it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood

For a bedroom community to NYC stepford sure is a transient community.  Living directly across the street from me there have been three different families in the 13 years I've been a resident here.  (Wow, that sentence was so awkward I don't know where to begin)   Same deal with the house to our right.  On the other side if me is a house that I suspect (prepare for a sneak peek into my own totally not sexual personal voyeur fantasy) would make the most frightening episode of hoarders ever, so obviously that lady, who I have pegged in my overactive and incredibly vivid imagination as a primo professional hoarder,  has lived there for all of eternity (aka: since the 70's) and I am unlikely to ever get a look inside her house unless they find her dead body and I manage to slip in an open door because the authorities have been forced to open the doors and windows for the first time since the 70's so that the rescue workers can breath while trying to navigate over the mountains of accumulations and rescue the rotting bloated corpse of the hoarder.  

Back to directly across the street, the second ex-neighbor sold the house to a builder who built this BORING (and in my opinion ugly) house, with tiny little claustrophobic rooms, and a tri-polar kitchen with what can only amount to rococo kitchen cabinets that he got on a mix and match floor sample sale somewhere, and painted the whole interior in weird colors, and then had the misfortune of what must have amounted to (remember my imagination) 6 feet of water in the finished and only not claustrophobic space in the whole house, basement last spring during those heavy rains we got here in the northeast, (they were pumping out the basement for weeks afterwards- also got new carpets) and someone went and bought the thing.  I thought it would never sell, especially after the flood, but it did.  

And then I thought I saw the teenage daughter of the new family across the street but the teenage daughter turned out to be the wife, and I thought I spotted the grandfather, but then the toddler called him dad, (you get what I am saying right?) and in the end, it's just a nuclear family, with two kids, and a full time nanny, who doesn't live there, just parks in front of my house every day. Yay.

The point of the story is, now that the newest family is there, they want to make their new home their own, which I totally get and is why I want to buy a fixer upper, and not someone else's fixed up or brand new that I got no say in house, and the newest neighbor has had truck after truck of trees delivered to her driveway the past two days and so far it looks like she is taking most of the new trees in her back yard, but all of a sudden I see some being wheeled to the front and also some gardener looking dude appears to be showing another gardener looking dude which part of the understated landscaping that the builder put in is to be removed.  I guessed that one because they are wielding shovels.  It won't be the first time a new to the neighborhood stepford wife turned her 1/2 acre lot into a little shangi la, but it is the first time it's happening across the street form me.  I'm not going to get catty here, I'm just going to be thankful for all the clean air the newest neighbor's new little forest is going to send my way.

Also, another new neighbor waaaaay down the street moved in and is putting up a big solid obnoxious - I don't want to any of my neighbors ever- fence and I am SO SO SO tempted to put a big obnoxious passive aggressive welcome to the neighborhood tasteless unfriendly snot face neighbor note in her mailbox, except  I look at that web site sometimes, and I don't want to end up on it.

In cheerier news, Josh came home from his first day at his new school yesterday and told me that he had met the very nice spanish teacher and chosen his spanish class name for the year.  I asked which he chose.  Jesus? (That would have been my first choice)  Jose?  Juan?   Nope.  Josh chose Antonio.  I laughed so loud the truck shook.

This is not my baby. 

Comments

[South Beach Steve]

I think I have a pretty good picture of your neighborhood now, at least in my own warped mind. :-) Oh the stories I could tell of our neighborhood. While people generally don't move in and out quickly, I have some real odd folks nearby.