Options: Sometimes dogs and sleep just don’t go hand and hand.

My wife ReNada, the one with the full-blown Afro, she’s not much of a talker. But, then, neither am I.  We just kind of sit in the living room each night, letting our thoughts carry the conversation.  We were doing that very thing a couple weeks back.

“Let’s get out and do something,” ReNada said, breaking an hour’s worth of silence.

I yawned in reply.

“You’re never in the mood,” she said.  When I still didn’t respond, she grunted a “Humph” and punched the remote to another of her lousy sit-coms.  That pretty much describes the give and take between us.

Our two-bedroom house is in an integrated neighborhood: lower-income families with lots of kids, old cars, chain-link fences, and streets that host lots of football a