Our beloved friend Maya the Border Collie exited this mortal coil.
Maya and I spent many fine hours together playing frisbee or on walkies around the neighborhood, sniffing things and herding neighbors. Maya did most of the herding and the sniffing, of course.
I’m updating this to clarify that Maya was my friend, she wasn’t actually our dog. Sorry for any confusion.
So, after blogging about Dana’s post about being “those” neighbors, I’ve realized we really are “those” neighbors.
I was showing off our swanky new exterior lifestyle areas, or whatever it is you call patios these days, to one of our neighbors. We rounded the corner and encountered the large walnut bookcase Husband and I have had propped up in the yard for weeks.
That’s right, kids, intellectuals don’t put cars on blocks in their yard. They put bookcases on blocks instead.
We’ve been waiting to get rid of the bookcase because it was damaged during construction. Spring is a busy time for our contractors and they just haven’t had a chance to haul it away for us. I’d better keep on top of this though, because time slips by pretty fast and if I don’t make sure it gets taken care of we’ll start ignoring it and the next thing we know the grandnieces will be building a fort on it while we sip our hot toddys on the porch and yell at them to get off the lawn.
Oh, the lawn. The accursed lawn. The lawn is a swatch of hay-covered parched clay because we can’t bring ourselves to shell out for sod yet. I’m sure the yarn gives the neighbors something to talk about now that we’ve made the rest of the place presentable. To be fair, we have very little lawn area left, what with the giant porch and lifestyle accessory zones and the flower and herb gardens. Still, there’s enough to be an eyesore.
Mostly, I ignore the desolate wasteland that is the lawn because I have bigger fish to fry. We had 16 arborvitae planted and until they get established, they need to be watered.
My spiritual advisor, Roger, also planted lots of sunflowers, but those need surprisingly little water. I make every effort to plant as few things that need regular (non-rainfall related) watering as possible.
Aside from the herbs and the trees, the rest of the plants are pretty drought and MeanLouise tolerant. I planted a shasta daisy seedling in 1998. Every year I divide and give away as many of it’s spawn as possible. I started out with that one little shasta daisy. Last month when I started dividing them I found I had 97 of them. These things don’t need full sun or water or, apparently, any attention whatsoever. Shasta daisies, like honey badger, just don’t give a shit.
The trees are another story. This year, they need water, and we haven’t gotten any decent rainfall at our house in a while. According to the local rain gauge we’ve gotten about .10 inch in the last month. That means the trees aren’t the only things that need watering, because some idiot who lives here planted lots of tender herbs. The perennial herbs are troupers. The annuals like basil need water.
That involves hoses.
I have become like Wile E Coyote with the fucking garden hoses.
Dealing with garden hoses is going to break me.
For reasons I cannot even begin to explain – but trust me, there is a logical explanation – this is the hose situation as of today: We have 8 hoses connected to various bibs, winders, soaker hoses, sprinkler hoses, other hoses, and possibly my neighbor’s water feature.
I can’t be sure anymore.
What I can be sure of is that I must be supplying some form of comic relief to the neighborhood when I’m out in the yard swearing and fussing. Some of the neighbors are new, they haven’t acclimated to my tenuous relationship with both earthworms and reality vis-a-vis the wonderful world of gardening. I believe I may be frightening them, but they’ll learn. Or move.
I am simply not designed for this kind of domestic horseshit.
If I have to buy another splitter, connector, washer, winder, holder, nozzle, sprinkler, watering can or divining rod I am going to lose what little is left of my mind.
And now, to take my mind off gardening, let’s all have a moment with honey badger:
editor’s note: this is the heavily corrected version of the draft that accidentally went out via google notifications on Thursday afternoon.
Dana at Feast After Famine has a new post, “Those” neighbors.
Until recently, I thought I was a good neighbor.
I mow the grass, tend our gardens, share vegetables and flowers with neighbors, and linger on the sidewalk when people want to chat. I manage to get the trash cans back to their right spot without too much delay and I pick up our dog’s crap.
We don’t have a rusted-out El Camino on blocks on the front yard, host rowdy keggers with bonfires in the back or howl at the full moon.
You’d be happy to call us neighbors, right? Maybe not.
[Go read the rest, it’s excellent. Go on, I’ll wait here].
In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll mention that Dana lives in my neighborhood, although I don’t think we’ve ever met in person.
I’ve lived here for 20 years, through many years of people complaining about how there are never kids out playing in their yards. Now there are kids and it’s a problem? Interesting.
Kids don’t bother me, that kind of noise is intermittent. For some reason I can block it out in a way I can’t block out the racket from the person who spends THREE hours EACH and EVERY fucking Saturday leafblowing their back yard from April to October. Every. Saturday. Hours. Hours and hours and hours.
But kids playing before 9 a.m.? That’s a problem for people? Really?
