On the front side of our rig, lives a family of 4 (Mom, Dad, girl 14yo and boy 13yo). The father has just gotten off disability and also works at the Solar Farm in Lompoc. Their rig is a 39’ 6” trailer (regulations say that 40’ or longer is a mobile home; less is a trailer). With a couple of slide outs their space comes out to about 400 sq ft. That’s 100 sq ft more than we have. They do use the outside picnic table for the kids to do their homework on and occasionally dinner.
With both of our histories of teaching junior/senior high students, we have a good sensitivity to the challenges of living with teenagers anywhere let alone within a 400 sq ft space. The kids like Karma and enjoy walking her after they get home from school and finish their homework. They are chatty and interesting young people, seem very respectful of the parents. It could be that they are just entering their teenage years and the storms will come later.
Besides the 4 of them, they have 2 cats who have discovered the perfect way to irritate Karma. While she seems able to deal with cats in other people’s houses, she doesn’t have any patience for cats (rabbits, squirrels, or armadillos for that matter) who are outside our rig - it’s her ‘hall-monitor role’. Anyway, back to these clever cats. One at a time, they will push back the curtain and sun themselves so that Karma can see them through the side window of her crate. They first make sure they have her attention – identified by loud shrill barking (Karma’s, that is, not the cats) – then proceed to clean each paw, side, ear, eye, etc, etc, etc.
We are working very hard with Karma to assure her that she can growl or “woof” to let us know a cat is again in the window but no horribly painful (to us) barking. By the time we leave, we hope to have made some progress on that behavior.
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