When Dogs Attack Window Blinds

When Mr. Lucky and I came home from shopping yesterday, this was what we saw in our front window:
This was obviously the work of our beagles, who attack the blinds in this way only when a stranger comes to the door.

We don't know how many times the stranger rang the bell, but it wasn't the postman, as no packages were left behind, nor did we find any notices in the mailbox.

It wasn't one of those people who hang advertisements on the doorknob, because nothing hung there, nor did anything hang from the neighbors' doorknobs.

Most likely it was one of those pesky salespeople who thought the better of leaving his or her card for fear I'd track them down and make them pay for new blinds. Especially since I probably won't be kindly disposed toward buying their vacuum cleaner with 64 attachments, all of which will end up at the bottom of Baby Bear's toybox.

It may even have been that red-headed woman from some carpet cleaning company who shows up every few months, asking which room of our house gets the most traffic. I keep telling her "the whole house" but she insists I pick a room and she'll clean it for free--after which I should be so amazed by the results that I simply can't let her leave the premises until I sign a contract agreeing to let her do the rest of the house for as much as we're paying on the mortgage.

I took both these photos. The first one is crooked because--well, sheesh! YOU try finding a picture in that LCD screen when the sun is glaring directly behind you! Mr. Lucky might have done better with it, since he's a photographer by profession, but alas, he tends to take after the cobbler with the barefoot children.

By the same token, I didn't think the interior shot was much better. He told me afterward that I should have used a flash (I thought I did); still, the artistic side of him said he liked this shot because of what he called the play of light (call me an Impressionist photographer) spilling through the blinds:


Mind you, we used to keep these blinds raised above the six bottom panes for the sole purpose of allowing the dogs to bark at passers-by and callers without destroying them (the blinds, not the callers). But recently the cord broke and we could no longer raise them.

The dogs left these in such a tangled mess of destruction that Mr. Lucky took scissors and cut off the bottom half of the blinds.

"But now I can't lower the blinds when it gets dark out," I told him. "And I won't be able to sit in my reading chair in the evenings, unless you don't mind people looking through the window at my legs."

"Put on those fishnet stockings I gave you for your birthday, and wear a lampshade," he suggested.

In his dreams and my nightmares. My plan is to replace the sheer curtains--which are more decorative than functional--with more opaque ones.

The same goes for those fishnet stockings.