We do live in a small, densely populate city so I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that people get annoyed by kids playing, I simply had no idea it was, you know, an issue.
Familiarity does breed contempt.
If you’ve ever browsed a neighborhood list-serve – for any neighborhood socio-economically able to sustain a list-serve – you know that there’s a never-ending menu of things for people to get upset about when people live within, oh, say 100 miles of one another.
Maybe I should invite the kids over to play in our yard – our neighbor’s 5 foot tall water fall is so loud no one could hear them over the din. We have to close the windows when some of our friends come over because otherwise everyone is standing in line for the bathroom all night because of the overwhelming sound of running water. It got quieter last year but today when they started it back up? It was like Niagara Falls for a few hours this afternoon. It’s beautiful and it’s a small silly thing, but sometimes it does make me a little crazy. But I digress…
Actually, I take back my statement that I don’t have issues with neighborhood kids – I do have one issue. I must admit that there’s a black patch on my soul that makes me almost sort of but not really secretly wish for some arts education de-funding on that cursed day every year when every kid in the neighborhood brings home a recorder. Jesusmary&joseph on a raft, do I hate recorder day.
Other than that, I’m good.
I try to take a deep breath when the leaf-blowing starts or someone leaves the dog out to bark all day or someone screams as they go over the Neighbor Falls in a barrel and remind myself that we probably do things that annoy the neighbors too, and we all have to nod and smile and compromise just a little bit.
Plus, there are those raging parties we throw every weekend, plus the bonfires, and the howling….
I made the part about the barrel up, but you can’t prove it couldn’t happen someday. If they were very small people. In a very small barrel.
Okay, okay. I made the part up about the parties every weekend and the bonfires, too. The howling, that’s another story.
I wonder if Dana’s kids would fit in a small barrel?
I’m kidding.
Mostly.
I’m regretting that I didn’t save the box our refrigerator came in for someone’s kids. Eventually we’re going to need a new dishwasher, I’ll have to remember.
(Sarasota readers: Dana Damico is no relation to Jennifer D’Amico. I assume. I’ve never asked. I did run into Jennifer one day – in our next door neighbors back yard! Jennifer went to college with them. And one of the neighbors turned out to be a distant cousin of mine. Small strange world. That’s a post for another day).
It seems like practically everyone we know is doing a Cleanse of some kind. Master Cleanse, juice cleanse, high-protein cleanse.
Cleanse, cleanse, cleanse.
The peer pressure has simply gotten to be too much.
I hereby announce that I’m doing a Spring Cleanse.
I started last night. I call it The Margarita Cleanse.
It was working well until I felt the need to demonstrate to husband the baboon behavior that resembles the yogic sun salutation series. Then it was still working well, but one whole side of the Taqueria got pretty quiet while I held my arms up in the air and screeched.
OK, I didn’t really screech, but I probably should have. Just holding my arms up in the air probably looked ridiculous.
This morning, I’d like to request that you not do any screeching.
Saturday morning I couldn’t avoid going to the grocery store. I hate shopping on the weekends. I did get to witness a fascinating, albeit depressing, exchange while in line to pay.
There were some off-duty cops waiting to pay in the next cashier’s lane. They were bragging about how recklessly they drive and how many accidents they’ve been in without ever getting a ticket and how parking is never a problem because they have law enforcement plates. They were one-upping one another about all the things they could get away with because they’re above the law.
I was trying to tune them out so I could catch up with one of my neighbors who was in line ahead of me.
She reached a point where she couldn’t listen to them anymore and she turned to the cops called them on their crap. She gave them a lecture about how they were exhibiting classic sociopathic behavior. She spelled out in no uncertain terms how their belief that they’re entitled to special social privileges and above the law made them a danger to society, not it’s great gift. She also spelled out how their bragging about it demonstrates both their disregard for the safety of others and their lack of shame about their behavior.
The best part?
They then got defensive about what safe drivers they are! The cashiers were desperately trying not to snicker, since we’d all just been treated to a dissertation about their many accidents, speeding stops, and other mishaps. None of those accidents was their fault, of course! And they been trained to drive fast and no one gets hurt by speeding drivers and speeding never causes accidents! And! And! And!
While they defended the tradition of “professional courtesy” and their entitlement to speed my neighbor finished paying and, as she left, advised them that she hoped they never came across her desk while seeking employment in her large Federal agency. Then she gave them her business card. The one that identified her as a mental health professional.
It then got very very quiet.
It was pretty awesome.
Unfortunately, when I left I saw them getting into their (unmarked or personal) vehicles, which they’d parked in the handicapped spots using official business placards.
Updated 5/10 to answer 2 questions. 1) These were not City of Alexandria cops. 2) I had my hands full and couldn’t stop in traffic to take a picture of their cars.