The Neighborhood

Crazy neighbors

October 2, 2006 by Tricia

I think I’ve been experiencing a bit of writers block these days, or perhaps it’s just the lack of material to write about. I’m still sick – of course, so I’m not getting out much.

My neighbor Sofie is the only one stalking me these days. Shelli gave up on that venture on Friday. Sofie is the elderly Greek lady who lives next door to me. We took our air-conditioner out of the window the other day so now she can see me sitting at the computer from her dining room window again. It’s kind of creepy to look out your window and see someone peering at you several times a day.

When she’s not looking for me via the window she’s knocking on my kitchen window, or worse, I’ll be walking into my kitchen and see a little wrinkled face staring at me. I just about jump out of my skin every time she does that. You’d think I’d be used to it by now since it happens at least 5 times a week, but I think that’s one of those things that you just never get used to.

I know she’s just a lonely old lady, but it’s seriously creepy!

I think I know why we have an increasing number of rats in our backyards lately too. BTW I never saw a rat around until last year, mice a few times yes, but rats – no. Sofie goes into her backyard and distributes her table scraps in her garden. Not just things that will decompose easily either such as fruit peelings or veggie scraps, no she’s burying things like meat and bone in her garden too. Naturally scavengers such as squirrels, rats and mice find these goodies. I’ve found small bone pieces in my garden and on my grass a number of times and now I know they’re coming from Sofie’s yard. It’s probably the squirrels finding them and then bringing them over to my yard to bury their treasure.

I’ll never get rid of the rats now!

Speaking of rats, my husband Chris played a joke on some of our other neighbors a week or so ago. Except he didn’t tell me about his little prank. So I’m sitting at home, on the computer probably, when I hear this furious pounding on our door. I open it up and it’s one of the guys from a few houses over.

Now, this guy happens to be gay, and he lives with his partner and two boarders. We’re friendly with them and we’ve been over to their place for drinks and they’ve been over to our house too. We also help each other occasionally with various household tasks like helping move things or helping with renovating etc.

We’ve got a big Canadian flag hanging on a pole outside our house, and they have a Canadian gay pride flag hanging outside their house. Ours was stolen a couple of years ago. It ended up being some of our friends playing a joke on us. They were going to cut up our flag and send us pieces of it in a ransom note! Until they saw a note that I posted in our window basically ranting and shaming the neighborhood for such a dirty deed. They felt bad so they gave it back unharmed.

These two guys knew this story and we’ve joked back and forth about stealing each others flags and we’ve said that our friends should have switched our flags instead of just stealing ours way back when they played their trick on us.

So back to the pounding on the door and A standing there looking furious. I opened the door and asked him what was wrong since he looked so upset. He said “Is Chris home?”, I replied that Chris was out walking with our boarder. “Which way did they go?” I told him that I didn’t know, but I thought they were off on a long walk so they could be anywhere.

He then asked me if Chris had taken their flag down and put it on their backyard patio. I didn’t know anything about this and I told him so. He seemed very upset though and he wanted to get in his truck and go and find Chris. At this point even if I knew where Chris was I doubt I would have told him because I was starting to imagine my husband being run down by a pick up truck over a flag prank.

When Chris got him I asked him if he did something to the guys flag and he said he’d taken it down, rolled it up nicely and tucked it in their backyard – a few days before. I guess the guys aren’t all that observant if they didn’t notice that it was missing earlier than that day. I told Chris he’d better go over and apologize to A since he seemed so mad.

Chris went and talked with them and came back saying that A wasn’t mad, but I don’t know, he sure seemed mad to me. I don’t think we’ll be playing tricks with their flag again! Now they’ll probably try to get us back though.

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It’s Click and Comment Monday – you know the drill, visit a link on my site and then leave that person a comment, then visit their renter or a link from that site and so on and so on. Visit at least 5 sites in order to spread the bloggy love.

The sirens wailed

September 12, 2006 by Tricia

A little action in the neighborhood on Sunday:

A fire Engine in front of my house!

