Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

It all started last week. We heard the dog yipping like crazy when we got home. We knew new neighbors had moved in the apartment directly above us the day before. We hoped the dog was visiting. Maybe some "game" of some sort was on.

We were wrong.

The next morning we woke up at 6am sharp. To more yapping. Continuous yapping, directly above us, for an hour. We couldn't go back to sleep. After three mornings like this, we looked it up in our contract, and were happy to learn that even dogs can violate the noise ordinance our complex has set forth. We visited the managers, who said no dog lived above us, according to their documents. They called the tenant. A dog did live above us, and had been locked in a cage to "get used to things". Luckily the next morning we did not hear the dog. But the morning after, we did. And that evening when the dog started yipping at 11pm so much that we couldn't sleep, we knocked on our neighbor's door:

"Is something wrong with your dog?"

"No, why?"

"Well...we just heard him making a lot of noise and thought something might be wrong."

"Oh, I'll let him out."

Why is the dog locked up so much? We don't know. Perhaps this puts a human face on the surrounding people that have to listen to the dog yap for an hour in a row. We hope so, anyway. We didn't hear the dog yesterday morning or this morning at any rate.

The rest of the week Wayne spent a lot of time on campus working with various people on his thesis project, trying to get the right boxes built. He had a productive meeting with one of his committee members. There is still a lot of work to do, but things are progressing.

I officially passed the background check (two months later...) so now we can plan our move in a little less than a month. Now to find a place to live in Boston.... I also got to spend time with my friend Kate Friday, and help her move on Saturday. 

Paela spent a lot of time this week coloring, putting straws into a sugar dispenser, and reading books. We went to playgroup Wednesday, and she was very excited about having her cousin Thomas come play Friday morning. Later we watched a video from one of our camping trips and was very excited to point out "Thomas!!". Cousins are fun. She also loves the dog upstairs, and every time she hears the yapping she'll say (and sign) "dog!" and want to go outside to see it. She doesn't understand our explanation that it is upstairs and we would not see it even outside. So hard to understand sometimes.