Time spent in my neighborhood...

It probably doesn't say much for my "parenting" skills, that Koala, my puppy that I raised from a baby, is such a bad, bad little girl. Not that I don't love her to death, but she has no manners whatsoever. And for a small/medium sized dog, she is incredibly strong. While Duke can definitely knock me over if he so desires - which is not surprising, as he comes up to my waist - he doesn't ever so much as consider doing such a thing. Koala, meanwhile, for all her diminutive stature, can - and does - knock me over in a heartbeat. Not to mention her love of tying me in knots with the leash and dragging me hither and yon. I took Duke, Koala and Dewey for a walk around my neighborhood this morning, and barely made it home... solely due to Koala's antics. Of course, watching me battle my way out of the various leash-knots Koala managed to tie around me and the other two dogs as we hobbled around the block provided obvious fodder for my neighbors' laughter. Sigh.

Now as you probably know, like to call my neighborhood 'the ghetto' as it is one of the worst (if not the worst) neighborhood in Waycross. That being said, Rob - who hails from Trenton, NJ - scoffs at the notion that anywhere in Waycross could possibly be considered a 'ghetto.' Nonetheless, as I've mentioned quite a few times in the past, it's not the best of neighborhoods. [Examples of this from my own personal experience can be found here, here, here and here.] My street is known to pretty much everyone in the community as the place one goes to buy drugs. I find this fascinating, as most of the houses on my street are rentals. Do these people get into dealing because they move to my neighborhood, do they move there in order to deal, or is it just that my neighborhood is the place in Waycross where the dealing is the most obvious? My street has five blocks, and I know there's one group (gang?) of dealers on each block. The group one block to the north of me is absurdly obvious in their marketing techniques - waving their arms and shouting while making crack/pot smoking gestures. They, unlike the other two groups, still haven't caught on that I *live* in the neighborhood and am not there to make a buy. (Of course other than Rob, myself, and our respective visiting family members, white people only ever come to my street for the purpose of purchasing, shall we say, goods or services. Unless of course, it's a landlord collecting the rent or remodeling after an eviction.) Definitely an interesting world in which I live!