Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Merry F'in Christmas People

I haven't written in a long time. I keep thinking of things to write about but then forget and/or don't have time. I would apologize, but I'm not that sorry so let's just move along.

Let's see, what's new and exciting...
  • Well it's the Christmas season and all my neighbors are Jewish. So there's not much in the way of parties in this neck of the woods.
  • My child had a runny nose so I was blackballed from all family events.
  • My husband was on call Christmas Day.
Where did this leave me? Oh right. Home. Alone. with a cranky kid.

On the upside, we're slowly adapting to the suburbs. I actually left the house a few times to run errands and didn't think about how it takes 100 times longer to get anything done around here. That's progress. On the downside, husband shoveled us out of the storm of the decade. 20 inches. Not fun.

Admittedly I grew up in white bread suburbia so I know how this game is played. I spent years listening to my parents talk trash on the people who didn't take their trashcans in immediately or the people who didn't mow their laws or the people who didn't take down their Christmas lights (gasp!).

So when every tree in this very old tree neighborhood dumped a metric tonne of leaves all over the place, my husband included the neighbor's driveway in his efforts with the leaf blower. (I should mention our driveways are attached. Different colored cement but fused together to make one large driveway that sits between our homes) So when we had this massive snow dump last week, he began shoveling our driveway. Our neighbor is a single woman with 3-4 adult children. It happened that her son was visiting during the storm, so we assumed he would shovel her driveway and front walk.

Needless to say there was still snow on her driveway until the day nature took care of it, no one touched her walk and I practically broke my ass multiple times trying to get around the ice patches on her side when putting my kid in the car. What kind of little shit leaves their single mother with a driveway full of snow?

I sort of felt guilty when I looked at our homes side by side. There was our driveway...nicely shoveled, clear, safe. Then there was theirs, which is none of those things. So what do you all think? In this land of happy neighborhoods and smiley people, did we have any obligation to help out after her turd of a son left?

They also have a daughter who babysits for us. She's quite nice but I believe she might be moderately stupid. I suspected this was the case when she put a diaper on my kid backwards. This in itself is not that weird, I mean unless you have done it before you might guess the tape closures could go the other way. She however works for a preschool taking care of 3 year olds. I'm assuming not every 3 year old is potty trained. Are they all over there running around with backwards diapers? The other day when we called to tell her she had left her car lights on for the second night in a row, she told me she got fired. Shocking.

There's also this crazy dude across the street. I watched him yell out the door at his wife not to rake the leaves into the driveway. I've been warned that Bob is a flaming asshole, but that was the first time I saw it in action. I introduced myself to him in an overly chipper way, just to piss him off. He grunted and that was pretty much it. His kindness once again shone through as he shoveled the snow from around his car into the street instead of onto his lawn. It's ok Bob, I like when I hit a packed ice patch in the middle of an otherwise cleared street.

So all you people out there, tell me, what do you hate that your neighbors do? Biggest pet peeve. We need to compile a list of Suburban Felonies.

I'll start - my neighbor has a giant blue recycling trash can that she leaves on her front walk. Like you have to walk around it to get to her front door. That's klassy with a K.