Yesterday was a long day (I worked 11 hours), but it was fun. Nothing like being a part of a conversation with a C-17 with a crew of doctors flying somewhere near Astana (Kazakhstan). All I have to say is that Landing Support is cool, the Russians are cool, and the Soyuz is cool. And there was lots of downtime, so I got some of my presentation done for class.

I came in way too early this morning to finish the presentation. But its done now. Though, I'm afraid I don't have a sufficiently good understanding of the subject material and that my professor will pull a Dr. Seitzman (a Socratic-like question asking prof from GT). And then he'll fail me and I'll owe NASA $3500 for the class. Why do I live in fear of this?

To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

I can't wait for the weekend, even though it will be mostly consumed by mowing the lawn and doing homework and cleaning and sorting and stacking. The usual.

This morning, I've been in a kind of randomly bad mood. Anyway, I was reading gtcrows (where some friends have political debates) and one of the uber-conservatives in the group has been talking about John Kerry being a big liar, and he cited an example of an evasive response to a reporter's question about whether he owned an SUV (according to James, it went something like this: So last Thursday is Earth Day, and journalists ask Kerry if he owns an SUV. He says no. Journalists know they have pictures of Kerry and family pilling into a SUV. They ask Kerry, "Does your wife own a Chevrolet SUV?" He replies, "The family has it. I don't have it."). Anyway, Carter posted this: Taking questions on the fly, someone asked him what cars he owned. He said a truck and a sedan. They said "doesn't your wife have an SUV at her third home?" He paused, because when you marry a ketchup tycoon, it's hard to keep track of all her stuff, and replied "Yep, I think she does." I think we should pick Presidents based on such anectdotes. What a joke.



I forgot to post one piece of good news yesterday in my super huge post. All I have to say is that after I heard the news, I was singing Ding, dong, the witch is dead... all day. For those of you who are in the know about my family's gossip (and plan on reading my book which will sound like a tall tale but is 100% non-fiction), you know what I'm talking about.

No, I still haven't found out about the FDO job. The waiting is making me want to scream. I know getting this or keeping my current job is a win-win situation since I like both. But the uncertainty is killing me. Can they possibly move any slower? Especially since I know they made the decision two weeks ago!

And my other complaint of the day is about clueless advisors. Jen M commented on why someone would ever go to grad school. I'm started to feel the burn right now. We have a presentation for class that we've been given basically no direction on. When I was in class two weeks ago, he said "Let's do it on Friday, our normal class time" Which is 5:15 p.m., after work, no conflicts. Sounded brilliant. So yesterday I e-mailed him and asked him if he had a USB port (which is a reasonable question since he has a Mac laptop) so that I can bring my presentation on a memory stick. He said "You'll have all the equipment you need" (I hope that means "yes"). And then he said "See you at 10 a.m. on Friday". 10 a.m.! What the heck? He knows that I have a job, and he knows my management isn't exactly thrilled with the idea of me ever leaving the office during "core" work hours. And he didn't even warn me. This is the first I've heard of the 10 a.m. thing. There's only 2 of us in this class, and I missed class last week, so he must have "announced" it then. He knew I wasn't going to be there, so you'd think he would've dropped me a courtosy e-mail (you know, since there are only TWO of us in this class!) Actually, he's probably just that clueless that he didn't think it through. Occasionally he e-mails me and says "Let's meet at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, is that ok?" and I always have to e-mail him back with "How 'bout 8 am or 4 p.m.?"

Anyway, despite my rant, the good news is that today I'm working the Soyuz landing (well, I'm watching the other Landing Support Officers work the Soyuz landing), which in theory should keep me at work until after 9 p.m. (possibly through 11), so long they don't waive off. If I get into work early (I was planning on staying home this morning), I should have enough hours to make up for stupid-advisor-scheduling. So here's to hoping the weather is good in Khazakstan (is that how you spell it anyway?)...

