Ever since any possible cordial and respectful relationship with our neighbors went out the window, I've been working on how to create more privacy between their deck and ours. Right now there's a light screen on their side but nowhere near enough to effect the kind of privacy I want from these jerks.
Anyway, the other day, after I saw the mother driving down Highway 1 in her shamefully damaged BMW (pretty easy to pick out because of her vanity plate and she had the top up on a gorgeous day), their son was hanging out in his car in the driveway and smiled and waved at me as I came in. No worries, I've got no issues with the kids, they aren't responsible for how stupid their parents are acting. A few minutes after I had gotten inside, the doorbell rang and I expected to have to deal with her yapping at me about some stupid crap or another. But it was the son, I introduced myself, met him and he asked to borrow my phone to call his mom as he had accidentally locked himself out. He's a nice kid, so are their other two kids.
The funny thing is that, unless one of the kids is present, P and I are invisible to the parents. Unless one of the kids waves or says hi they won't even glance over at our side of the driveway. Yes, they are that childish and stupid. My take is that neither went to college and so the highest level of social evolution they attained was high school, therefore, they act like hormonal and ridiculous teenagers when they feel an insult or attack.
But the sad thing is that, they got what they'd asked for. All we wanted out of the whole thing was for them to admit that they shared some of the responsibility for creating the possibility of the accident by parking the car in our driveway. No car there, no accident. Pretty straight forward.
So they are petulant little dickheads and, honestly, we're no worse for their antics. Sometimes its actually pretty funny watching him walk the opposite way around his truck just to avoid having to even come close to eye contact. Then again, the weed whacking at 8:30 this morning was pretty much a solid asshole move. But I got my measure of payback.
Which brings me to my current project. I'm building planter boxes to span the entire right end of our deck. My plan has morphed over time, guided by my changing desires and the fact that wood is damned expensive. It went from a single 8 foot long, 2 feet high and 1 foot wide planter box to three 2 feet long, 1 foot high and 8 inches wide boxes to two of those and one 4 foot by 1 foot by 1 foot box. The final configuration will be nice because the three containers can be moved alot more easily and more flexibly than one single huge container.
And its been really quite alot of fun working on the boxes. Using my power tools, hanging out in my garage workshop, playing loud music over the circular saw (and yes, my circular saw has a laser in it, its that cool), the mouse sander and the jig saw, selecting tasty sounding stains and high tech urethane finishes, working out issues as they crop up and ending up with something that I like looking at. The first box was kind of the proof of concept tester and it came out well enough but its not quite what I wanted to do. It has exposed hardware and I wanted to go with the whole secret frameup design.
The second and big box came out very nicely, has absolutely no holes on the outside and all of the connecting pieces are hidden inside. Sure, the wood isn't the best quality but that's alright, I'm still working out the kinks in the design. It'll be nice out on the deck with the Golden Pecan stain on it and filled with some fast growing and view obscuring and noise muffling bamboo growing out of it. Yep, bamboo that says in no uncertain terms to them that we will be having nothing to do with them. That and I like bamboo alot and have wanted to do this for a while anyway and I needed a project to get started on using my workshop to make. I will post a pic or two when they are all finished and put together.
And then I think I may start thinking about some sort of privacy wall out front between our two driveways. Oh yeah, right where their basketball hoop is right now, only thing is that half of that sucker is in my driveway and guess what? It ain't staying. Fight childish behaviour with childish behaviour, I always say.
Potentially related news, some asshole stole my registration sticker off the back of my truck, it ripped in the process so they got nothing but now I've gotta go spend a morning waiting in line at the DMV to get another one. I would like to think it wasn't the assholes next door but there's a sneaking suspicion I've got that it was them. They seem that idiotic.
[Update: Sunday morning: Proof of the last line above. P just got back from an expedition to Orchard Supply and they are cleaning the BMW right now only they've turned the car around so that the damage is facing away from our house so that we won't know that they spent the insurance money on their bills instead of on getting the car repaired. They are truly stupid people who think that we're as dumb as they are. I looked out the bedroom window and laughed long and hard at their antics. I'll be heading to the bamboo place later on today, I think. After I've applied the first of two or three coats of the quick dry polyurethane. And I may also get some trim finish pieces at OSH too to clean up some of the edges on the planter box.]
Total tangent question, if dog's sense of smell is like a hundred times better than a human's then how can they stand their truly horrendous nose melting farts?
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