Neighborly

I've mentioned before how our neighbors have 3 kids the exact same ages as ours. The kids get along great.

Well, now they have four kids actually, but their baby's not old enough to join the fray quite yet, since she's like 3 weeks old.

I love that this family lives just steps away from our front door. I am so grateful.

Silver lining

This past spring my neighbor told me they were selling their house and I was SO bummed. They have a daughter Ida's age and a son Lars's age who all play well together, and we get along great with the parents. Every cloud has a silver lining though, because they sold their house to a family with 3 kids the same ages as ours. The oldest boy goes to kindergarten with Theo and the family also happens to be LDS. Best of all, the kids all get along really well, and so do all the parents. I still miss our old neighbors but our new neighbors are pretty fantastic too. I guess I should keep that in mind the next time I'm bummed about something. Who knows what might be waiting around the corner?

Everyone up on the peace train

I have made the mistake of going to bed way too late the past two nights, so this morning I provided myself an hour to catch up on some sleep before leaving for work, while Lars napped and Ida watched Max and Ruby's Halloween. I was just drifting off when a knock at my door jolted me awake. I closed my eyes again and ignored it but it continued incessantly. Grumbling I got up, got decent, stumbled down the stairs and opened the door to find Betty, an elderly neighbor. "Yes?" I inquired, none too sweetly. She asked me to move my car since the tree trimmers currently working on another tree were going to move to the one in front of my house. I crankily obliged and was on my way back in when another car came and parked in my spot. 

I should add that people use our (private) cul-de-sac as an extension of the elementary school parking lot all the time, which only bothers me because they are supposed to use the other side of the school instead of jamming up our little road which is not built to accommodate so much traffic. Plus it drives me crazy to see so many cars driving around every day during dropoff and pickup times, and honking and double parking and getting mad at each other, with so many kids crossing the street.

Anyway so the point of that is that I don't mind being slightly confrontational--sweetened with a friendly smile--with people I don't know who are parking in my spot. Especially after I've been woken up from an all too brief, all too precious nap. It was very loud outside with the tree trimming going on but I told the (also elderly) stranger lady that they were trimming trees and I had just been asked to move my car and she should probably move hers from my spot too. She told me she was picking Betty up and that wasn't this her spot? and I said that's fine, it's actually my spot but just wanted to make sure she wasn't parking long term because I didn't know her. She pointed to a bumper sticker on her car and yelled over the din of the chainsaws, "I'm with Romney. I don't do things like that." Wait--what? I hollered back through a debate-worthy simper, "OK, I'm voting for Obama and I don't 'do things like that' either." (Although I do provoke old ladies?)

She in turn yelled that she was sorry for me and I went back into my house. Greeted by a screaming baby--also woken from his nap by a solid minute of knocking, no doubt, or perhaps by his crazy mom?--and the startling realization that I had just gotten into a yelling match with a stranger about a parking spot that had somehow ended with an awkward political flourish. Did that really happen? November 6 cannot come fast enough. Okay, and I'm going to bring Betty some cookies tomorrow.

What would you say?

Yesterday as we prepared to leave the store, I told Theo I was going to take him out of the shopping cart, so he stood up. Then I got distracted by Ida and told him to sit back down. He took that as a suggestion to stand on his tiptoes and grab a glass jar from a high shelf. He was in the large part of the cart, the part where the little pictures on the plastic seat of the cart show you that you're not supposed to be sitting in the first place, let alone standing.

Very bad parenting moment. Terrible actually. If I saw someone's kid doing that, I would probably walk by and think to myself, "Tsk. That kid is on the verge of falling backward out of the cart."

A severe woman, dark hair in a bun, eyebrows drawn on fiercely with a blunt, black pencil, approached me in the narrow aisle. "What do you think happens when he falls backward out of the shopping cart?" she asked loudly.

"I'm sorry, what was that?"

"I said, what happens when he falls backward out of the cart and lands on his head?"

I stared at her awkwardly and felt extra blood rush out of nowhere into the veins of my face. Equally loudly, I sang, "Well, obviously I haven't found that out yet!"

"I'm serious!" she replied with big eyes, wagging her finger and shaking her head."He's gonna hurt himself and it's not gonna be pretty."

"Okay, well...THANKS!" and I walked away, my hand on Theo's head, pushing him back down into the cart in one motion.

