A couple of our neighbors found a woman lying on the sidewalk in front of our house last Friday evening, dazed and bleeding from a cut on her forehead and from her nose. The first we knew of it was exiting the house to take the dog to the dog-park. Several firemen, a fire truck, an ambulance, the woman, the neighbors, a startling amount of blood; all these things were either blocking our driveway or close to interfering with our planned route but we resisted the urge to ask, "Umm, could y'all, like, move out of the way a bit? We'd like to get our car out of the driveway to take our dog to the park."

So no, we didn't do that. The ambulance eventually took her to the hospital for evaluation; some unknown medical condition was suspected as the cause of her fall. Should the homeowner breath a sigh of release from possible litigation? Again, too self-centered a reaction.

An awkward discovery that was, residents emerging from a house, unaware (apparently uncaring?) of the human trauma just outside. Later in the weekend I was opening the garden gate in order to wheel the lawnmower to the back yard. On the concrete flagstone there lay the squashed corpse of a mouse. The dog had been fucking around in that area and it's likely he killed it with a swat of one of his big playful paws. But he didn't eat it; that was left for the black flies crawling in and out of a hole in its abdomen. And for a pair of wasps doing likewise.

I am terrified of wasps, but leaving the dead mouse for Boris to chew on next trip to the back yard didn't seem very responsible. So finally I dropped an empty tuna can over it (used for tracking the watering of the lawn), maneuvered that with the pooper scooper into a plastic sack, dropped all that in the garbage can. Now I just have to worry about enraged wasps attacking me when I next take the garbage out.