No, I wasn’t trying to cook again. Really. Actually I think I’m the only one in the near neighborhood that doesn’t set off the fire alarm regularly when I cook. The neighbor behind us sets the smoke alarm off every single time he cooks dinner! I’m starting to get used to that high pitched whine.

[Read more…]

So it continues

July 15, 2006 by Tricia

If you’ve come here for the Saturday Photo Hunt I’m sorry to say that I don’t have anything that really suits the theme of Doors … but if allowed this entry might work as it came through my DOOR early Tuesday morning:

Found: Tuesday morning in our enclosed front porch – one pair of well used running shoes.

Lost: My husbands nice white running shoes that he usually uses for his work as a porter at the hospital.

Priceless: The look on my husbands face when he realized the shoes above were left as a replacement for his stolen shoes.

On Tuesday morning, as I was upstairs getting ready to go and see my family Doctor about my knee that I could still barely put any weight on, my husband came up the the stairs to talk to me.

“Baby, don’t get upset.” he said.

“Upset? About what?” I replied.

“I can’t find my shoes. You know the ones I wear to work?”

He’d worked on Monday and he was tired when he returned. Could he have put his shoes in the back porch? worn them downstairs to the basement when he got home? Nope, he looked everywhere. They were gone.

He proceeded to tell me “Someone must have come into our front porch in the night or early this morning and took my shoes.” Shaking his head at the thought.

“What do you mean someone came in and took your shoes?” I asked.

“Well, you see, they left their old huge dirty ones that they were wearing.” he replied.

I went downstairs to see the shoes, and there inside my front porch were the shoes pictured above. Well worn, very dirty, crushed heel area. Yuck. There were sitting as you see them in front of one of the chairs were have inside the porch. A pile of our other shoes were nearby.

The person, probably a homeless, or perhaps someone that was recently released from the hospital (as in one of the psych patients maybe), must have been wandering around on the street and for some reason decided to enter our enclosed front porch. They tried on all the running shoes that we have out there and left the remains in a pile. It must have seemed like a shoe store to the person. Lucky find for him, unlucky for my husband.

My husband I both wear the same size shoe. He’s a short and I’m tall and somehow we both pretty much have the same sized feet. How rare is that anyway? His feet are wider than mine though, so we don’t trade shoes very often. Actually he’s not really allowed to wear mine as he stretches them out. Besides going back to the whole cross dressing memories that I have of and ex I don’t really want to see Chris wearing my shoes, at least not my heels.

I’m counting this as one more unlucky thing that has happened to us this month. Could have been worse I suppose. Chris has had those shoes for over 6 months and they were starting to wear a little with all the walking he does for work anyway. Besides, if I remember correctly we got them at an manufacture outlet so the price was inexpensive too. Unfortunately he needs new shoes now. Anyone know of any deals in the Toronto area?

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Now we are off to Ottawa. One of my Aunts is celebrating her 80th birthday and her family is throwing a surprise party for her. I haven’t been back to Ottawa, my home town, since finishing things up there after my mothers death in 2003. It might be a little bit of an emotional rollercoaster of a weekend.

The drive takes between 4 and 4.5 hours, depending on traffic and how fast we go. Unfortunately, with my knee, which happens to be a tiny bit better but still very sore and extremely swollen, our ride might take longer if it acts up and we end up having to stop a few times so I can stretch my legs.

The party is at 2 pm! It’s 7 a.m. now, so I guess we’d better get started. Oh we’re going through a heat wave here. It’s supposed to be 32 C (89.6 F) but with the humidty it will feel like 40 Celsius (104 F). Did I tell ya we DON’T have air-conditioning in our car? It broke last year and we didn’t fix it, well we tried but it didn’t work. So … it’s going to be a long hot sticky drive. We’ll do the same thing and experience the same conditions sometime tomorrow as we return home.

My Green Thumb Sunday post will be up sometime Sunday afternoon when I return!