Instantly I wanted to rewind. I'm like Kathleen Kelly--the perfect mean thing to say never comes until it's too late. Which is probably a good thing. When she had asked me what would happen, I wished I had said:

"It's funny you should ask me that. Last week he fell backwards out of the cart and got a concussion! There was blood everywhere! We had to wake him up every 45 minutes that night to make sure he wasn't unconscious, or dead!"

Or maybe:

"Well, probably I will rush to his aid and feel terrible, and you will stand there congratulating yourself."

I left the store soon afterward, and almost as soon as I got into my car I wanted to turn around and find her again. I wasn't even mad at her, though--she was totally right, even if she had been really awful about it. I was mad at myself for the way I had answered. I mean, if I was going to be rude I could have at least been funny. You know, something really funny like yelling, "What are you, the shopping cart police? HA, HA!" then knocking over her cart and running away really fast.

Really though, I wished I had called attention to her smugness in a polite way so that maybe she would stop terrorizing us idiot mothers. Because I know that my answer just made her feel even more smug. I earnestly wished I had said:

"If you were concerned about my son, couldn't you have called it to my attention without sarcasm and a lecture? You could have said just as easily, 'Hi, I'm concerned that your little boy is going to fall out of the cart,' and I would have said, 'Oh gosh, you're right, thank you.' "

I don't get many rude or smug people approaching me with "advice"--nosy people maybe, or people who genuinely want to be helpful, and usually I thank them or ignore them. I am never sarcastic or rude to strangers. Seriously never. Even to the rare ones that are really rude to me. If I feel a siege coming I will run and hide (and possibly cry). Something came over me, though, when this lady clearly wanted to make her point by embarrassing me. And I did feel very embarrassed. Not chastened, not grateful, just embarrassed.

I mean I'm sure she wanted Theo to sit down and was worried about him, but why did she have to ask me that question, like I was a 7-year-old horsing around, like I didn't know what would happen if he fell out. And why did I have to answer her so loudly and rudely myself? Did I want to prove to her that I was as mature as a second-grader?

I guess I am glad I learned this now, so that when I'm offended like that in the future I will say what I want to say and be an example to my kids. Maybe I will even remember this feeling when Teenage Theo needs chastening. Maybe.

As I drove home I thought that maybe she was kicking herself much the way I was. Maybe she wished she had approached me differently too.

Nah, probably not.

A case of the Mondays

Sharon Peril (as Theo calls her, to everyone's delight, including Sharon's) lives in the apartment below me and we have become friends over the years. I like to think that my various angry 3-a.m. knocks on her door when her TV was blasting helped facilitate this. Sharon is originally from Buffalo. She has battled breast cancer twice and has been divorced once. She is retired and she doesn't drive or otherwise get out much. Her husband started working nights a few months ago and since then she has become a more frequent visitor in the evenings. She has even taken to running errands with us, which is a story in itself...and a mighty good one, I might add...

Anyway, she has been coming over more and I have been frustrated by it at times because I have been feeling pretty overwhelmed with all of the semi-meaningless things in my life that I am trying to tame at the moment. Last night she came over while I was feeding the kids dinner. I had not been outside at all that day except for a short run with the kids in the morning. I was wearing an ill-fitting shirt, cutoff shorts, and athletic socks (I had been attempting to mop the floor and I hate mopping barefoot--gross) and my hair looked like I had brushed it with a piece of duct tape. As I let her in I issued the standard caveat when the surroundings are dangerously messy--something along the lines of "Protect yourself, shield your eyes"--and I dashed back into the kitchen to finish up with the serving of the meal.

As I did so, I heard various exclamations coming from the other side of the wall. "Oh wow. Ohhhh, wowwwwww." She ambled in and said, "You weren't kidding, it's really a mess in there--laundry and toys everywhere." I laughed and changed the subject. "So, John's at work huh? Matt's at Scout camp this week!" She pulled a chair up to the table and sat down. "Oh, so is that why you haven't been cleaning up? [very brief pause] Do you ever wear makeup?" Me: "Oh, sometimes, I mean I wear mascara. Not today though." Sharon: "Ohhhhh."

I think you had to be there, and you have to know Sharon and her earnestness to really picture the "ohhhhh"s, but it was really, really funny. And Sharon's reaction to the mess actually oddly made me feel better about my home and I being an absolute aesthetic disaster. I was having one of "those" days which almost always occur on Mondays. I hadn't been grocery shopping in over a week and we were once again eating omelets and waffles. I was drowning in magazine work and yet chose to spend the kids' nap time writing a blog post about Noah (way more fun).

