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what Neville did on Saturday Tuesday, June 25 2024
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At the end of the weekend it gradually became clear where Neville had been during is five-plus-hour absence on Saturday. Joel, the president of the home owners' association, sent an email to Gretchen saying that a multicolored dog that was either a pitbull or a bulldog had been seen near the public dock with a dead baby deer. Later it turned out that people had actually witnessed the dog killing the fawn, though perhaps they'd actually only heard the fawn being killed. (It was reportedly a gruesome sound.) Neville is gentle dog around humans, but something snaps in his brain when there is a prey animal nearby, and if he could catch a fawn, he surely would kill it. He's usually too slow to catch anything except woodchucks and porcupines, though perhaps Charlotte had played a role (she is, as you know, extremely fast). Over the course of several messages, it was clear that there were now concerns at the lake about Neville possibly being a dangerous dog, something Gretchen tried her best to tamp down.
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This afternoon, I had some landlording chores to perform, so I started out over at the Brewster Street house, where there was a break in the picket fence out back and one or more burners weren't functioning on the gas stove. It seemed one of the gas jets was clogged, and I couldn't unclog it until I used the sharp tip of a self-tapping screw. As for the hole, I was going to need replacement wood to fix it. So then I drove over to the Wall Street house to look at some soffit cladding that had come loose. I'd brought the ladder, but something about the situation made me not want to tackle it quite yet. Instead, I drove over to Home Depot to get a few things (a high-end hose sprayer and 100 feet of clothesline) in addition to the fence pickets I needed. Initially I thought one could only buy such pickets in panels. But as I was considering how to load an eight by six foot panel I'd just bought onto the roof of the Forester, I saw that Home Depot also sold individual pickets. So I went into the store to return the panel I hadn't even taken, a procedure that seemed to confuse the woman handling the returns. I would've bought the pickets right then and there, but she wanted me to go through a checkout line for that. [REDACTED]
Back behind the Brewster Street house, I used stainless steel screws to attach the new pickets to the horizontal members of the picket fence on the side with no pickets (since doing it any other way would've required somehow getting into the neighbors' yard. I was happy with the result, and it only required five of my twenty pickets. (There are parts of the Downs Street picket fence that could benefit from the remainder.)
Back at the house, I was feeling sleepy, so I ended up taking a nap. When I awoke, Gretchen was off at her prison poetry class (which she now despises). I took Charlotte for a walk (Neville didn't come), and then took a bath despite the resurgence of summer temperatures. Later I added a fun feature to my version of spelling bee: photos of bees on flowers that change depending on what level you've attained.
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