Thursday night: We come home from camping and begin unloading perishables from the trailer with banging noises, dropping things, boys too loud and parents loudly whispering “ssshhh!”
Friday: More unloading of the trailer, our washer and dryer running 24/7, sapping the energy from the grid (14 loads of laundry!) and more banging, dropping and sliding as we put things away.
Saturday: More banging and scraping noises as the gear is cleaned and put away. Screeching noises from me as I implore the boys and my husband to hurry up! (Why? Because we are hosting a surprise birthday dinner for 14 people for Ernie’s birthday that evening.) (I love pressure!) There were several items that did not get put away and we ended up needing to put them around the corner of our patio, out of sight.Saturday night: Good party (even if Ernie wasn’t surprised) and we were on the patio until midnight. (Very late for us, and for our neighbors!)
Sunday: We cleaned up the party remnants. Banging, scraping, screeching, de-construction. The camping gear that had been moved out of sight, stayed right where it was. Sunday is a day of rest.
Sunday night: Nice, simple dinner. All the windows and doors open to take advantage of the evening ocean breeze as we all watched a movie. (Pan’s Labyrinth – I finally got Rich to watch it! Yay)
Suddenly, our quiet movie time was interrupted by a hissing sound coming from our back yard… sounded a lot like sprinklers running. Rich jumped up to see what was wrong. (Corsa came slinking towards him with the Guilty Lip Thing.) That dumb dog got into the camping gear and somehow got Rich’s pepper spray. Pepper spray for bears. Bears. (Stronger than pepper spray for people? I don’t know. Probably.)
There was a cloud of pepper spray mist settling over our yard. And being sucked into our house. We had every window and door open, some with fans pulling the air in to the house. We frantically ran around closing them, but it was too late. Rich tried spraying the cloud with water to dampen it down, and it helped a little. We all tumbled out onto the front porch to get some fresh air.
As we sat there, coughing, we saw two bicyclists riding by our house. On the opposite side of the street. Their bikes developed the wobbles and they began coughing too. “Oh my eyes!” “It smells like a chemical or something!” Oh, we are sucky neighbors. My friend, Dave, has been visiting and he will probably never come to visit again.
I’m sure our neighbors are wondering if we’ve started a meth lab, using child labor.
Corsa? The pepper spray did not affect her at all. Nothing. Rich better have a Plan B if he ever meets a bear.
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