I tried to explain to Sharon about how Mondays are always hard for me to keep up since I'm already behind from not keeping up on the weekend. Seriously, can a girl get a couple of days off? Are ya with me! Then again it's also Matt's time off from his work. Hence the war zone we're sometimes left with by the end of the weekend. I don't think she could quite relate. So instead she looked around my kitchen and made polite comments about what she could make out through the piles of dishes and food-soiled baby clothes: the plastic CD rack serving as a spice rack ("You have such nice modern things in here"); the magnetic strip securing a sinister-looking row of kitchen knives ("Oh, that's handy"); the ugly yet functional rug that catches the water that spills from the sink ("I've never seen such a long rug before. Would you look at that").

Her obvious sincerity made me smile. Then somehow we started talking about what makes us anxious (always a mood-lifter) and what makes us happy.

I think we have grown on each other. I feel that if I can bang on her front door in the middle of the night and she can not-so-subtly tell me to pull myself together and then we still sit and talk about the meaning of life over waffles, then she's the kind of neighbor I like to have.

It's funny, except when it's not.

So, I'm sure there comes a point when anyone listening to me complain about my neighbors starts to think that the problem might actually lie with me. I have contemplated this, and decided that if having high standards is a problem, then that assumption is correct.

I love my neighbors. Perhaps "love" is too strong a word but we do get along, despite all of the cigarettes and stinky food and stairwell-screaming and parrots and all-night TV-watching and--latest development--mariachi music that blares so loudly from the next building over, we can hear it in our apartment with all the windows closed.

Last week I decided to capture on film the sonorous warble of our neighborhood parrot, who lives across the yard from us. His bedroom window faces our back door. This parrot--I think it is a parrot?--is a very large white affair with some sort of feathery headdress. He (or she) is the loudest and most long-winded bird I have ever met in my life. He and his owner go on leisurely strolls about the grounds--and when I say leisurely I really mean that she takes about 10 steps per minute. Also she likes to wear skintight white stretch pants, which could be beside the point, but don't you think it enhances the story?

Also, the part in the video where I say "Yeah, whatever" is the part where the bird's owner tried to tell it to stop screeching or she would "leave" it. I am skeptical because it really does screech almost constantly some days. I imagine it is like a family member to her and she can't bear to part with it, or maybe she can't afford to get it therapy or send it to obedience school.

Enjoy the video and imagine hearing that lovely whistling/screeching All...Day...Long. I think it's time to lower my standards of neighborhood peace, or maybe I already have, since the bird is still alive.

It's a neighborly day in this beauty-wood

I know I have listed my neighborhood complaints many a time.

Allow me to do it again.

1. Smokers--3 smokers in my unit. The smoker above me smokes inside her apartment so it comes in through my AC vents. (Luckily I think we resolved this last summer; here's hoping. AC comes on in May.) The smoker next to me smokes on his balcony so it comes in through the screen door on balmy days. He also enjoys summoning all phlegm from within his deepest, most inner bowels and expectorating it approximately every 5 minutes. The smoker below me is actually the "companion" to the lady who lives there, and she has no qualms about smoking in the actual stairwell on her way out to the car.
2. Parrots--1 very loud parrot in the apartment across the yard. Not kidding, this is the loudest, most loquacious parrot you've ever met in your life, and its owner loves to (a) leave her windows open, (b) take him for very slow, deliberate walks all around the grounds. Don't worry, you can hear the bird even if they are on the complete opposite end of the property. I am pretty sure the bird never sleeps, and also never stops whistling.
   
3. TVs--1 very loud TV in the apartment just below ours. My nocturnal neighbor leaves it on All Night. You may think I'm kidding, but just come visit and you'll see. I have also taken care of this, twice, by knocking on the door at 3 a.m., which by my calculations has given me about 8 months of peace at a time. I think she slowly turns the volume up every month or so until I snap. It's time to take care of it again. Don't worry, we're friends. Although to be honest that makes it much more awkward.
   
4. Gardeners--I estimate 6-8 gardeners who work on the property. Sadly, ever since my parents' gardeners killed their apricot tree I have been more than a little suspicious of gardeners. We live on a gorgeous property with luscious trees and grass, but I still think the amount of maintenance is excessive: these guys start up at 9 a.m. twice a week and I am not kidding you, it is 4:20 p.m. and they are still going strong. My question is, couldn't the condo association be saving money on these guys? They raised the condo fee 13% this year due to some major problems with the plumbing last winter. And yet we've got these leisurely gardeners who, I would guess, are paid by the hour. Ever since 9 it has been nothing but lawn mowers, weed whackers, and edgers. Nonstop, I tell you. And they all seem to be right outside my window. How does this take 8 hours? How does this take 8 hours? Would I care if I didn't have a napper? Probably not as much, but still a little.
   