The Birds are taking over!

May 30, 2006 by Tricia

Ok, how do I get birds to not build a nest under my window air-conditioner? I’m afraid that this is going to be like when we lived in an apartment and the birds are going to take over!

After a mostly too cool month of May we’re suddenly in the midst of a hot humid heat wave here in Toronto, and we don’t have central air. We have two window air conditioners that we put in each year and for the most part they do a pretty good job.

But, last year, the day we put the upstairs air-conditioner in the window some birds started making a nest between the bottom of the AC and the outside window sill where there is a good sized space. I think the birds were little house wrens or something similar. I didn’t mind having them there, but they did get noisy, especially early in the morning. Chirp Chirp and small little bird squabbles at 5:00 a.m. are not how I like to wake up.

Yesterday when Chris installed the upstairs air-conditioner he put a row of bricks underneath it to try to prevent the birds from noticing the gap and building a nest. It didn’t work!

I’m afraid the birds were waiting for their favorite spot. As soon as the AC was in and running we started hearing a lot of chirping outside that window and we could see the birds flying back and forth through the drive way with pieces of grass and other wonderful nest building materials in their beaks.

When we lived in our apartment we used to be bothered by pigeons. For the first few years they just visited, but after one particularly warm winter we could see the pigeons visiting our balcony regularly one February so we decided to check out our winter abandoned balcony and low and behold the darn birds had build a nest in a protected corner and already had eggs! We removed the nest and eggs but that didn’t stop them, they did it again and again.

The next year the pigeons succeeded and actually had their eggs hatch before we noticed. Being animal lovers we couldn’t hurt the babies so we let them raise their two young ones. I was actually curious to see a baby pigeon. I’d never seen one before. I can tell you that they are pretty big right from the start and quickly grow to look like smaller versions of their parents which is probably why I hadn’t noticed baby pigeons before since they are almost the size of their parents and look quite a bit like adults within a month.

Over our years in the apartment we tried everything to get rid of the pigeons and keep them off our balcony. We put out the fake owl. Didn’t work. We strung fishing line strategically across the balcony rail so it would catch their feet and disturb them when they would land. Didn’t work. We strung fishing line from our upstairs neighbors balcony and attached each line to our balcony railing. We put the lines about two inches apart. Yeah, that’ll work, they won’t be able to get through, it will hit their wings and scare them. Nope, didn’t work.

We ended up abandoning our balcony in the last two years or so that we were there. It ended up being a pigeon poop covered mess despite our efforts to get the birds to stop landing on and using the balcony. I hate pigeons!

Now, I’ve got birds building a nest under the air-conditioner. Oh, yes their cute harmless birds, but considering what happened to us last time birds started liking our property, I’m afraid. Very afraid. The birds are going to take over. I just know it! LOL Help!

ChrisLand where time stands still

May 29, 2006 by Tricia

I’m married to Peter Griffin! Well, not exactly. My husband isn’t a cartoon character, and he sure doesn’t look like Peter from the Family guy … But at times, well, he sure acts an awful lot like Peter!

He’s always starting projects around the house, and coming up with ideas that end up getting him into trouble. Usually into trouble with me.

I’m thinking of this past weekend as Neighbors weekend. It started Saturday with Chris going outside to hang our Canadian flag. The whole post, flag included, blew off our house in a windstorm late last fall and with the bad weather we just decided to not put the flag back out again until spring. That day was Saturday.

He’d asked me to give him a hand positioning the flag pole as he had to drill new holes into the brick, but before I could come out of the house our neighbors adult kids were over and offering advice. It was like watching a construction crew at work; one worker and the rest standing around looking like foremen telling the one working what to do. It shouldn’t have been a difficult job, but it some how became one.

The beer came out and the voices got louder. My husband talks loud, especially when he’s outside with the guys. I could occasionally hear him call out to others as they walked by or stepped out onto their porch “Hey Neighbor!”. Gee, maybe I’m married to Ed Flanders from the Simpsons? That’s what it always reminds me of when he calls out this phrase.

