Lion and Magic Boy

Last night Michael delivered the Bad News: there were people moving into the townhouse opposite ours.

We’re fucked. Er, I mean screwed. Uh, in trouble.

A little background, which would be EVER SO MUCH EASIER TO UNDERSTAND WITH PHOTOS, but I don’t have any. Yet. I am still refusing to document our lives in Humid-Hell Pennsylvania (which you would think by now would relax on the humidity dammit, as it’s SEPTEMBER ALREADY, ISN’T THIS AUTUMN YET? No? WELL IT SHOULD BE!), but I will. Soon. Because (shhhh!) I have located the Missing Camera Cord.

So. Background. We live in a little prairie-dog community (which would be great, if there were prairie dogs here, which there are not, because prairie dogs live in Colorado, and we do not. Anymore.) of apartments charmingly referred to as townhouses. Our building has 8 such beauties in it (I’ve previously referred to how well-built they are) and our front door inexplicably arises from the side of the building, where there is a sidewalk going not to the front of the building where guests might park, but only to the back of the building, where I park my car in the driveway that is sized to fit the car exactly and nothing more, because there’s absolutely no way the car will ever fit in the tiny garage (which apparently NO ONE here uses, except to house grills and other important accoutrements, since their Big & Tall SUVs barely fit on the driveway, let alone inside the garage without scraping both doors and probably the roof). So my front door faces the front door of another townhouse, its exact opposite twin, about 20 feet away.

So. Michael says, he says: There’s people moving in next across the way.

My first thought was: So they’ll finally turn off the light in the incredibly space-wastage two-story entry hall upper area, which has been lighting our entire house at night as well as the three nearest communities, for 2 weeks now. Yay.

But my second thought was: There will be people. Living 20 feet away from us. In plain view. (It’s easy to ignore the two twenty-something couples that live next door, six inches away from us, forgetting to pull their trash can to the front every week so that the trash piles up, and up, and spills over into their driveway 4 inches away from mine, and let their dog roam loose for hours in “our” yard, leaving little piles of reminders to rememeber it by.)

And so they are. They parked their Hertz Rent-a-Truck behind their driveway all day, effectively blocking their neighbor’s egress but also ours and everyone else down our line of 8 tiny driveways, and we could no longer navigate the tiny road attached to said tiny driveways, so thoughtfully marked “one-way”, because said Hertz was upwind of our tiny driveway, rendering it completely useless. So we parked in front of our house, near the signs that read “no parking” so thoughtfully spray-painted on the road.

We watched them bring in their stuff, one item at a time, all day. The rule was: bring in a dresser, take a break. Bring in the sofa, have a beer. Leave the truck a few hours, it’s not going anywhere, let’s go to dinner!

We hate them.

So should I bake them a cake or something?

technorati tags: neighbors, curmudgeon, get off my lawn