). It's then that nothing but nothing can settle him down.

Like last night. It appeared to be another one of those nights where I spend far too much time humoring him in an attempt to get him to shut the hell up. He and I peeked out the upstairs windows, but that just sent him into even more of a frenzy. We went downstairs and I turned on the outside lights, picked him up and we looked outside together from all the doors and quite a few of the windows. There was absolutely nothing to see so I put him back down and went back to what I was doing, only to go through the ritual again when his barking cycled back up. It went on for hours and I don't know about you, but a shrill agitated chihuahua is not one of my favorite things. Soothing to the nerves? Not so much.

Eventually everyone in the house went to bed, save for me and the boys (per usual). Around 1am I decided to go downstairs and get something to snack on while I worked and just as he had been doing all evening, Edison tore down the stairs ahead of me and went to the kitchen door in a total freak-fest of noise. Sure enough, there on the porch rail, with her frantic face plastered to the glass, was Maia Louise begging to please be let back inside. As an indoor cat who only goes out on a leash for short romps, her gleeful escape of about five hours earlier when the back door had last been opened had clearly long since ceased to be a gas to her and had become something far scarier. Scratching furiously at the window, her mouth meowing silently out there on the other side of the glass, I let her in. As she fell into the kitchen in a big ball of relief, Edison smacked her once across the face for being so naughty in the first place and then glared at me as if to say, "I've been trying to tell you she was out there for the last five hours, you dumb ass." And with that, he went back upstairs, curled into his bed next to where I was working and finally- silently!- went to sleep.