Crazy Neighbors Send Dog into Tizzy

July 4th is a hard time to live in the ghetto. Ghetto people spend a fortune on fireworks and start at 8 a.m. (sometimes earlier) to shoot off loud poppers all day and all night long. Sometimes even guns are involved, but this 4th it has been mostly firecrackers. That and loud music, played outside with all the bass reverberation the neighbors can muster.

Gus has had enough. He just wanted a little quiet. So at 8 a.m. he snuck into the computer room and angled himself under the computer desk and waggled his butt up as close to the wall as he could get, while his papa read e-mails.

Then Hubby took the boys to the park and over to the second house for a little piece of quiet while I cleaned the bathroom.

The fireworks continued all afternoon but when I took a break around noon, I found that we had lost DSL connection -- for the second time in a week. This time around, however, the phone worked which meant that the problem was with Earthlink.

I had Hubby check out the connections around 2 p.m. and just now called Earthlink to see what the problem might be. We did have some heavy rain last night. Of course, we got the guy in India -- but it's the 4th and a holiday and Earthlink was still providing service, so I can't complain.

Anyway, when the guy got around to asking about Internet connections, I put Hubby on the phone -- and that's when we discovered that little Gussie's butt had pulled / knocked out all the Internet connections from the phone line.

We've got another three hours of this noise, at least -- and probably all day tomorrow. Right now the street is so full of haze and smoke from fireworks that we can't see two houses away.

Think of the money that is just going up in smoke. And pity poor little Gussie, who still has 24 more hours of this to endure.