That's My Bix!

Oh the floor. The floor! I just can’t get over the floor! It’s all shiny and pretty and eclectic and looks like what other people have in their homes instead of the sixties lin-oh-lee-um that should have been in the Smith-soh-ne-un. It’s almost like we’re actual adults instead of living in a frat house. Of course, now the countertop has been demoted to the ugly feature and every time I walk in there, I keep thinking about how it looks like ass. It’s just a never-ending cycle.

I had a bunch of homework to do last night (including watching a movie called ‘Baad Aaaassss’ (or something like that with many A’s and many more S’s. You know that you’re taking a real graduate class when you’re assigned a titty movie, people. This is why English majors can’t get jobs, people, right there) so I didn’t get to take pictures or move the kitchen junk back in or anything like that but I did slide across the floor in my lumberjack socks about fourteen times as I wandered through to get juice refills. So not only is it pretty, but two thumbs up for the wacky sliding factor.

In other domestic news, we have new neighbors. Lorna, our crazy divorcee’ next door (oh, not really. In fact, she was very boring and quiet and normal, but it’s much more interesting if you think of her wandering around wearing a negligee and doing deep knee bends when the paperboy is walking by) built a new house and then her house sat empty for awhile, which was fine with me because I’m an unfriendly snobby bitch and don’t like talking to my neighbors. Well, ok, it’s not that I don’t like it, but it just makes me uncomfortable. I lived in twenty different houses when I was growing up. You learn to not bother with getting to know the neighbors. Besides, they are just too close to your everyday life. It’s like being bestest friends with your gynecologist.

But the day I was painting my front door, new neighbors moved in. I didn’t introduce myself (see above paragraph re: snobby bitch) but later that week, Esteban marched over and welcomed them to the neighborhood. That’s my husband, ambassador to our little bedroom community. He only lived in two houses while growing up and still talks about the neighbors he had when he was twelve. We both regard our attitudes in this arena as somewhat freakish.

However, he did broach one topic that made me very happy. You see, Lorna had a love of keeping her porch light on. Her porch light which shone directly through our bedroom blinds and onto our pillows, worming its way into the cracks of our closed eyes and boring a quarter-sized hole into our brains. That light. I fantasized about smashing the light or perhaps shooting it with a BB gun on more than one occasion. In fact, during winter, I hung a quilt over that window, under the guise of keeping it warmer in the room, but really because the light stayed on all fucking winter.

Apparently, Esteban mentioned the porch light to them and explained that the shining and the worming and the boring into the brain. And they offered to never turn on the porch light. Just like that. Wow. Awesome. I had new affection for these neighbors whom I had never met, even though I was put off by his giant bright yellow truck and her wind pants and giant hair circa 1991. Esteban had learned that they were from Pulaski, which is a little community about 20 minutes north of here and unofficially the source of dumb hick jokes in Green Bay. And he worked at a place that turns rancid animal fat from the meat packing plants and turns it into soap (First rule of animal fat: you don’t talk about animal fat) or something that I don’t want to think about. The place smells rank (to the point that when you pass it on the highway, you want to pull your shirt up over your mouth and nose) and I swear to God the only people I know who work there are from Pulaski. I’m certain that there are residents of other towns and cities that work for this corporation, but in my Weetabix universe, the two are now forever intertwined and certainly this proves that the residents of Pulaski are not very discerning. And apparently are born without the sense of smell or taste, because seriously, it’s THAT bad.

Their house is considerably smaller than ours and only has a one-stall garage with a long single-lane driveway to the edge of their property. The grass on the other side of their driveway is about twelve feet of our property and then our house. They had two cars and a large black, obviously homemade trailer, which in total used up almost every inch of their driveway to the street.

Over the weekend, the guy caught Esteban while he was outside and asked if he could come over and look at something. The ‘something’ was that he had moved his big ugly black trailer onto our yard along the side of our house so that they could park a car in the garage over winter. He wanted to know if that was ‘ok’ with us.

Esteban, being a big friendly old teddy bear, said sure, fine, no problem.

Um. Problem.

I, of course, do have a problem with this. I asked him if he really thought his wife wouldn’t mind our yard looking like a white trash parking lot so that the neighbor’s 4x4s can snuggle up to our house all winter. That may fly in Pulaski, but in Green Bay, we call that low class.

(Actually, it’s what half the people in the city do, but that doesn’t mean that it’s right.)

I mean, what did they expect? They knew when they bought the house that they needed room to park three cars and that they owned a big ugly black trailer. When we were looking at houses, one of the requirements was that the driveway was big enough to accommodate both of our cars and we still managed to do it without relying on the kindness of our neighbors. Gee, too bad there isn’t something called ‘winter storage’ where you could perhaps pay someone to store your grit toys. Oh wait, there is. And nice to just park it on our lawn and then find out afterwards whether or not it would be ‘ok’. And of course, by saying yes to this, Esteban was saying yes to this happening every winter forever and ever amen. I may be a snobby bitch but it would mean that I wouldn’t have to deal with a permanent dead spot on my lawn in the shape of his adult Big Wheels.

Is it wrong that now I sort of hope that they get divorced and move away? Or that she gets knocked up and they have to sell his toys to pay for formula for the baby? Or that they find out that the rigors of homeownership are just too much and that Green Bay was just too “big city” for their tastes.

I quickly informed Esteban that he has left me no choice and we now must sell our house and move.

This is why I am not friendly with our neighbors. This. Right here.