Neighbours

A 5-post collection

Challenge #01562-D101: In the Neighbourhood

There are those who delight in annoying their neighbours. This one had made an art of it, noisy music, renovations at the crack of dawn or into the night. For sale signs went up and people moved. Then the new owners arrived next door and retribution ensued. -- Anon Guest

Skating on the thin ice of the letter of the law was an art form that Gary indulged in. He didn't like Those Types living nearby, so he did everything legal to annoy them into moving. Mowing the lawn at mere seconds past eight in the morning. Playing loud music until seconds before ten in the evening. Aggressively pruning anything that came over his property line. Purposely planting things that would kill the things along their mutual fence line. Deliberately leaf blowing seconds after they had hung the washing on the line.

All that passive-aggressive stuff that isn't, strictly speaking, illegal - yet skating on the very edge of the law. And, of course, always combined with complaining about the slightest thing that the unwanted neighbours did.

It took three weeks to convince them to move out. And Gary had an entire week of peace before the next set of neighbours moved in. Gary should have guessed he'd have trouble when he saw that their mini-van was painted up like some kind of Star Trek space ship. They, too, played or did loud things on the cusp of legality. The lady of the house installed a strange structure over the Hills' Hoist that protected the laundry from leaf-blower dust whilst also letting the evaporating water escape out of some kind of whirligig.

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Clever Dog, Not Smart Dog.

The hound, by daylight known as Max, loves rounding up our neighbour’s cows. I’m pretty certain that the neighbours feel less than charitable about that.

Another neighbour dislikes Max barking at the cows, the birds, etc. while he’s on his leash and has complained. Twice. I’m sure he has a few names for the dog that aren’t printable.

So in order to keep both neighbours happy, we have been attempting to fix

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Someone, somewhere, theorised that we spend half our lives waiting for something to happen.

Be that in a queue or in waiting rooms, or sitting around and waiting for someone in power to get the thumb out of their divot and get things done.

I, currently, have wasted half my day waiting for the men of the house to get their hairy arses into gear so we can finally finish fixing that fucking fence. They apparently spent all night programming - at

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A Quarter to 2AM

Monday 28th of November.

That’s when I sat down to write this. Give or take a few minutes.

Someone rang our phone and hung up. Twice. Long about midnight.

As a means of waking me up, it’s very effective.

Once I’m awake, no matter what, I can’t get back to sleep.

It doesn’t matter how tired I am. It doesn’t matter what time it is. It doesn’t matter

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Nostalgia For Never Was

Remember all those sitcoms where people helped people out? The dream worlds like The Waltons or Leave It To Beaver? If a Neighbour was experiencing trouble, the whole neighbourhood pitched in to help.

I’m more convinced than every that it was just a dream. An impossible utopia that everyone pretends was real so they can say, “things were better when…”

In the real world, some busybody Neighbour would have reported the Cleavers to CPS because their kid

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