Can I help it if I have high standards?

My home is where the heart is, sweet to surrender

You know how I am about anniversaries. A little over 1 year ago (Nov 4 to be exact) Matt and I moved to our current abode. Apparently I took no pictures. I have very few pictures of November and December of last year. Probably my hugeness had something to do with that.

Things I recall with fondness about the day:

1) apprehension. We had spent the night before wet/dry-vacuuming the carpet, which had previously been taken over by an apparently incontinent dog. Will it be dry? will it smell better? These things I asked myself.

2) stuff. I can still picture the living room filled to the brim with stuff. How did we get so much stuff?? It seems like a lot more when it's all in boxes. A good friend and some very nice people from our old ward helped us move all the stuff.

3) fragrance. The lovely fragrance of baking soda with a hint of wet carpet and dog.

4) walls. Kitchen walls to be more specific. Maybe you remember the highlighter shade of green they used to be. They actually glowed at night.

5) cold. We left the windows open all night and all day to help with the cleansing of the smell.

6) tired. Neither the bed nor the couch were set up, and most of the carpet was still wet. And remember the boxes of stuff. After everyone left, I found a small dry spot on the floor of the master bedroom and awkwardly settled in on the carpet for a nap while Matt ran errands. Wrapped myself in some sheets and my down comforter (see #5).

7) hormones. Woke up from the nap (who knows how long I slept) in the dark and breezy cold, hungry, surrounded by boxes, smelled the carpet and cried for a good minute before calling Matt and requesting his presence back at the new pad. "What were we thinking" crossed my mind a few times.

8) peace. When Matt got home I felt better. I am pretty sure food was involved too. My parents were coming to visit a week later, which was the motivation we needed to get the place in order when we got home from work each night. It turns out that once the dog smell was gone, our furniture in place, bathrooms cleaned, the windows closed and heater on, we had a pretty decent place. In fact: cigarette-smoking, loogie-hocking, TV-blasting, parrot-owning neighbors and all, I love it. Oh yeah and I stopped taking naps on the floor.

I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you

Problem:

Our apartment stinks like cigarette smoke.

I have had it up to here with it.

I know for sure that our next-door neighbor smokes, and it seems like maybe the stink in our place started at about the same time he moved in.

But, I am pretty sure he only smokes on his balcony, which is annoying when I'm out on the balcony, but he's not home that often. Matt and I are thinking maybe that it is the lady upstairs. The smell seems worse when the air conditioner is on, so it is probably coming through the vents.

She has lived there since before we moved in, but I don't remember the smell during the fall, winter, or spring. So I can't figure out why it wouldn't come through when the heat is on, but it does when the air is on. Hence the reason I initially thought it was New Guy next door (we think his name is Lee but he is not very social), who moved in at the beginning of summer, at about the same time the A/C came on.

I asked the manager of the complex and he was no help--"Oh yeah, I have the same problem in my apartment, our neighbors smoke too, I think you just have to live with it"--and I think the answer I'd get from our landlord would be the same answer when the carpet stunk like dog urine when we moved in: "I'm not charging you very much for rent" (although he did reimburse us for cleaning the carpet).

I have air fresheners in every room but, not surprisingly, it only serves to mask the smell somewhat. I keep the A/C off as much as I can, but it doesn't help enough. Matt changed the filter for our vents tonight but we don't think that will help much either. And so, I am left fuming inside with annoyance and anger toward our neighbor upstairs, Lynn, whom I have only talked to once. She is not too social either and I never see her leave the place.

So the dilemma: Do I say something to her, and what? I am sort of thinking I might. When our neighbors downstairs blared their TV all night long every night for weeks, I finally knocked on their door at 3 a.m. one night when I was 9 months pregnant and the blaring stopped for good. So I am tentatively thinking I might go upstairs one day this week, talk to Lynn, and sort of casually and politely say that we are trying to figure out where the smoke smell in our apartment comes from, without accusing her or anything, maybe ask her if she has the same problem and what she has done about it.

What do you think? Too much? Not enough? Like I said, I have done this before with the door-knocking at 3 a.m. and it was effective, no more TV blaring all night and those neighbors still seem to like us OK. So maybe if I go up with a baby on my hip and try to feel out the situation, I can come to some sort of solution or at least stop resenting the neighbor. Not like she's going to quit smoking--but at least maybe then she would think about how smoking in her apartment is affecting her poor little baby neighbor downstairs and his poor little mother.