Maayan started a journal, but I don't know how often she plans on updating it. Still, I feel contagious :)

I have so so so much to say. I am going to at least make an attempt to be less erudite than usual. And maybe I'll even work on limiting my use of parenthesis. I know this won't satisfy all your curiousity (especially you Granddad!), so I'll try to call and chat more later.

If you really want to amuse yourself today, Nick (my roommate), set up a web cam of his pet bird, Belle, in his bedroom, so you can watch Belle all day doing whatever it is parakeets do, here

The Right Stuff

I spent all last week out at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California (that's between San Jose and San Fran, on the Bay). I was there to do Space Shuttle Approach & Land training at the Vertical Motion Simulator. I'm training for a position called "NASA Subsystem Engineer for Approach and Land" and the folks training me thought that watching the sim runs and participating would really help hammer home a lot of what they were teaching me (and they were right!)

Its a motion simulator, and like most of these, it rolls, pitches and yaws around a fixed base. But the reason it was so cool, and the reason we fly all the way out to California for it, it also slides up and down a 60 foot high rail, while sitting on another horizontal rail (30 feet) that in can slide across. It makes it feel incredibly real! I took some pictures and they are posted here.

For a few weeks, twice a year, they set up the simulator to train astronaut crews how to approach and land. Different pilots come out and "fly" the simulator in half day increments, so, needless to say, I saw a lot of astronauts (since I don't work with astronauts too often, I'm still a little starstruck... of course, you can't let that show, oh no, have to stay professional...) For the first couple of days, it was real work. A lot of little things turned up in the simulator which weren't matching what shuttle guidance would "really" do. So, Tina (who has been training me) and I worked a lot of issues. I was so proud of my piloting background, because I was able to sort out a number of little quirks (with the weather forecasts, for instance) intuitively, which made me feel useful to Tina.

After that, though, I was able to sit back and watch the sims. I watched most of them from the control room. I did get to sit in the "jump seat" (that's the seat behind the pilot & commander's seats) a couple of times, and THEN I got to sit in the right seat (the pilot's seat) while one astronaut flew his whole training sessions (I didn't mess up too badly -- one early gear deploy, but that just made things interesting for him)! That was also the first time I flew the simulator myself (with the motion on). All the astronauts were playing this game, to see how close they landed to the touchdown targets on their last landing, with a slightly complicated scoring method. I won't explain the details of the scoring, but a single-digit score is considered extremely respectable. I think the winning score at the end of the week was about 2, and a lot of the pilots were getting between 5-10, with several scoring between 10-20. Anyway, my landing scored a 7.6! Apparently right after I landed, the pilots in the control room were joking about firing someone in the corps to hire me instead (this was the second time this joke was made, the first was while I was in the jump seat and won "button pusher of the year" award by spotting a warning light and they commented that most mission specialists in that seat miss the lights sometimes). That was awesome (though, admittedly, a little bit lucky on my part)! On one day, one of the most senior astronauts came out to fly, I mean, the man walked on the moon! It was awesome to hear his stories while he was practicing - it was like a scene from Space Cowboys (complete with the "ah dang")! After that, I got to fly a couple more times, and it all basically rocked.

The Non-Work Fun Stuff

I've put pictures of all the non-work fun here

The first night I was there, I saw Jen O and her beau, K. She suggested we go out to sushi, and so we went to what I am now calling "my sushi place". Why, you ask? Because Sarah took me to the same place several years ago. Now, once I've gone to a place for 2 of my 3 trips to the Bay Area, it is now officially a tradition. For the record, Karen and I also have a tea house in Edinburgh in Scotland where we traditionally go after climbing Arthur's Seat (we've been there twice together, and Karen's been there a third time with her family).

