"How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?"

This is the greeting I was met with the other day when I answered a knock at our door.

Monkey-Girl was in the "dining room" unpacking. We work in shifts during the day as someone has to be on Phoebe patrol whenever she's awake. That girl has a death wish and not the good Charles Bronson kind. Wait, the Charles Bronson kind isn't even good.

Anyway, since the woman was looking vaguely to the south I assumed she meant the people living in the house on my right. I explained that I hadn't met them yet as we'd only been in our house a total of six days. I thought that opener was a very odd way to welcome someone to the neighborhood.

The woman went on to say that she had just put "some dogs" that were running around loose into their house. The woman was confessing to me that she had just put more than one dog into someone's house not knowing if they belonged there. I must have made some (appropriate) expression at that point as the woman felt compelled to continue.

"The door was unlocked," she said apparently freeing herself of any moral error.

Not knowing what to do, I said I would pass on the information to the house owner when they got home. Not wanting to be the only one bearing the brunt of my neighbor's wrath when he or she went ape after coming home to more than one potentially strange dog in his or her house, I asked which house was the one my new "acquaintance" lived in.

"I don't live here. I was just driving through to avoid the lights on Lee Street," was her reply.

Thankfully Phoebe crawled up to see who Daddy was talking to. I don't think I could have gone on at that point. Just to be clear, this woman was driving in a residential area to avoid some traffic lights when she sees "some dogs" in the neighborhood. Not able to stand this, she pulls over, wrangles the strange dogs then goes door to door check for an unlocked door to shove the dogs into. Afterward, she feels compelled to tell someone else what she's done. Hopefully, this wasn't some kind of test to see if I'd "do the right thing" and tell her just how crazy what she just did sounded.

She did recommend a nice daycare for Phoebe. Is it weird that we went ahead and put our name on the waiting list?

I guess the moral of the story is: It doesn't matter how nice the neighbor looks. ALWAYS lock your door!