The Neighbours from Heck

Anyone have one of those neighbours?

When we moved in almost three years ago, we found our older neighbours to be very friendly. Warning bells should have gone off in my head when, only a couple weeks later, they spent a good half hour telling us about their neighbours on the other side - and every activity said neighbours had participated in that contributed to "bringing down the entire block." No, not warning bells about their other neighbours - about them!

In my entire life of renting and owning, never have I encountered so many complaints.

Here is the short list of what we have done so far to ruin their living experience for them (in no particular order):

- allow our children to drive their Power Wheels vehicles on the road (we live in a close, with a large green space in the middle, and no one drives around it if they don't live here...and we never let the kids do this at "busy" times like after work on weekdays)

- take too long to mow the lawn (we've been known to let it go a whole week in the summer)

- have visitors over who, ever so rudely, park their vehicles - on the public street - in front of their house

- spray the weeds in our yard with products that are safe for children and dogs, but according the odour they send into the neighbours window they are clearly toxic

- park our old pickup truck in front

- park our old pickup truck in back

- sit around our firepit with our kids

- have exterminators in to deal with our problem with carpenter ants

- have a particularly loud gathering in our yard, around that dratted fire pit, until (*gasp) midnight (the one and only of these types of gatherings we've ever had at this house) --- the story of how their adult son "retaliated" for our noise is a whole post on its own!

- and many, many other small but irritating/ annoying/ dangerous/ discourteous things we do over the course of just being alive

Most recently, though, is the problem with our puppy. When we got her, we worked hard to train Daisy to relieve herself only in one section of the yard - it's a little patch of grass at the side of the house that the kids don't play on. I have been told that "the smell is just horrible!" and informed, under no uncertain terms, that I "just have to train her to go somewhere else. [I] have a big yard, and the dog just CANNOT 'go' near the fence right next to [their] yard anymore!" (I really should mention that our dining room window overlooks this patch of grass, and we have never noticed an unpleasant odour while dining.) Being the good neighbour that I am, I apologized for not cleaning up as often as I should. Since then, I have made an effort to ensure all is cleaned up every second day or so. Unfortunately, this is not good enough. I received a letter from the City, informing that we have seven days to get it cleaned up or we will be subject to a $200 fine. Next time, $400.

I am thinking that it is best for me to just bite my tongue and comply. So in exactly seven days I will go out and clean up all the dog poop. Ha! (Totally kidding, we're now trying to clean it up daily.)

And I thought the party-ers we lived next to a few years back were bad...