When Lo-Fi and jazz music don't entertain your dog, try these 7 tricks while you're not home

Something had to give. While the workplace and any other place in the world can put people at risk of dealing with chaos and people they cannot stand, home is supposed to be the one place where homeowners and tenants have the right to quiet enjoyment. The problem is my dog repeatedly decided she doesn't like the same people I don't like in my neighborhood. Instead of doing what I do and treating annoying neighbors as though they are invisible, she would leap into the windows and loudly announce every single time they walked by.

Getting their mail? She barked. Watering the grass? She barked. Walking by with a guest? She barked. Trimming the bushes near my windows? She let out the kind of guttural growl that made me wonder if my home was getting burglarized. Junee was making my own blood pressure rise by letting me know every single moment she was not impressed.

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Considering I was already having issues with loud noise above me from new tenants, one easy way to peacefully work was to move the furniture around and put my home office desk somewhere else. I also talked to their landlord. Rugs considerably helped me stop feeling like horny dinosaurs moved in. Stomp! Stomp! Stomp! Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!

Moving one of my couches also quieted my four-legged security guard, so she was no longer becoming more of a nuisance to me than the people outside. Although my dog paced and protested losing one of two security stations and still uses the ottoman to stare longingly at a window sill she can no longer climb onto, the early-morning growling and midday barking decreased at least 50%.

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But then I got a new indoor camera and realized how much noise she was making whenever I left. I thought she was barking until I was out of sight of the windows. Turns out she was having an off-key session of En Vogue crooning for at least 10 minutes, protesting me for having a life outside of petting her. I realized my dog was making me the neighbor I complained about.

I started testing some ways to drown her out or distract her. Dog TV did me no good. TV shows with Black women talking (mainly “Mary Mary” on TUBI) were interesting enough to make her whining stop quicker, along with R&B and hip-hop dance beats from Club 1BD. (Her reaction to Usher singing still entertains me. Sometimes I play songs by the ATL singer just to watch her freeze and stare at the TV.) While I'm home, I also noticed my dog developing a love for jazz and Lo-Fi music.

And the sounds of the latter two types of music are distracting enough for her to not leap into a window every single time a blade of grass moves. But smooth jazz and Lo-Fi music are a little too low-key to keep her attention when I'm not sitting at a desk, quietly working.

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So I had to get creative when it came to other ways (Club 1BD and “Mary Mary” work 85% of the time) to keep her from wildly opening my blinds to let passersby know I wasn't home the entire time.