A couple of days, we managed to escape the lab early and get out on the town. Tina (who's about my age, and as it turns out, has a number of common friends with me, and scary coincidences, like knowing a guy from Newtown who is working at Penn State for the awesome professor who offered me the research assistantship with DLR in Germany just a few weeks too late for me to accept!) and I headed into San Francisco one night and drove through random streets to the Cliff House, where we walked on the beach, saw (and touched) the Pacific Ocean, and otherwise climbed on the rocks until we got a good view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Afterwards, we went to fisherman's wharf for clam chowder (yum!!!) and to watch the seals (which are suprisingly like dogs in their barks, their playing, their cuddling, and their laziness).

On Friday afternoon, a few of us went to hike Mission Peak, which was awesome. It was 6 miles roundtrip, 2500 feet up, then 2500 feet down. As is usual, I was about 15 minutes behind my companions by the time I reached the top. It did remind me that I really need to go out and find myself some hills to climb to prepare for Longs Peak and Peru. Ah, boring flat Houston.

March on Washington

Well, for the first time ever, I marched on Washington. Well, me and over a million other people. Something inside me says that this should be a required activity for high school civics classes. (Actually, one of the many chants I heard during the March: "What does democracy look like?" "THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!") I hadn't exactly told everyone the reason why I was going to Washington, because, well, I know some people around are religious-onservative types, and why try to explain when all it will do is start arguments that I shouldn't have at work. So, anyway, when in doubt, I called this a "family obligation". Why? As best as I can explain it is that I have family members that are professional feminists. Well, because my Aunt Di is Vice Prez of Ms. Magazine and my Aunt Ellie is an uber-feminist (I mean, she has honorary doctorates in it!) and her organization was a sponsor of the march. To top that all off, my high school girlfriends, Maayan, Melissa & Sharon were all going to be around!

So, I tried to be useful. I was hoping to be able to pitch in more, but it was going amazingly smoothly. I spent early Saturday in the Feminist Majority offices ordering pizza for the volunteers, getting change for the t-shirt sales, doing other random stuff. Then, we headed off to a VIP reception at the National Geographic building (coolest lobby EVER!). Lots of annoying speaches were given by important people (Congresswomen, actors, etc.), but the food was good, and I made myself useful making sure all the volunteers and the pro-choice picketers (they were countering the anti-choice picketers with their disgustingly graphic signs) bottles of water, stuffing flyers etc. The biggest excitement is when I turned around and saw Tyne Daly from Judging Amy and Cagney & Lacey standing right behind me (she had a pink streak died in her hair too, it was awesome)! Amy Brenneman was there too. There were other celebs, too, but I watch Judging Amy every week, so that was too cool. They also marched (picture here).

Afterwards, Maayan, the twins, and I went to the D.C. Armory for some entertainment (unfortunately Planned Parenthood's rally apparently "stole" Anie Difranco). I helped sell t-shirts, and ended up making a midnight run the Mall to drop off the leftovers. I also purchased what I was going to wear the next day, my "Don't mess with Texas Women" hat!

Onto the March. I put my photos up here and there are a bunch of photos on the Feminist Majority page here. Of course, we got up way too early (only 4 hours of sleep the previous night). We promptly made ourselves useful signing people in (I don't know how they were going to manage to sign in a million people, but I easily signed in 500 myself, and they said there were about 2500 people doing the same thing). Someone at work asked me about the "type" of people that go to these things. Well, I can tell you now that it was all types. The usual suspects, the families with kids, the happy couples, the college students, the former hippies, the respectable yuppies, the old Catholic ladies from Canada, Maayan's friend Mike from school who was looking dashing in his bright pink "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirt. All of them looked like they were having way too much fun shouting things at the couple hundred bible-thumping anti-choice types on the sidelines ("Pro-life, that's a lie! You don't care about women's lives!" was the chant for that segment of the march. There were some volunteers holding up yellow caution signs to the marchers that said "Warning: Crazy fanatics ahead", it would have been really funny to be one of those people). I was lso amused by the folks who hung "Another statue for choice" sign on every random statue along the march route. The police didn't seem so amused by the guy who did that to a Scouting monument, I don't know why...

