When I was a kid and I would see other kids in movies with houses so close they could have those aluminum can telephones I would be jealous that my house was so far from the neighbors that I couldn't play telephone.

I'm over that.

Houses are so close together here that if one house is up in the middle of the night, all the houses are up (especially on cool nights when everyone has their windows open). One house turns on music (that would probably be us), then another houses dog hears it and starts barking (but the dog isn't supposed to be an outside dog anyway, according to the housing community) and then another houses child starts crying (I use the term child loosely, I haven't figured out if it's some kind of mutant or if it's a baby. Whatever it is, it's mad). And I'm afraid that I'm perpetuating this because now that Erik's away for awhile I stay up later.

The other day I was working with Baxter to speak, and everytime I'd say "SPEAK!" the neighbor dog would bark. I did it a few more times just to see if it was a fluke, but sure enough it was the doxon to the back left of our house.

Oh. And my basil died.