Sunrise, Coffee, My Balcony

I miss home--most days I get up and almost instantly find myself in throngs of traffic, or if not traffic just a collection of rude drivers on their way to work, and nobody out here knows how to drive (I'll save my rant about different lanes being for different speeds for another day), but some moments it's perfect.

This is one of them.  I'm sitting outside on my balcony, looking at my little potted basil plant, and watching the sky turn from purple to yellow to pink as the sun comes closer to the horizon, and there's a large flock of little birds flying past, and my coffee is perfect, the air is just cool enough that I can wear a sweatshirt, and to top it off, there's a small dog on the neighbor's balcony that is adorable.  The dog spends all day out there, as far as I can tell without any water or toys, but at the moment it seems content sitting under a piece of patio furniture, lazily attacking the tag hanging off the bottom.  This dog is a prime candidate for impersonation by Mita, which usually involves some form of inquisitiveness about where his mom has gone, followed by confusion as to what just happened to the lawn chair (it collapsed when he attacked it), and ends with the ever adorable series: "OOOH, what's that, its moving! [its his tail]... Mine, wait, come back, don't go away, I'll catch you!... HA, gotcha, you're mine now!...Oops, I fell over... Hey, what's that wagging thing?"

I've been told that its pathological, but this is the first dog I've seen that not only chases his own tail, but catches it, an event followed on most occasions by his falling over, releasing the tail, and then trying again to catch it.