While I was signing people in near the front of the line (near the honored guest checkin), some random person walked up to me and said "You're a Cutri, right?", and I said, "Yeah", and she gave me a yellow sash. I was very confused, but the lady said that she had worked for my Aunt Ellie for 20 years, I guess she's seen a picture of me or something. Anyway, we eventually started marching in the throng of people. I have never gone 2 miles (around the Mall, the Washington Monument, past the White House, and down PA Ave.) so slow in my life! (Over 3 hours) I could've marched in the front of the line with my nifty yellow sash, with the Congresspeople, Whoopi Goldberg, Moby (I wonder if he would've remembered me from when he visited NASA), etc. But I was having fun with Maayan and Sharon and Mike and I didn't want to desert them. We finished the March just just in time to watch Aunt Ellie's war cry on the jumbotron.

Let's just say that I slept well on the plane back to Houston. The final total: three time zones and crossed 5500 miles.

To satiate your curiousity, I've posted some pictures of my last week. I will try to find some more time to put up a full trip report later.

The Vertical Motion Sim

Fun in San Fran

The March for Women's Lives

Also, look to your left, I've added some new people to the blog roll. My friends Chris L. and Jen M. have started blogs in the last week. Oh, so much more to read now!

Ok, so much to say about last week, so many photos, so much fun/education, so many links, etc. etc.

I'll update tonight.

Its another beautiful spring day in Houston. The flowers are blooming, the sun is shining, and I only have to drive up to Rice once, potentially twice, before the summer. Once for a project (something about compressible flow that I find "interesting", ha, yeah, right). And a second one to return my take-home final. The Rice honor code continues to amaze me. Not only are profs forbidden from proctoring tests, but they are required to send the exams to be taken at home (even if they are timed, or closed book) if the class size is under 50 people.

It looks like Karen found Jen O. last night during her two-day visit to California. She almost had an Ireland moment.

You won't here from me for an entire week. Here's my itinerary, in case you need to supress the temptation to call out the National Guard to track me down (Mom!):

Sunday afternoon : Depart for California

Monday - Friday : Fly/Observe Flight of Vertical Motion Simulator at NASA Ames, try not to be too awestruck by precense of multiple astronauts; get reminded that my job really is darned cool occasionally.

Friday Night: Take Red-Eye to Washington, D.C.

Saturday: Be my Aunt Diane (and/or Aunt Ellie)'s lacky in all ways possible; potentially throw in the possible glamour of a reception at National Geographic and/or a Congresswoman's housen (need to remember that engineer's business casual and D.C.-business casual are two different things); Hope I end up hanging out with Maayan and/or the Twins.

Sunday: March. Keep the people in the front of the line out of too much trouble and moving forward. I've never actually marched on Washington. Should be an educational experience. You'd think this would be required of all high school civics classes. Yes, the weirdest things qualify as a "family obligation" in the Cutri family...

Fourth place sailing last night (out of 9). It was fun, sunny, and a bit windy. Nice. The tide was out so they canceled the big-boat races, so it was just us little guys, which was kind of fun too. There were two catamarans, they are so beautiful, they just cut through the water. I think it would be really entertaining to sail on one of those.

Today is my last day of class for the semester. I still have a couple assignments to turn in (take home finals), but otherwise, I'm done after my test today. I think I may cut out of work early to get in a last minute cram session. I have never looked forward to a summer break so much.

Today is a beautiful day for sailing. Which is what just about *everyone* will be doing tonight. This is because a co-worker of ours who lives on his sailboat offered to take the whole entry group out sailing tonight. Inconviently, 2 of our small group (Gavin & I) already crew for the races tonight (which is most unfortunate, 'cause I'd really like to go out on his boat). But we'll be sailing, so life is good.

This morning, I'm going to finish my Approach & Land Guidance cram session. This afternoon, I hope to find time to study Optimal Control algorithms for part 2 of my test tomorrow.