What would you do?

Have myself a home life

Sometimes I complain about where I live--e.g., our smoker neighbor who stinks up the whole unit, especially my kitchen, via the air vents. (sick)

But I can't complain about the trees. This is what I see when I am perched at the computer. I am so excited for October! (although once the leaves fall it won't be quite so nice to look at.)

Want to come visit?

Things

The thing about my neighbors who live just below us is, their TV is on at the highest possible volume from about 7 p.m. to about 7 a.m. And the thing about our bedroom windows is, they're actually made out of a special kind of glass that's very similar to Saran Wrap in quality, thickness, etc.

One time, when I was at my very most pregnant--the night before we went to the hospital to have Theo, in fact--I actually went downstairs and knocked on their door at 3 a.m. I didn't think that was too rude since they were probably up--I mean who could sleep with all that noise? Not me. Anyway so against Matt's advice, I went down and knocked on the door. The noise from the TV immediately stopped and I heard a little scurrying toward the door. Then I heard some more scurrying and the TV went back on.

I was probably a pretty scary sight, especially through the fish-eye lens that is the peephole, so I wasn't surprised at this.

Then I wrote a very polite note, also against Matt's advice, pointing out how very loud their TV was, and knocked again; they didn't answer so I slipped it under the door.

They still watch TV all night long, but it's a few decibels lower. I hardly notice it anymore.

The thing about the neighbors who live next to the TV neighbors is, every day, twice a day, at noon and again at 7 p.m., they blast (as in blast, like I'm pretty sure they have industrial-strength subwoofers down there) the same 2 songs: "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" (the Diana Ross version) and some song I can't place but I think is by the Pretenders. The whole song, then the other song, then silence. A few days ago they replaced the Pretenders song with "What a Fool Believes" by the Doobie Brothers.

This actually does not bother me at all; in fact, I am fascinated. These are the only neighbors in our unit that we have never met, because every time we've gone to introduce ourselves they haven't been home or just haven't answered the door. I kind of want to knock again or write another note--just to ask about the history behind the "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" ritual. I'm curious to know whether they're having little mini dance parties or if this is an extreme case of obsessive-compulsiveness or what.

Our neighbors are all very nice. I really like them. But sometimes I miss living in a house.

For the Benefit of Mr. Kite, There Will Be a Show Tonight on Trampoline

Last night I attended Enrichment for the first time in . . . I don’t know. A long time. The only times I’ve attended Enrichment in the past several months were when I was asked to play the piano or when the Relief Society president had somebody call and remind me. I honestly forgot almost every month. I’ll need to remember that for the future—some people just don’t come because they forget. Plus there’s nothing quite like a personal invitation to (a) get a person excited about it or (b) guilt the person into coming.

Anyway. As evidenced by the Good News Minute recently incorporated into R.S. Sunday meetings, women just really love to share stuff about themselves—but sometimes you need an excuse. So, last night’s theme was “What’s Your Bag?” and everybody brought a bag containing something that represented a hobby or interest of theirs.

One dainty little lady who’s like renowned for her quiltmaking skills—she’s probably in her fifties or sixties—opened her bag, and instead of the exquisitely pieced quilt I expected, she had brought a Diet Coke because she loves to drink Diet Coke and in turn to have belching contests with her family. That second part was a little bit of an overshare in my opinion, but I enjoyed the Diet Coke part.

Another lady who’s probably in her eighties brought a book by Bill O’Reilly and said she loves Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. This was not a surprise, but I found it funny anyway and it reminded me of my grandma.

A cute thirties-ish mom confessed she loves to listen to rap while she exercises (I’m not sure if this is closer to the gangsta end or the De La Soul end—my curiosity was piqued though), which prompted the fifty-year-old woman next to her to admit that she blasts ZZ Top when she’s on her stationary bike and has recently gotten “way into” heavy metal.

Yet another woman revealed a few pieces from her collection of vintage Disney Cinderella items.

My across-the-street neighbor divulged her obsession with mowing the lawn. She mows it three or four times a week. I’ve noticed this.

The tough-talking woman behind me announced that she once won a gold medal in karate at the Utah Summer Games. The soft-spoken woman next to her timidly volunteered that she likes her family, second only to traveling.

Note to self: go to Enrichment more often.

Music: Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite – The Beatles