Location, location, location

My noisy neighbours are moving! When PG came over the other night, he (eagle-eyed as he is) immediately noticed a realtor’s lock box on their door.

“Hey, are the next-door neighbours moving?” he asked.

Naturally, paying very little attention to my surroundings, I knew nothing about it. So I googled the realtors listed on the communal sign by the street, and sure enough, their house is one of the new listings!

My neighbours have only lived there for not quite two years, and honestly, I could have told them that the house was too small for two adults and four kids ranging in age from mid-teens to early twenties. Not to mention their three cars, two of which are rather large and always parked on the street because they only have a tandem garage, which is designed for two small vehicles parked nose to tail (as opposed to side by side). Not to mention the fact that they appear to require far more yard than they have, since they’re always out there and staring into my yard.

But maybe they’re being forced to move because the dad or mom’s job got transferred elsewhere. Or maybe they’re splitting up (although, having been through this myself, I hope not and I certainly wouldn’t wish it upon anyone!).

Or maybe they just don’t like their next-door neighbours. Especially that woman who lives on the west side of them. I hear she’s really anti-social and snarky.

Forever young

I was minding my own business early one evening, sweeping my front porch, steps and sidewalk, when one of my neighbours across the street came home. This guy is recently divorced, with three kids from two different wives. All the kids seem to spend a lot of time with him.

I think I know why he is single again: he has never really grown up. He plays his stereo really loud on summer evenings when we all have our windows open. He likes heavy metal. When he’s watching a really cool DVD on his big screen TV with the theatre sound system, the whole neighbourhood gets to enjoy it too. He likes shoot-em-up dick flicks (as opposed to emo chick flicks, of course). He plays the same first few bars of “House of the rising sun” on his guitar while sitting on his balcony. Over and over. He doesn’t appear to have mastered many other chords. His best friend comes over and they sit in the garage drinking beer and laughing uproariously. He always smokes his cigarettes outside and flicks the butts into the streets. Lovely. He also once cornered me and expounded at length about the type of woman he was now looking for: someone for whom he could cook and clean (because, he explained, he’s a great cook and an even better housekeeper) and also have sex with. Charming. This guy is a catch.

So few of his antics would truly surprise me. I have more than a fleeting acquaintance with teenage boys, so I simply put him in the same class as them.

But he does make me laugh out loud at times.

This particular day, instead of driving directly into his garage as usual, he manoeuvred his Jeep (yes, of course he has a 4 x 4!) so that its back end was at an angle close to the closed garage door. He hopped out of the driver’s side, and his son, about seven years old, jumped out the passenger side. While I and his son watched, he clambered onto the roof of the Jeep. From there, he scrambled up onto the balcony above the garage. I must have made some small strangled noise, because at this point he turned around and saw me gazing up at him from my front sidewalk.

He grinned down at me. “I forgot my house key,” he chuckled.

My first thought was, You don’t keep your house key on the same ring as your car keys? But then I reconsidered that: actually, some people (not me) don’t keep all their keys together, so maybe that’s not so strange.

“And,” my neighbour went on, “I couldn’t open the garage door because the battery in the opener was dead.”

That’s when I laughed out loud. “You forgot your key AND your garage door opener battery was dead? What are the odds?!”

“Yeah,” he smiled ruefully, “what are the odds? But good thing I didn’t shut my balcony door, so I can still get in!”

“That’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time!” I called after him as he disappeared through his balcony door, presumably to go back downstairs and open his garage door so that he could park his Jeep inside.

Fast forward to just a day or so ago. I was watering my hanging baskets outside this time, when he called over to me.

“Hey, guess what! It happened again!”

I looked across the street at him. “What happened again?”

“Remember when you saw me climbing in the balcony door that day I forgot my key and my garage door opener battery was dead?”

“Oh yeah – I’ll always remember that!” I told him, giggling.

“I walked over to the pool with the kids yesterday, and we left through the garage, so I just took the opener with me. When we got to the pool, I forgot that I had the opener in my pocket.”

I could already see where this was going. I was grinning again in anticipation.

He continued. “I dived into the water and swam around for about an hour before I remembered the opener in my pocket. When we got home, of course it wouldn’t work any more. So I had to climb up to the balcony again to get in.”

I was laughing pretty good by then, and so was he. Teenage boys of all ages are just so amusing!

No woman is an island

We used to live next door to a young couple and their dog.

They were really nice people, friendly but not overly so. We weren’t best friends or anything, but we knew each others’ names and chatted over the fence once in a while.

They were getting married not too long after we moved in that summer, and one night, their friends had a joint stag-staggette for them. They were picked up early in the evening by a limo, then dropped off home about 4 am the next morning. They were rip-roaring drunk, as was the other couple with them, and the four of them were incredibly loud and foul-mouthed. (Did I mention that this was at 4 am?!) But it only lasted about ten minutes, which was basically all the time necessary for all four to get into the house and pass out.

And that was it for noise from next door.

A year later, baby number one came along. And a year after that, baby number two. Two adults, two very young children and one dog next door. All of them were quiet. Oh, of course one of the babies would cry at times, especially at bedtime. The dog would bark at times as well, but those sounds didn’t seem steady or obtrusive.

Then, almost two years ago now, that couple moved away, children, dog and all.

New neighbours moved in. Two adults, FOUR kids. I introduced myself when they first arrived, but only the woman actually spoke to me, and quite briefly, at that. The man simply gazed at me blankly. Not a word. The four kids are just as bad with conversation and politeness. They just don’t seem to get those concepts.

One kid, who looks to be in his early twenties, has a cigarette or two in the backyard almost every day. Another kid (or maybe the same one?) clips his fingernails outside about once a week. One of the younger ones listens to crap music on a ridiculous tinny radio (what, no iPod?!) that blares out her open bedroom window frequently enough to piss me off.

They have a bunch of birds in a huge cage that they set outside every morning in good weather. The damn birds don’t shut up. Ever. They’re so loud I sometimes hear them when the weather is bad and we’re all inside, too.

These people set up their lawn chairs in their back yard right beside the fence that separates our two yards. Unfortunately, it’s only a waist-high fence. Sometimes they turn the chairs to face my yard so they can watch the setting sun or something. Last summer, their grandmother visited for about six weeks, and she sat in one of those chairs, right beside the fence and my yard, and smoked most of each day away.

They also barbecue almost every night in the summer. This requires most of the family to be outside, looking at the barbecue, which, because of its position on their patio, means that they are looking into my yard. There’s always a lot of smoke from their barbecue, smoke that drifts over my yard because of the prevailing winds around here.

I feel like I can’t be in my own backyard without being watched.

When the man washes his truck, he sometimes blocks the entire shared driveway by parking it straight out from his single garage. Or else, he parks the truck sideways but halfway in front of my garage door so DD can’t get her car in or out.

And not one single person in that family knows how to shut a door properly or walk normally up a flight of stairs. We share a wall, so all I hear is SLAM and STOMP STOMP STOMP from them. Even DD at her worst isn’t as noisy as they are.

I saw my old neighbours in the grocery store a couple of weeks ago. They had just had yet another baby. I told them that I missed them very much.

Maybe I should live on a island all by myself.