The FDO interview went pretty well yesterday. The summary I sent Mom & Sarah: A bunch of questions about my technical experience, my leadership on teams, my abilities as a team player, dealing with conflict, my ability under pressure (I basically ran out of times that I've had to deal with real emergency situations by the time they finished questioning me..), what I think a FDO does (I think this was where I made the worst answers) and who a FDO works with... I made a few jokes (one borrowed from Nick, "I want to be a FDO because my mom was a FDO, and her mom before that...")

I'll find out if I got the job after I get back from California. I'm trying not to think about the potential career changing right now, because its just too distracting.

Sarah put up some pictures of Yuri's Night that are quite good - including pictures of the crowd, the bands, and the Russian dancers. Here are some of the highlights (maybe this will help you put faces to the names I mention in these entries):

Matt, Stephanie, Me, & Ray (our group lead)

Gavin & Jen

Jo & Sarah

And some pictures from the museum last week are here.

Yuri's Night was a sucess last night! We had about 250 people, 3 bands, 300+ free vodka shots, some bar food, and lots of fun. Personally, my tally is 5 cranberry&vodka shots, 1 all-vodka shot, 1 Corona, 1 blue skyy (a sissy girly vodka cooler), a diet pepsi, and a half basket of popcorn shrimp. Just for the record, this basically doubles the amount of alcohol (besides wine) that I drink in a year. I also practiced my 10 words of broken Russian and was granted a 10 ruble coin with Yuri Gagarin's head printed on it, and I practiced my slightly larger French vocabularly and got laughed at. Nothing like partying for the future of space exploration!

Since you're all waiting with baited breath to see how my FDO interview went. While, like me, you'll have to wait another day because it was delayed until noon today. This means one more day of me listening to Bach's Cello Suites, which tend to both calm and energize me.

I know you're all waiting with baited breath to hear what I decided to do this weekend. Well, I decided on Nothing. I slept in. I took the dogs for a walk. I went to a very satisfying chick flick (Prince and Me) with Sarah and Buzz. I did some shopping. I caught up on bills. I took naps in the afternoon. That's it.

This week is going to be busy. I have my now weekly test in Optimal Control (don't ask, its disturbing). Tonight is Yuri's Night! And today is my FDO interview. That's that.

Happy Good Friday to all! And Happy early-Easter!

This weekend could go a few ways for me. One possibility, I sit home, veg out, and enjoy some down time. One possibility, I sit home Saturday, and go hiking on Sunday. One possibility, I call my Aunt Joan and do a whirlwind trip to Dallas to spend Easter with family for the first time in years.

Whatever shall I decide? I don't know.

Right now, I'm focusing on finishing work that needs to get done (T minus 1 week until Ames). Lunch. More work. Then swimming with Buzz (the girl, not the bee).

Today is going to be a long day. I have lots of work to do. And I have about a million days of Optimal Control notes to commit to memory. Plus, I'm probably going to blow my gas dynamics test. Its open book, open notes, but the homework was basically cryptic to me this term. So, if the test varies much at all from the homework, I'm going to have problems. Another student who took my gas dynamics class got a C, and now, I'm fearing for a C in that class too. The prospect of actually paying for one of these classes freaks me out.

This song just randomly played on my mp3 player, and its kind of a depressing sentiment:

I can go to Europe, travel with my friends

I can blow a thousand deutsche marks

Today has been a very good day. I woke up early, but not early enough to study for my two tests tomorrow (why is it that even when I'm only taking two classes, I will always be doomed to have both with exams on the same day?). Daylight savings time has made it so hard to wake up in the dark of the morning.

I made it to work just in time for my how-to-fly-the-space-shuttle class. After class, we grabbed a quick lunch and then we went and flew the space shuttle. Seriously. Well, at least a simulator that moves and banks like the space shuttle. I got to fly FOUR landings. And I road along for about 10 others. I didn't have any perfect landings, but I was pretty close to the landing targets (airspeed, touch down point, verticle rate, etc.) on a few of them and I only landed short once. Then, just for fun, we did an ascent, where they flip the simulator so we lie on our backs and it starts shaking and rolling like an shuttle launch. It was awesome -- I've always wanted to do that!