With that job finally finished the neighbors and my husband moved to the backyard. Chris had started painting the small picket fence at the end of our drive a few weeks ago. Our elderly neighbor Sophie shares part of this small fence with us and her son had said he’d paint her side as well. Naturally, her kids never got around to doing it, and after seeing how nice our side looked she’d been insisting that we paint it for her.

We some how seem to end up doing everything for her, rather than her own kids doing the odd jobs around the house. We’ve been getting frustrated with this, so when it came to painting her side of the fence we stalled. Every time Sofie’s sons have been over we’ve mentioned the painting job to them, usually after Sofie herself had pointed it out and asked us AGAIN to paint it for her.

He son promised he’d do it but never did. So finally on Saturday, after Chris went to the store to get more paint (which Sofie paid for), we pulled out our own brushes and handed them to her son and grandson and said here you go- paint! Chris did some touch ups on our side while they painted her side of the fence.

The flow of beer continued, and the small job was finally done.

By this time it was perhaps 7 pm. I was ready to eat and had already prepared dinner – it just needed to be BBQ’ed by the hubby. However, at 6:30 our boarder had mysteriously decided to go out. He’d said he’d come home for dinner … but, uh we were just about to have dinner when he left. Arghhh. He didn’t come home until close to 9 p.m and by that time I was pretty upset at him and my husband was no where to be found!

Now nothing in here describes my husbands “Peterness”, but believe me, if you saw him interacting with the neighbors or the way he acts around me at times, he’s at least 60% Peter Griffin.

While we were waiting for our boarder to return home, Chris was outside and one of the other neighbors called him over and asked if he could help move some things. Chris told me he’d be 10 minutes. Did I believe him? No way! Time in Chrisland is extended. 10 minutes is close to an hour in real people time.

The neighbors he was helping this time are these two really cool gay guys. They’re a hoot to hang around with, but since I was waiting for Chris to come back I wasn’t totally impressed that Chris had gone over to help. Chris ended up coming back with two other neighbors that we hadn’t met before. He was showing them our garden. This time it was two ladies and their dog.

When our boarder finally came back, and I got Chris to stop interacting with the neighbors, we got down to the business of eating dinner. After dinner I went back outside to finish watering the garden- a job I had started while I was waiting to get dinner going. By this time it was at least 10 pm.

Chris came out with his guitar and played for me while I sprayed the garden. How sweet is that? Live music, songs sung to me while I worked in the moonlight? Nice.

We moved to the front yard to finish the garden work, but Chris’ guitar playing was attracting attention. The husband of the only neighbor I really dislike happened to see and hear us outside and waved at us through his open window. His wife is the one that I talked about in an earlier post who, both times that she’s been here, I’ve ended up taking care of her baby. The last time her kid was walking around eating my flowers – ones that I thought might be poisonous. She’s a winner!

The husband seems like an ok guy, a bit whipped perhaps, but he’s definitely nicer than she is. He came out of his house and wandered over to listen to Chris play guitar. More beer flowed. More neighbors poked their head out to enjoy the music. Drunk party girls walked by trying to entice my husband to play something for them – he didn’t.

It was close to 1 a.m. by the time we went back into the house. How does watering the garden turn into a 3 hour job? Well, for most people it doesn’t, but if you are like me and you live in Chrisland that’s the way things go. Everything slows down, sounds get louder, and strangers come over at all hours of the day and night.

Lets see, all in all, we were visited by or visited 8 or more neighbors on Saturday. Sunday was a slower neighbor day – it only involved 5 neighbors and his mom and aunt dropping in unexpectedly. Today will likely include people from work dropping by. Oh life in Chrisland, don’t you envy me?

It’s a wonder that I ever get anything done around here.

Crazy neighbors

The sirens wailed

So it continues

The Birds are taking over!

ChrisLand where time stands still

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