Downtown hounds
Sands Woody and Mary Fitzgerald open the door to their garage to find three tails wagging.
Bogie, Oliver and Mugsy, the couple’s three dogs, head to the hook holding their retractable leashes; Fitzgerald and Woody stuff baggies in their pockets.
Out the door goes the pack, strolling on the sidewalk of Church Avenue in downtown Roanoke. All three dogs avoid stepping on the sidewalk grates.
“It hurts their feet,” Fitzgerald explains.
They cross the street and make it to the soft lawn in front of the Norfolk and Southern building. There the dogs are dogs. They roll in the grass. They sniff. They play. And they deposit what the baggies are intended to collect.
Woody has lived above his Market Street restaurant and wine shop, Trio Bistro Bar Bottle, with his chocolate Lab Bogie since late summer 2005. A year ago Fitzgerald, a nurse anesthetist at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, moved in, bringing her two dogs, 3-year-old Yorkshire terrier Oliver and 10-year-old Jack Russell terrier Mugsy.
Walking three dogs, especially on the east end of downtown where green space is limited, can be a challenge. The couple wants to be good neighbors. They always tote their own bags.
As Roanoke’s downtown area expands to include more homes mixed in with offices, retail shops and restaurants, more families moving into those condominiums and apartments include pets.
But city dwelling, even in a relatively calm area like downtown Roanoke, can create challenges for dog owners whose pooches must tread the sidewalks in search of green space to do what a dog must do.
Cleanup is a must
Artists Suzun Hughes and John Wilson moved to Roanoke from San Francisco a year ago with their two 5-year-old American Eskimo dogs Sugar and Sefka. After a year of renovations, they settled into their Campbell Avenue studio, gallery and condo in April.
Tags: dog, green
Jeez-us. If you put that in a novel, people would toss it out a window for being unbelievable.
I actually thought this was more plausible than usual because it wasn’t just a string of really absurdly bad technical decisions.
Yeah, the only thing missing is the overpowering smell of the homeless.
Of course, with his decision he lost 45 minutes and has a great story… your way would have cost him a night in jail (as he would have just been arrested) and a nice fat lawyer fee.Sometimes, not being an ass is more productive.
Wow, talk about mishandling the situation.You don’t leave the decision as to whether or not to get a lawyer up to the high schooler. If cops demand answers, you demand a lawyer. Plain and simple. You don’t let them question your kid without you and a lawyer being around. You tell you kid to keep his mouth shut until a lawyer’s there.These are simple, basic rules any parent should know to keep their kid from getting steamrolled by the system. It’s not paranoia, it’s just common sense. Why don’t people understand this? Lots of cops, most cops even might be good officers, concerned for the truth and for citizens’ civil liberties, but you don’t know whether the ones you’re being detained by are in that set, and a stressful situation like that isn’t the time for you to make that evaluation.
And then sometimes, it lands you up the river for 5-10 because you got steamrolled by a cop trying to make detective. Are you going to take that risk? I’m not.Furthermore, it’s not “being an ass” to assert my legal rights. I have them for a reason. If I don’t assert them, they’ll be violated, again and again, and it’s very possible (not necessarily probable, but possible) that one of those times I’m going to lose more than my dignity.
So apparently the cops don’t know that you can also voluntarily fake a caller ID?