Mr. VanDernoot...Tear Down this Fence

This one right here.

SO, a few weeks ago my neighbor's dog started jumping the fence. Let me start this by saying that we like our neighbor, he is a nice man, we have a good relationship with him, he is most of the time an excellent neighbor. His dog is named Toshiba. It was originally named Sheba when he thought it was a girl, and then he found out it was a boy so he threw a To- in front of there to make it sound more masculine. Right.

He has had Toshiba for a few years and he has been a fine dog-neighbor. Not the best, not the worst. Out of nowhere, he started jumping the fence and basically spending most of his time in our backyard. Which is not the greatest thing considering I have three cats, two who like to be outside, and two kids who like to be outside too. And the dog has no problem being in the backyard while we are in the backyard, but I have a problem with it. Because pre-fence on top of fence, he ran one of my cats up a tree, attacked another cat and attacked my parents dog while we were dog-sitting. The dog attack was the last straw of our patience, and Jamie started to put up some garden fencing, which you can kind of see right above the wood in the foreground of the picture. He ran out, and when he woke up Sunday morning (I was out of town, grueling away at a super no-fun, uber-stressful convention), BAM- the picket fence was up. I haven't inspected it closely (combination of laziness and cold weather), so I don't know what it's held there with, but it has helped. No more Toshiba in the backyard.

HOWEVER, this cannot be the permanent solution. My  backyard typically looks a mess anyway (an Ameren employee once asked me if I ran a home daycare), but I do have standards. Somewhere between being envious of other people's houses and neighborhoods but not embarrassed to invite people over to my house or neighborhood standards, but this fence on fence action is raising them a bit. So what do we do? Like I said before, we like our neighbor, he is a nice man and friendly guy so I don't really want to call the city on him, but it's kind of an awkward conversation to have. I don't even know if the chainlink fence is ours or his, our neighbors on the other side built this truly hideous tall wooden privacy fence, so I guess that was theirs, so it feels like this fence should be ours. My only real option is to pray for a tornado to come and do no damage to my house or new roof, but to blow the fence into the lot of the new QT, and then I'll have to go over there to check on it and the new QT manager will be there checking out the construction and I'll be like 'Hey' and she'll be like 'Hey' and I'll say 'Want to be best friends forever?' and she will already have my half of the best friend necklace ready to give me, and on the back she will have inscribed 'Present this half-heart for Free Fat Free French Vanilla Capuccinno's for LIFE' and then she'll slip me a card for free fountain soda's with crushed ice and I really do think I should have done a whole blog devoted to the new QT by my house. Because I have a lot of really great ideas.

Get to work, prayer warriors.