I have so much to blog about, and I've been too busy to do any of it, partly because of the neighbors.

My neighbors to the west are awful people. They appear to be a nice elderly couple, but like many minions of evil, appearances are deceiving. He is as mean as a snake, once threatened Gavin (peaceably mowing the lawn) with a golf club (he bullies other neighborhood kids as well), knows (and uses) every epithet in the book for no reason I can see, throws trash over my fence, and calls the city for the tiniest infraction -- he measures people's grass lengths, makes sure everyone's fences are far enough from the street, cars are not parked too far from the curb or (in a driveway) not too close to the street. He even called the city on the neighbor who didn't get a garage sale permit .His wife is probably a nice lady, but she has Alzheimer's and is paranoid; she likes to send registered letters to people about their tree limbs (which are still attached to the trees, but what if they fell off?). I try to ignore them, but since the golf club incident, there is a strip of grass between our houses which is No Man's Land. I'm kind of surprised he hasn't called the city yet...my excuse will be that it's "decorative".

The people who lived in my house before I bought it were very fond of ornamental shrubbery. Unfortunately, they bought the wrong kind, and despite my best efforts, the 10 bushes/trees/shrubs morphed into a sort of gigantic house-eating vegetative mass which towered over the house and crammed into the eaves and soffits. I've been trying to figure out how the heck I was going to afford a tree trimming service since I'm not really sure I want to find out if I can use a chainsaw without cutting off any body parts (I'm afraid the answer to that would be "no").

Little did I know that the neighbors to the east of me were angels in disguise. I was mowing my lawn Saturday, and the older gentleman and his wife (in their 70s) were out walking around the block and stopped to ask very gently if I needed help with my shrubs. I said that I could use all the help I could get and before I knew it, he and his wife were hauling over ladders and a chainsaw and all kinds of nippers and trimmers and clippers...and then Rog came over to help as well.

And we nipped and trimmed and clipped and sawed for DAYS until at last my house has been saved from ingestion by mutant greenery. The shrubs, now chainsawed into submission, cower beneath the eaves and tremble at the sight of the daily parade of walkers around our neighborhood.

Since the neighbors from Hell are west of me, and the neighbors from Heaven are east of me...that must mean I'm living in Limbo. Which explains a lot.