Thursday, September 19, 2013

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

  I wrote earlier this summer about my crazy neighbors and how they were making my life miserable. That was a lot of my summer. Our garage was in bad shape, so we had to take that down.

This is what a two car garage looks like when you cut it up and stack it neatly (sort of.).
  Fuzzy nearly got his throat slit undoing the garage door. Apparently you have to unhook something to loosen the tension before you undo the spring...or something. I had been freaking out, telling him to get his head out of the garage door before something happened. But of course, he's 18, so he just said, "Everything's FINE." and went on. The next thing I know he's in the kitchen with blood pouring out of his jaw.SEE?! Why does nobody listen to me?! Ken took him to the emergency room and he got stitches. He had a couple of nicks in his neck too, and it chills me to think that if the cuts on his neck had been as deep as the ones on his jaw he would probably have bled to death before we could have gotten him down the street to the hospital.
  Ken also kept trying to take the garage down from INSIDE it. Who is that crazy? I was in a constant state of nerves until the thing was down.
  Anyway, now that the garage is down I have to look at even more of my neighbor's ugly fence, (That thing looks like it belongs behind a convenience store.)AND their stupid sign:



  'No leaning'. I like to go out in the yard and do this...


Danny Kaye defying gravity in "Wonder Man".
...and there's not a thing they can do about it!
  Seriously, what is the deal with that sign? I mean really. Did they think I was going to squeeze behind my garage, in the foot and a half between the garage and their monstrosity...I mean fence...with my nose to the fence---because that's the only way I could have read that sign. They have another sign on their front gate...the one with the padlock on it...which says '...and do not touch the fence'.Why do they think I have an obsession with touching their fence? Personally, I was glad they put it up, (Apart from the fact that they jumped the property line. But we won't go there. They will, but we won't.), because then I didn't have to look at them, or even pretend to be friendly. ("We hope you don't hate us." Well then why do you do so many things to MAKE me hate you?) I just want to ignore them, and have them ignore me,but they keep making that impossible.I mention the padlock because of it's weirdity. They bother to padlock that gate, but if you go around to the other side of the house to the driveway, or to the back of the back yard,you can just walk into their yard. (In the picture of the 'garage',that corner of the fence where the sign is, that's where the fence ends. There's no fence around that corner.) So what good does the padlock do? It's SYMBOLIC, obviously. They are locking us out. Like I want in. It's like the American flag they put on the side of their garage, facing us. Not on their house or even where they could see it properly, like a normal person would do. They put it there, kind of AT us, obviously a dig at Ken, who is from England.(Their way of saying 'Limey go home' I guess.)
  Every summer they do something to mess up our whole summer, and then lay low in the winter, feasting on their kill.("Ha ha, we ruined their summer again!")I won't even go into all the stuff they've done, like pouring trash cans full of poison into our yard until they killed the huge rose bush that had been planted in the 1940's, or putting a pile of 'cat food' in our yard (to poison our cat or someone else's?), or throwing glass into the other neighbor's dog pen, and then trying to sneakily feed the dog some 'left over noodles', or stealing a piece of the other neighbor's yard by fencing in an L shaped section by the property line because it's a rental and the people didn't know any better . Gad! For not going into stuff, that's a lot of stuff. All I did was have branches growing in their air space. (Ken questioned how far up the property belongs to them and when it becomes God's.)
  Apart from crazy neighbor problems there were the basement floodings and we're STILL disposing of the garage pieces. (Anybody want some free garage?) I am tired. I need the winter to recuperate.I'll need the strength. There'll be another summer next year...

2 comments:

  1. When Mum's aunt died my sister and I helped her clean out the place. Aunt Clara never bent over to pick up anything in her life. When she was and my grandmother were children they had servants, and she never got over it. The rugs were lumpy from newspapers, Kleenex, coins, you name it, that Clara had kicked out of the way.

    So - to get to the neighbors. The rowhouses were built on a hill, so you went into the living room at street level, but the kitchen was a full story above the ground. Everybody had a deck off their kitchens. The neighbors would sit on their deck and flip their cigarette butts into Aunt Clara's back yard. It was bad enough cleaning up HER mess inside, without having to clean up THEIR mess outdoors.

    My sister spent a fair part of one day picking up every single cigarette butt off the lawn, collecting them into a coffee can. I came out the cellar door and asked her what she was waiting for. "Hush." She stuck her finger in her mouth and then held it up in the air. "I'm waiting for the wind to blow in the right direction." A few moments later, a stiff breeze sprang up, and she emptied the can into their yard, chuckling as she watched the butts fly across their lawn.

    And then she came back inside.

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