To My Neighbor....Have Fun Raking Again on Friday!

*I'm posting this Tuesday post now, as we will probably lose power at some point tonight.  I hope I don't see Antie Em and  Miss Gulch on her bike sometime tonight.*
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We have a neighbor who is not on friendly terms with us.
Meaning he wants nothing to do with us......as in he never initiates conversation, nor does he wave or smile or even acknowledge our existence.

I don't know why he is this way.  I'd like to think that it isn't his being a foreigner and wanting nothing to do with American ways and customs.  Our sons were friends when we moved here and remained friends through about the 3rd grade.  This kid's mother and I were Kindergarten parents together and she use to send her son over here to get homeowrk papers and forms he forgot from school.  Yes, I was suppose to scan and print out copies of homework papers for her kid but she barely spoke to me(her English is VERY good)and I never got a thanks either.

When our kids were young, they would play in their yard or ours.  Their kid had strict orders to never come inside our house and never eat or drink anything we offered to him.  Ok, I knew they were strict vegatarians and would never had given him a hamburger or something and I know how to read the labels on snack foods for gosh sakes!  But I didn't get too offended by him not drinking a juice box, etc.

But this not allowed inside our house?  I guess they figured we had a regular house of sin and decadence that would lead their son off the path to Allah.  Being typical Americans they probably thought we ran a house of prostitution or maybe even a Crack House.
Playing Pikmin on the GameCube in our den is just the epitome of evil, is it not?

My oldest asked their daughter out on a date many years ago.  She declined not because she didn't want to go, but because her parents refused to let her date.  I believe she has an arranged marriage but don't quote me on that.
It was to be a group date thing....more a teens going out together rather than pairing off, but even that she was not allowed to take part in.
I understand folks hanging onto their cultural identities but sometimes, if you refuse to mix with those in your community ON ANY LEVEL, who are not of your faith or racial group or cultural heritage, it appears that you don't want to belong to our American society.  You want all the perks but you don't want any of the responsibilities of being a member of that society. 

Anyway, relations went awry with this neighbor some time ago.

And He is anal about his yard.  That, right there, drives a wedge between him and us. lol
It's not so bad, except in the Fall when the leaves start falling.
If this neighbor had his way, he'd cut every tree in his yard, as well as in a 2 mile area around his house down.
He has taken down a couple of trees already.....small ones he's been able to cut down himself for free. 

There are some very large trees though and they are right on our joint property line.  He wants them taken down but he's too cheap to pay to have them removed.  I know because he asked us to take them down(meaning we should pay to have them removed)and he said he'd be "ok" with that even though the trees in question are partly on his property.

It wasn't broached as, "Let's do something about these trees together."  No, he clearly doesn't want the trees and he isn't concerned with if we want them to stay but he wants someone else to pay for the pleasure of having the trees removed.

Because of this, I am all for keeping those trees into eternity.  Even though one of them releases an ass ton of leaves into the swimming pool.  If we still live here when I die, I might just have a trust fund set up for the trees here, you know, to keep them happy and healthy and dropping leaves every Fall onto his yard into perpetuity.

So Mr. Neighbor gets out there in the Fall with his noisy ass leaf blower.  He can't be bothered to rake leaves, he has to wake the dead with that infernally loud machine.  What a waste of fossil fuels too!

And he blows the leaves into a long pile and then bags them so the municipality will cart them off.
When he blows, he starts about a foot or more inside his property line and blows them into a pile toward his house.  And that foot or more at the property line he doesn't blow into his pile?  He blows that over into OUR yard.  I guess he figures that since we have more trees on our lot, most of those leaves were ours to begin with anyway.
He doesn't think I notice but oh!....I do.....

We try to coordinate with our other neighbor who's property borders ours, so that we attack the fallen leaves on the same timetable.  What's the point of raking leaves, when your neighbor hasn't done his/her leaves yet, so that the next wind storm you get more leaves in your yard and you have to spend another day dealing with the leaves again?

Since we've been gone for the last week on a beach vacation, we came home to trees that look like this....

And here is what our yard looked like....just one little piece of it.....

And here is what our uncommunicative neighbor's yard looked like on Saturday.....

It appears that he is rimming his yard with bags of leaves now, huh?  Maybe he thinks he bags of leaves will act like sandbags against Hurricane Sandy's winds?

Notice how the other neighborhood adjoining his yard hasn't raked his leaves either? lol  I bet he blows a foot or so of his leaves onto that neighbor's yard too!

Anyway, it's a shame really.
A shame that our neighbor will be out there reblowing/bagging leaves after Sandy blows all our leaves into his nice leaf-free yard.
Friday is suppose to be a nice, partly sunny dry day.....the perfect weather for raking blowing leaves.
I will NOT be grinning evil-y......nope......not me......

Sluggy