perhaps we should have stayed home

okay. we had a pretty strange trip to california. it was actually a strange entire week. i'll start with the events preceding our departure. (disclaimer: this entry promises to be long and strenuous. only the bold {bored} read on.)

once upon a time there was this dog. this dog lived at the shelter. and in that same once-upon time, there used to be this friend. in these days, she was a really good friend. despite that last description, she made a fateful error in deciding that on a particular day when i was driving (we used to carpool), she needed said dog from the shelter. did she already own a dog a third of this dog's mature size? yes. did she live in her parents' house while they were trying to sell their house? yes. did she know this new dog acquisition might upset her parents and therefore be unwelcomed? yes. but she wanted it anyway. it was a cute dog, and, understandably, she had a difficult time resisting. so she got the dog. and on the way home, said dog decided to puke in my car from the motion sickness. notably, it was not in her control that the dog did puke in my car, but needless to say i was not too happy. but the second fateful error was when she decided to do the most shoddy clean-up job i've ever seen. basically she rubbed the puke even more into my car. so it became my problem. and that was the end of it. or so i thought.
{fast forward about 8 months} we were busy all weekend (before last) with preparation and party festivites for j's father. the eve of the party we went down to help at the farm, and we took our dog ollie with. so you can imagine our surprise when we returned much later that night to find another dog in our backyard. this dog, at first glance, looks quite similar to ollie, though the sober and alert person would notice enough discrepancies to discontinue mistaking the dog for ours. nonetheless, this dog was in our backyard, we assumed, probably from such a lack of sobriety or attention as to have made an honest mistake. this was not so much a problem, until we came up onto our porch and began to enter our house. there was a GINORMOUS hole in our screen door, and upon further enterance, we found dog paws of mud tracked all over our house. to help you perceive just how upsetting this was, i had spent the entire day cleaning my house for guests of the party that would be staying at our house, and who were entering directly behind us. mud was literally everywhere; this dog had not missed a spot. it wasn't the first time we'd seen this dog; i myself had actually seen her at a distance at nighttime on my way home and stopped to call what i thought was my dog, of course discovering it was not her. and frequently when i take my dog for walks she is carousing around in the neighborhood, no collar or other mark of ownership present.
as there is a strict leash law in our neighborhood, we had a choice to make: call the police and have dallas (the local law enforcer) spend way too much time at our house going over every grueling detail to discover the owner, issue a ticket, take the dog to the pound, which would only incrue more fines for the owner, und so weiter...
we decided to be cool about it and try to find the owner on our own, thinking this owner would of course pay for the screen door to be fixed and my time spent re-cleaning my house.
this is where it gets interesting. we did find the owner, by way of other neighbors who had also seen the dog running rampant and had returned the dog several times already. turns out, the owner is a friend of said once-upon-a-time friend, the person upon whom the dog was shoved when it wasn't allowed in the parents' house anymore, and the dog was the very dog who puked in my car. so at this point j and i are wondering how the hell this dog and this person continue to affect our lives in frustrating ways?!
well since we've discovered the owner of the dog, j goes to pay him a visit. he isn't home, we're told. he's leaving to go camping. j leaves our number. so then we get a phone call from the owner, and get this. he says, i won't be back in town until tomorrow, but you can take the dog to the pound if you wish, or just let her go, or just put her on my porch, she'll be fine until i get back. i don't know about you folks out there, but as i understand it, that isn't the way you take care of a dog. just let her go or leave her on my porch. nonsense! so we decided to keep the poor (and obviously neglected) dog until the owner returned. of course, our ollie was in heaven. he's just discovered what his balls are for and, well, i don't really need to say anymore. but the guy did come back, and as i understand it, j and he had words. something about why don't you talk to me like a man and how can you call me irresponsible? type phrases coming from the perpetrator's mouth.
to end it, he did fix the screen door, though i didn't get any recompense for having to re-clean my house. the dog hasn't been seen running around (or in the backyard, for that matter), and as far as we can tell, the matter is over.
that was the beginning of our week.

i'm going to finish the rest of the story tomorrow.