Since the day is only getting better, the weather is beautiful, breezey, and the first race of regatta season is upon us. So, I will depart work and go sailing at 5 p.m. today! Yeah for sailing season! I guess that's one perk of daylight savings time (we only race on wednesday nights when it stays light enough for it...)

The only downside to this happy day is that in all likelihood I am going to be up all night studying. Woe is me.

Maybe one of these days I'm going to get around to telling you why my neighbors thing Bennet is a vicious attack dog. I just haven't gotten to that tale of my suburban hell yet.

Sorry my updating has been slack. I've actually had places to go and people to see. Let me start at the beginning...

Yuri's Night... it went swimmingly so far, with the 5K and the Museum education event out of the way. Now, the piece de resistance, the party, which will take place next Monday on April 12.

Yesterday @ work... I had my first official sim as an LSO ALP(landing support officer - approach and land processor). I've been to a couple before, but this was the first time I was actually on the schedule. Then, they left me alone on console for all of 30 minutes. Ok, if anything critical happened, this could have been a problem. And they did call to check on me once. As it was, I fielded a few questions and felt all cool about myself.

Yesterday @ home... some folks came over to watch the NCAA Championship Game. Now, you wonder, why would I like to watch college basketball? Well, Georgia Tech actually made it to the finals. Unfortunately we lost to UConn. Lost badly. I guess it wasn't a good day for sports. The Astros lost too.

Today @ work... This morning was uneventfully full of training stuff to finish. Then this afternoon I went over to go over my training stuff, and I found out that tomorrow I am going to get a half-day "flying the space shuttle" lesson. Well, at least the TAEM, Approach & Landing part. And the capstone of this lesson -- two hours flying the SMS. That's the shuttle motion simulator, that moves and turns on a fixed base. Ok, so I have to split the time with 2 other people. But, I should be able to get 4 or 5 landings in with me flying. How cool is that! Then, I drove home in a deluge. I am going to be soaking wet all day.

Yesterday when I got home the "Help Wanted" sign I posted looking for a neighborhood kid to bring my dogs in from outside after school was gone. Hopefully this means that someone was interested enough in the job to take the sign. Or, my evil neighbors took the sign down because they didn't feel it was an acceptable solution. I'm trying to stay optimistic about it being the former, rather than the latter, situation. I hate feeling like a prisoner in my own home. I love living in a house, I never want to go back to my apartment. But I need more land. More separation between houses.

This weekend will be full of Yuri's Night stuff. The 5K is tomorrow morning; museum set up tomorrow afternoon; museum event all day Sunday. That's that.

Its rant time.

Last time you heard of my unneighborly neighbors was in September. I bought bark collars. We've heard occasional yips from the dogs with their collars on, since, but nothing else. After receiving that call in September, I called them back, and told them about the bark collars and hope that solved the problem. Also, since September, I have ALWAYS come home by 7 p.m. to put the dogs inside (my latest nights are after class -- which, with traffic, might detain me until 7:30 p.m.)

That is, until last night. I was out until 10 p.m. Work. (You can read about it in yesterday's entry, which I admit, I updated late).

I came home to a horribly mean message on the answering machine. I'll sum up: We've warned you. You should get rid of those dogs. The police made a visit to your house, and you'll be hearing from them. Keep in mind, these neighbors are across the street and kitty corner to me, so its not like the dogs are barking in their windows or anything.

