More House(s), Fewer Trees

On my street, there are trees behind the houses.  The green space on our side of the street is a ravine.  Although our lot extends part way up the far side, I've never been back there.  It's dense underbrush and not really passable, with towering oaks overhead.  During the summer, the houses on Lanier Place are completely hidden by vegetation.

With construction going on, we are losing more of the trees that make this greenbelt.  They took out the trees that were behind the house I still think of as Angela's house, and now the house will fill what used to be the back yard.  From Kathy and Steve's backyard, the view over the fence (I am sure the builders will add a fence) will not be of their neighbors' backyard, but of their house, going all the way back to the diminished treeline.

Friday afternoon when I was walking the dog, a man driving a City of Atlanta car posted this sign in front of the duplex:

I talked to him later, when he finished walking around the empty lots where the apartments used to be at Wessyngton and North Highland.  I asked if he was a city arborist, and he said he was. Did the orange sign mean more trees were coming down?  It meant that there was a proposal to remove trees; it had not yet been approved; if and when it was, the yellow sign would replace the orange one.  I gestured to the empty lots where the apartments were.  We're worried about losing more trees here too, I told him.  He said the trees weren't being adequately protected there.  

The next day I walked around and saw what he was talking about.  This tree had been left when the demolition was done, but has been badly damaged, presumably by the equipment that had been used.

Yesterday morning I woke up early and heard for the first time in a while one of the neighborhood barred owls.  It wasn't so close, but it sounded like it was somewhere in the trees behind our house.  A little later in the morning, when I was walking the dog, I heard an owl again, this time on the other side of North Morningside.  Yesterday afternoon, I was out with the dog at dusk and heard it again, but this time it was closer.  It kept calling and seemed to be staying in one place, and as we walked toward home, we were getting closer.  I think it was in the trees behind where Angela's house used to be.

I hate it that we are losing so many of the trees on our street.  At some point, surely it will matter.

More on the New Development at Piedmont & Cheshire Bridge

This is the artist's rendering of the development that Millcreek Residential has on their website now.   It would appear that name of the development (previously the somewhat deceptive Morningside Park) has been changed to Modera Morningside.  I am not sure what "Modera" means -- I think it's one of those words that marketing people make up that doesn't actually mean anything, but I'm not sure.  (Interestingly, the name of the GIF image is "Morningside Heights," which I actually liked -- sort of an amalgam of Morningside and Piedmont Heights, the neighborhood on the other side of Piedmont.)

Iain and I have been trying to figure out where the viewer of this imagined scene would have been standing.  I thought it would be from the gorilla car wash (I thought the woman on the far right, walking straight ahead with the Coke in her hand, had left her car there to be washed) but we went there this morning and walked around.  It clearly was not the future view from the gorilla car wash and maybe not even from Grind House (the only establishment on that block on that side of Piedmont that has any landscaping, I might add, but even there not the lush greenery in the foreground of this drawing).  Our guess was it was from the BP station.

Here's the view from the BP station (inexplicably devoid of cars on Piedmont).

And here's the BP station, which does not have vegetation between it and the street.

The other curious thing about the artist's drawing is the near absence of cars on Piedmont.  Now, as my photograph above shows, it is possible at just the right time to capture such a view.  But this photo, also taken this morning, is more typical:

A notice recently went out to the neighborhood, that the Millcreek construction team would be doing roadwork over the next several months that would impact Piedmont, Cheshire Bridge, and Piedmont Circle, resulting in "slight road closures" and detours.  I'm not sure what a "slight road closure" is but if it requires a detour it sounds to me like an "actual road closure."  At the community meeting that Iain and I attended back in March, there was mention of a traffic study, but it wasn't done yet.

Is it done now, and if so, what did it find?  

Just curious.

National Night Out, with Ice Cream

Yesterday, August 5, was National Night Out, and we observed it on Wessyngton Road like we have for the last couple of years with ice cream on the grounds at Morningside Presbyterian Church.  At this point it is a nearly self-organizing event.  A query via Facebook, does anyone have any other ideas?  None proposed.  Is 8 p.m. too late?  Yes, given that school will have started the day before, 7 is better.  A sign up sheet gets essentials first -- bowls, spoons, and napkins -- and after that anyone else who asks gets told to bring ice cream.

Lynsley got us on the church calendar, and I filled out the on line registration for our event with the National Association of Town Watch.  I emailed Major Hobbes to invite someone from Zone 2 of the Atlanta Police Department to come by.  Later I saw a different contact for APD, and I emailed her too.  After that, there wasn't much else to do until yesterday afternoon.  Since the picnic tables aren't there any more, just south of the playground, I put a folding table in the car along with a table cloth and a couple of trash bags.

Late in the afternoon I took the dog for a walk.  He's doing better every day on a leash; I don't know if it's the harness (we got the one that is the correct size on Monday) or the fluoxetine or both, but he's definitely doing better.  But I didn't take my cell phone with me, and it wasn't until I was about to drive over to the church that I saw that I had several missed calls from the same unrecognized number.  So I called back, and after I identified myself, the man who answered asked if I'd called for a fire truck.

