My dog Ace isn’t much of a barker. When the mail comes, or there’s a knock on a door he’ll generally just bark once and be done with it.

So when I heard him barking up a storm on a recent weekend – a “ruh, ruh, ruh-ruh-ruh,” as opposed to one clipped “ruff” -- I knew it had to be something big. It was.

Ace was in the backyard, and I use the term loosely. As with many rowhouses, the “yard” is just a slab of concrete. I refer to it as the “cement yard,” with the emphasis on the “SEE,” like the Beverly Hillbillies called their swimming pool the “SEE-mint pond.”

I looked out my kitchen window and saw Ace looking up at the sky. I stepped out to see if he was barking at someone on one of the many rooftop decks looming above my patio. All were empty. I went back inside and, in a few minutes, he was raising a ruckus again.

Stepping outside I looked around, and up, and saw what was upsetting him: not a bird, not a plane, but a blimp -- the “Sanyo” blimp, which was cruising over and around Camden Yards during an Orioles game.

Every three minutes or so, it would pass overhead, and Ace would spend the lulls in between scanning the sky for it, barking when it finally appeared. He has seen birds, and planes, and the police helicopter that seems especially fond of flying over my neighborhood, but never anything like this.

He probably didn’t know what to make of it -- something so big and fat moving so slowly across the sky, disappearing behind rowhouses and church steeples, then popping out again. I went in and grabbed my video camera.

Here, then, for your viewing pleasure, is “Ace and the Blimp.”