The Neighbor and World War Four

What a lovely day.  Not a sun in the sky, not a chance of sun for days and there's this old dude in the parking lot, loading animals into a big boat.  Don't ask me - I just report stuff.

I got a call at work a few days back from the wife.  This in itself is not odd; my wife only calls when it's important (or when it's twenty minutes past the last time she called).  It turns out this was nearly significant, though.  We got another visit from those nice folks from the township.

For those not following along, the last visit from the township was due to an anonymous complaint about our front yard being a mess.

Now when they say anonymous, they mean The Crazy Lady next door.  Crazy Lady is four-hundred thirty seven years old and steadfastly refuses to die.  Whether it's cancer or repeated replacement body parts, she simply stares it down and will not succumb.  One time she fell off her broom and broke her hip.  It was replaced within three days and she was worse than new.

The Crazy Lady seems to have two hobbies: gardening and calling the township on us.  It must be nice to have that kind of focus.  One time she claimed our bees bit her.

What makes things doubly confusing is that Crazy Lady has two personalities - Ok and Completely F*ing Nuts.  She'll leave fresh tomatoes from her garden on our steps, then call the township because we haven't raked the leaves to her specifications.

So Visit Number One from the township involved the messy front yard.  The nice fellow from the township seemed somewhat confused, as there was no mess in the front yard.  I explained The Crazy Lady to him and he got the picture straight away.  He shared an anectote of his own with me: somebody (guess who?) called the township because another neighbor had too many birdhouses on their property.  I suspect she has a red phone in her cave that dials the township and nowhere else.

Which brings us to Visit Number Two from our friends at the township.  This complaint was from yet another anonymous complainant (guess who?) about standing water in our yard.

Now I don't want y'all to think I just randomly blame people for stuff without any proof or that I think I'm psychic. The small bit of evidence that holds this theory together had something to do with a voicemail my wife received from The Crazy Lady, complaining about standing water.

Donning my Sherlock Holmes hat, Mrs. Watson and I connected the dots.

The fellow from the township and my wife were both a little confused, until she escorted him to the back yard to find the culprit: the standing water was the dog's little plastic pool, which gets refilled every other day so it doesn't turn green.

Everyone (except The Crazy Lady) was in agreement that there was no standing water on the premesis. When we mentioned that we knew who made the complaint, he said the call was anonymous and he couldn't tell us. Uh-huh.

Our grass, however, turned out to be a problem.  Why?  Because it was a little tall.  Not a foot tall, mind you, but tall.

How tall?  Nobody knows.  But the nice man from the township assured her that they had standards, even though he didn't bother to tell her what they were.  I suggested we paint a ruler on the inside of the fence, so we would always know how tall the grass was.  If the township said the grass can't be any taller than six inches, I'd adjust the mower to cut it down to five inches, then wait til it hit six inches again to cut it.  We could have them come out to measure it on a bi-weekly basis.

You may have detected that I have a problem with the township and you'd be right if you said that.  First of all, the weather here has basically two states: rainy and sunny.  It's rainy at least five days per week (in fact, we may be the new rainforest) and sunny rarely.  How anyone can mow with this disgusting display of wet weather is beyond me.  And did I mention that mowing ranks slightly above dental work on my preferred list of things to do?

The guy from the township claimed to understand all about priorities (my working three jobs and my wife physically unable to push the mower).  I get the impression he didn't understand priorities at all, as he said he'd be back to check.

I wonder if he'll bring a ruler or if his retina is calibrated in inches.

Guess What Your Children Just Ate...

I didn't realize it til about half the day was done but I was having a pretty bad day yesterday.  Sometimes it starts with a bang, sometimes a whisper and sometimes, as it did yesterday, it comes by phone.....

"Guess what your children just ate," asked the wife on the phone.

This is never a good question.  They're only mine when they do something bad.  Apparently the cat discovered leftover Mexican food (Chipotle's) on the stove.  In a move guaranteed to baffle Pet Science, he somehow managed to move it to the edge of the stove, then catapult it to the floor, where both of the little buggers consumed it.

Have you ever heard of this kind of inter-species cooperation before?  They could have their own show: Ren and Marshall Rule the Roost, Sundays on Animal Planet.

I got this news right before lunch.  I had to go out for lunch because Ren had consumed parts of my lunch the night before.  Off the eight of us went, because my boss made the mistake of mentioning french toast, causing a Food Avalanche.

Although I complained about this diner, with their twenty dollar burgers, we were on our way.  Up we pulled, only to discover that the diner had gone out of business.  They had the nerve to never even let us know.

Again, off we went, to one of our usuals.  Everyone got their food and exactly what they ordered.  Except me, of course.  The waitress kept telling me it was coming up any minute now.    Ten minutes later my sandwich arrived.  Perhaps they had to grow the chicken to make sure it was truly fresh.

Hours later, back at work, my wife and Marshall came to pick me up.  Ever the demure and classy lady, my wife asked me if I knew what my son just did.

Uh-oh.

"He pooped on your seat in the car, after that Mexican food."


My coworkers fell like dominoes.


Although I'm against them on principle, I suddenly became thankful for car seat covers.  The ride home was less than odiferous and we were relieved.  Not as relieved as Marshall, but still.


After all of that I began to feel that the Universe was having a bit of a giggle at my expense.  It has certainly happened before and I expect it will certainly happen again.

At this point, you know that there could only be one thing left: the lawnmower.

I filled the bastard with gas, as I ran out one quarter of the way through over the weekend.  At this point I need to remind all of my good friends here that there is simply nothing I hate more than mowing the lawn.  There's no logical reason for it but there we are.  I'd almost rather sit in that lovely chair at my dentist's office (Dr. Mengele).

The throttle cable simply broke a while back and I've spent most of my time jury-rigging it to function but the mower had had enough of me at that point; it was going to keep quitting while I tried to keep mowing.

I'm surprised you guys in Florida didn't hear me spend an hour or so screaming at the five horsepower beast.  I would mow a few strips and the beast would shut off.  I would adjust the new wire and it would start, mow a bit, then shut off again.  Then I would burn myself trying to fix it, causing yet another fusillade of Very Nasty Words and a warning from my wife that there are children on the block.

When one is in the middle of a good old-fashioned tirade, the last thing we need to hear is that there are children on the block.  Most of the children on the block, especially the ones produced by the Loud Family, have vocabularied that far exceed mine, especially when they're outside flipping off their parents.

My wife attempted to help but that didn't work out so well.  I suggested she either fix it herself or sit on the steps and supervise: two alpha males cannot fix a lawnmower.  Or much of anything else.

After some more wire and even more screaming, I managed to finish off the lawn, to everyone's great relief.  Having had the pleasure earlier of throwing out the errant car seat cover, I was free to sit down and sweat all over my recliner.

But the joke, as usual, was on me: Marshall's new pool got filled and he was racing all over the house, completely soggy from swimming and sitting on all the furniture.


Yeah, we're a tv show without need for scripting.