My initial response was "no," thinking that he meant a 911-call-that-the-house-was-on-fire kind of calling for a fire truck.  I certainly hadn't done that.  But after initially saying no, I realized that this might be a National Night Out-kind of request for a fire truck, so I told him that we were having a National Night Out event at Morningside Presbyterian at 7 p.m., and we'd be delighted if the guys could come with the truck, and if they could, we'd feed them ice cream.  It turned out there had been a major miscommunication (I'm not sure on who's part, since they only part of city government I'd contacted was APD) and they had sent the truck out to our event at 5 p.m.  I reiterated that our event was at 7 p.m. and he said something about the church being on Piedmont, across from Fat Matt's.  I told him no, that we were at Morningside Presbyterian, and that the church on Piedmont was Morningside Baptist (that's what I said but the church across the street from Fat Matt's might actually be Rock Springs Presbyterian.  Either way, it wasn't Morningside Presbyterian.)  After we got that straightened out, he said he wasn't sure they could come, that they'd had to respond to a house fire earlier, and I said I certainly understood but if they could come they'd be welcome.

So we didn't get a fire truck but we had plenty of ice cream, our neighbor Linda's homemade cookies, and a good number of neighbors over the course of the evening.

Scott's parents, visiting from Florida, came as did one of our new neighbors who had just moved in.

The Atlanta Police Department was well-represented, and even without the fire truck we had plenty of guests.  Major Hobbes was there, along with several other police officers.  Anna Crist from the Mayor's Office of Constituent Services came too, and so did Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Harlow of the Fulton County District Attorney's office. 

So it was another successful National Night Out on Wessyngton Road.  But one of the best parts of the evening was watching the three small boys on bicycles going up and down the street.  One of the boys was from the family that just moved in; he was riding his bike with the boys who live next door.

That's my street.

Scared of Everything

Right now Leonard, our new dog, is lying on the floor at my feet.  At this moment (unlike when I took this picture a few minutes ago) he is asleep, lying on his side, and using my left foot as a pillow.  He finally started eating a normal amount of dog food about four days ago.  Before that, it was just a few bites at a time, and not very much over the course of the day.  I think he was too scared to eat.  But now he's eating, and that's good.

But it was still nearly impossible to walk him during the daytime, when there were more people out and about and lawn mowers and chain saws being used and air conditioners running.  He would get scared, and pull so hard first in one direction and then in another that we were afraid he would hurt himself.  We were still using the red Atlanta Lab Rescue choke collar that had been on him when we got him two weeks ago.  I took him on longer walks early in the morning and in the evening when it was quieter but still a jogger or a dog walker or a bus going by or loud music from a passing car could send him into a panic.  I had never noticed, until trying to walk Leonard, that we obviously are under a flight path for the airport.  Planes fly overhead every minute or two, and I had not ever noticed it, but the sound scared the dog and made him want to run away.  Everything scared him, including children, bags of yard clippings, squirrels in trees overhead, and our neighbors and their leashed dogs.  

So yesterday morning I showed up at Intown Animal Hospital without an appointment.  I got there a few minutes before the time they were scheduled to open because I wanted to increase the chance that we could be seen and hopefully get there before too many other dogs showed up.  He wouldn't get on the scale; I had to pick him up and set him on it.  Thankfully he didn't growl at anyone or at any of the dogs that were there.  Dr. Fiorillo was able to see us, and she prescribed him something to help him calm down.  She was easing into the recommendation that our dog needed something for anxiety, and I interrrupted her.  I'm a doctor, I told her, and I think he needs doggie Valium.  She didn't prescribe Valium but she did prescribe fluoxetine (that's generic for Prozac).  She told us not to use the pinch collar we'd gotten last weekend (we'd already decided that would probably make things worse) and recommended a harness or a head collar.  She recommended that we get some help from a dog trainer, and gave us a phone number for one she says is good.  And she said it was just going to take a while.

As soon as I got Leonard home from his doctor visit, I got his prescription filled at Kroger and gave him his first dose of fluoxetine.  Then I took the pinch collar back to Pet Supplies Plus and exchanged it for a PetSafe Easy Walk Harness.  They didn't have a medium-large so I bought the medium, but when I got home and measured Leonard was afraid it would be too small.  So I took it back and exchanged it for the large which probably is too big even at the smallest setting.  But even not fitting quite right, it's like he's a different dog.  He doesn't pull, and even though he sometimes growls at joggers or other dogs, he often doesn't and sometimes doesn't even pay much attention.  He doesn't panic and try to take off, and he calms down more quickly.  Walking him is now mostly uneventful, although I do still have to tell him that the airplane overhead is not going to hurt him and we can just keep going.  I've ordered the medium-large from Amazon (the pet store recommended I order it on line, because it was hard for them to get the in-between sizes).  But until it comes, I think he'll do okay with this one.

I think the pressure on the choke collar must have scared him, and then when he was startled by anything else it just made it worse.  Without the extra fear from the collar, he's doing much better - I really do think it's that and not one dose of generic Prozac that has made him so much calmer.

So if you see us walking and I take him across the street to avoid a too-close encounter, don't take it personally, and if he growls at you or your dog, don't take that personally either.  It's one thing at a time, and I think now he's no longer afraid of his collar.  Hopefully joggers, other dogs, bags of yard waste, lawnmowers, air conditioners, and planes flying overhead will follow.