Since the time stamp on the message was 9:30, and it was only 10 p.m., I decided to call them back. I started out calm as can be, I apologized for my dogs disturbing them, I said that I wished they had come over to talk to me rather than calling the police, and I was trying to ask them exactly what they heard (I was explaining to them that my dogs were wearing bark collars and I wanted to figure out what wasn't working about them). They wouldn't listen, they said We warned you. We came by to talk to you in your yard [that was last March] and the only time we get action is when we call the police. Now the police are involved and we're going to do something to get those dogs from you! You're going to be hearing from them! You shouldn't have dogs, they're a nuisance!. At this point, my first instinct was to tell them to go to hell. Instead, I said something like "Obviously you don't want to work this out, so we shouldn't talk about this any more." To which the idiot neighbor said "We tried to work this out! The only solution is for you to get rid of your dogs!"

Completely unreasonable. First of all, that's near the level of telling someone to get rid of their children. Second of all, nearly half the neighborhood has dogs, and a good portion leave them outside during the day (this morning, while I laid in bed, I heard no less than the faint barks of three different dogs).

Anyway, I called the police officer who visited my house. He was very friendly. He said that the police department was complaint-driven (funny, I always thought the police should be crime-driven), and that they only investigate this stuff when someone calls to complain. He said he didn't issue a citation, because a citation requires multiple complaints, and he should probably also bring out a decible meter. I told him about the bark collars and asked exactly what he heard when he came out. He said he heard one dog barking, that it wasn't continuous, the dog would bark, stop, bark again. He said in his opinion it was frequent enough to be considered a nuisance, though if it happened regularly this late at night (which obviously it doesn't). He also said that he was prowling around the outside of my fence to get them to bark, and most people with dogs like their dogs to alert them to prowlers outside their fence. He said sometimes bark collars don't work for every dog and I should investigate other options.

Smart dog

As pissed off as I was by this whole thing, I obviously don't want my dogs to be annoying the whole neighborhood. So I did some investigating on what was going on. Its not easy to get the dogs to bark, because they know me, and they tend to bark when strangers walk by the fence. Anyway, I shook and raddled things until I got them to try to bark. Apache only wimpered. Bennet did bark, stop, bark again. He's figured out the bark collar. The way the collar works is that it beeps first, and then shocks with increasing intensity as the barking continues. Anyway, if the dog only barks for a short time, it just beeps, and then when the dog stops in resets the cycle. So basically, Bennet has figured out exactly how long he can bark without being shocked, and how long he has to wait before he barks again. That dog is way too smart for his own good!

Solution

I'm currently at a loss for a solution (besides the obviously unreasonable thoughts of burning down my neighbor's house and/or telling them if they want me to get rid of my dog, they should get rid of their kids who are always kicking balls into my yard). The dogs would just be miserable staying inside every day (they'd probably get stir crazy and destructive). It seems this is only a problem when the dogs stay out in the evening, so I've posted a sign looking for a neighborhood kid to pay to bring them inside the house after school. It won't stop the dogs from barking, but at least they'll have some time outside, but come back in before most normal people get home from work. I've also put a padlock on my gate because I'm afraid of what they might do to my dogs. What a horrible world we live in, where I have to fear for the safety of my pets and padlock because my neighbors are threatening them.

Bored housewives

Ok, I know I shouldn't be critical of other people's life decisions. But I attribute this whole situation to bored housewives. The young married couples who think they can live in the "perfect" neighborhood are the ones who report me to the homeowners association. And the bored housewives that stay home all day are like the neighborhood Nazis. I hate to generalize. But most people with something to do during the day aren't so unreasonable. The other single people, the couples where both parties work, and the older couples are all perfectly pleasant.

So, my second solution is that I am moving to the country. Seriously, nothing could be better than several acres to separate me from my nearest neighbor. I spent all morning trying to figure out how long it would take me to save up enough money for a second downpayment. I could rent this house to a young-married-couple that would fit perfectly well in my neighborhood. And I could move somewhere else, with lots of land, a wraparound patio porch, and NO HOMEOWNERS ASSOCATIONS. I am convinced the homeowners association is what gives people the thought that they have the license to be unneighborly and file complaints with outside authorities, rather than stopping by to meet your neighbors and have friendly chats.