Black Dog Swimming
One of the things that truly vexes me is having a problem without an apparent solution. I currently have a problem without an apparent solution. The story itself is simple, but there is, of course…
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Black Dog Swimming
Posted on July 13, 2014by meemselle
One of the things that truly vexes me is having a problem without an apparent solution. I currently have a problem without an apparent solution. The story itself is simple, but there is, of course, Gentle Reader, a moral.
We have a Russian couple who are long-term guests at Fawlty Towers South. They are very insular, speak very little English and virtually no Spanish, so there is not much lingua franca. They are very nice, pay their rent on time, keep to themselves, never complain: all that you could ask of long-term guests.
I think the husband may, in fact, be a vampire, because I have never seen him in daylight…..but the wife, I see. She’s always pleasant, we say hello, we say how hot it is, when will we have rain, etc. She sounds for all the world like Natasha Fatale in the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” cartoons. She has a deep voice, she rarely smiles, and she seems absolutely devoid of humor. But that could be something that is lost in translation….
She came knocking on the door the other day, setting my Dominican Security Alarm System (a.k.a. 3 dogs) into high alert. Sometimes she comes to check on the Internet, which can get squiffy during long afternoon blackouts and in the wind. But this was something different:
She said to me—and I will have mercy and not write it in her accent, so you will have to supply that in your mind’s ear—and I quote, “I wanted to let you know of strange thing at hotel.”
“Oh?” queried I, with trepidation. “Strange” is not something to be taken lightly here in the 2.5 World., and “strange” can take on a whole previously unknown spectrum of meanings here at Fawlty Towers South, in particular. “What’s that?”
“Well,” continued Natasha, through the screen door. “My husband and I takes sometimes walks at night and then sits outside to smoke cigarettes.”
And I know this because they smoke these highly aromatic brown cigarettes that are not cigars, not clove cigarettes, but something in between. You can smell them a mile away.
“We sitting there, you know, smoking and we see big black dog come to hotel.”
And I remembered that a couple of weeks ago, I was awakened by the dogs absolutely baying in the middle of the night. I almost called the police, so sure was I that there was an interloper on the grounds. It was terrifying, and it happened twice in one night.
“So dog, he walks around few times. And then dog jumps in pool and swims.”
“Wait,” I said, feeling like Jake Dressler. “The dog comes onto the property, walks around, and then goes for a swim….and leaves?”
“This happened,” said Natasha Fatale with an emphatic nod. “More than one times.”
“A swim,” I repeated dumbly. “A swim,” she concurred.
I thanked her for this information and then came up to the Arriba Apartment to think this thing through.
There are several issues here:
- How do I prevent the dog from coming onto the grounds? We don’t have a high fence; we don’t have motion sensors. Hell, I don’t even have a security guard that stays up all night.
- What does it do to the pool if a dog swims in it a lot? It’s a little bit gross. Do dogs pee in pools?
- How in the name of all that I hold dear can I get video of this so that I will laugh my ass off every time it happens?
How do you make the Black Dog go away?
