Gutsy Neighbors

Although it isn't their intention, my neighbors have been shaming me again. To be honest, they couldn't care less about me, but I'm not about to let a little thing like that get in my way of a perfectly good resentment.

I was riding my bike and feeling pretty damn good about it. In fact, I was weaving, just to enjoy the sensation, and that's something you can't do in a car. Then I tacked right in front of a neighbor's house and there were two women sunbathing in the front yard.

I admit to frequently taking my shirt off and have been known to sit in my back yard for an hour or two, reading and sipping lemonade, but I don't lounge in my front yard. I don't think about being shirtless when I'm working on the yard or doing something like that out front, but I haven't laid out for everyone to see me since I was about eight.

I happen to know a little about the house these women were laying in front of, though. When I was growing up there were four kids there, two of each gender. The girls were like five and ten years older than me, so they weren't part of my life until I discovered girls. By then one of them had moved out, but the other went to a beach with us once, and I was thrilled by that.

One of the boys was a little younger than me, and his older brother had some Playboys we found once. That added considerably to my experience with women, which up to that time had been limited to smaller pictures of native women in National Geographic.

The other thing in the boys' room were aquariums, including a salt water one. Later, after I stopped hanging around and went to Jr High School (as we called it, then), they even had a monkey cage in their backyard. With monkeys. Last I heard, the younger boy was a teacher or zoologist or something.

I'm thinking that their back yard, which I remember as never having any grass, still doesn't and that may explain why the current owners lay out in the front yard. At any rate, I still won't do that. Just too public.

Also, my next door neighbor has again raised the bar. He's in construction (does carpentry for the studios) and can put things up faster than anyone I know. They moved in while I was re-roofing my house, and he was fixing up his place before his wife and kids moved in. He did the majority of the carpentry, but had others lay his floors and do some fancy stuff.

Now, he's built a great little picket fence around his property. He's good at that, I know, since he had to hand-cut and build all the picket fences for the Cat in the Hat movie. He complained about that for weeks. But, he was out the other day vacuuming his lawn.

That's right. He has a machine that he wears on his back and a large tube that vacuums his grass. I have a rake, which is more organic, but ... damn. I'm sure the blades of grass on my lawn are dusty, and that's a worry I've never before had.

I survived all that, only to have my site crash today. I wrote them this morning, but if they e-mailed me any response that bounced. I guess it's okay now, and I'll find out more later.