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Our dog is a 55-lb sack of potatoes who will voluntarily get up from her spot only under one of three conditions: 1) there is a more comfortable spot nearby; 2) someone said the word "treat"; or 3) loud noises. Her life is what I hope to be rich enough to have one day. It is usually considered an accomplishment when I can get her to walk all the way around the block in under 20 minutes. You know the old guy with the cane slowly crossing the street as you wait at a light to take a left turn? The guy that is going so unbearably slow that the oncoming traffic is about to close on your chance to turn? The guy that drops all his bags midway into the intersection and has to bend over to pick up everything up? Well, that guy passed us on the sidewalk. The point of this little tangent is so that I can talk about my dog. Also, it gives you some context for this next story. In her every day life, one extra foot of movement is like the end of the world to our dog. But if there's poop involved, she would walk 3 miles out of the way to avoid it. We'll be walking along on the sidewalk (racing an ant carrying a crumb 20 times it's weight) and if we come upon any unbagged dog crap, this is the route that I will be forced to take because our dog refuses to step over or step to the side of some other dog's poop:

This One's About Poop

We share a front porch with the people downstairs. Our front doors sit side by side and there are shared steps that lead down our front yard to the sidewalk and street. We (as in the upstairs people) like to refer to this front porch/step area as "the stoop." Our duplex sits on a relatively busy road about a block off of a very heavily-trafficked lake. We enjoy sitting on the stoop on late summer evenings, sipping on a beer and/or gluten-free cider and watching rich people drive by. We also like to use our stoop for things like entering and exiting our apartment. Never having lived in a neighborhood where it was technically considered "safe" to sit in front of your house after the sun sets, it is definitely an understatement to say that we really enjoyed hanging out on the stoop during the first couple of weeks of our move.

Then came the shit. Literally.