Odds and Ends
Oops, I haven't posted in a week. So much for the promise to post every day, but let me offer you a lame-ass excuse and a really long post to make up for it. As for the excuse, I entered "Fall Cleaning Mode". I think this is what other people experience as "Spring Cleaning". Austin doesn't really have a spring and we don't really have a fall, but each year there comes a week in late summer when the temps go down a bit. Sometimes this happens in late August, sometimes in September and occasionally not until October. When ever it happens, I feel the urge to clean house, as in "deep cleaning" along the lines of scrubbing the walls and such. This is a very rare thing and something that needs to be taken advantage of should it occur. Normally I'm working a kazillion hours so the moment is lost, but this year I happen to still be unemployed and can answer the calling. I didn't get very far before it was the long holiday weekend and in the spirit of the "holiday" I avoided any more "deep cleaning", but I plan to be back at it tomorrow provided the mood holds. Meanwhile I have spent the long weekend admiring a kitchen wall cleaned of nine years of gunk and promising that I will clean the rest of the walls starting tomorrow.

On another subject, there are a few things that I think should never have been invented. The atomic bomb qualifies as one of these items, but something that is a more frequent occurrence in my daily life is the powered leaf blower. Whoever invented this abomination deserves an endless night of sleepless hell enduring the drone of the damn thing. What was wrong with the rake or the broom? Is it really THAT much more effort to QUIETLY scoop up the leaves? There doesn't seem to be any less arm movement involved and that leaf blower is bound to weigh more than a rake or a broom. I can only hope that this was the last day of my having to listen to the damn thing because the house appears to be rented to someone new so maybe Mister Daily Leaf Blower is gone now.

And speaking of the rental house next door to us, I really miss our old neighbor. Louie lived there long before I moved in here nine years ago (that's why there was at least nine years of gunk on the kitchen wall in above paragraph; I had NEVER cleaned that wall since I've lived here.) I'm not sure that Louie was the most upstanding citizen in Austin and we suspected those weeks away from the house might be due to jail rather than work or visiting family in Mexico, but all the same he definitely was a good neighbor. Thinking about it now, I can't really put my finger on what made him a "good neighbor". It's not like we had dinner parties together though if we had leftover barbeque we gave him our extra and vice versa. I never went in his house once, though I think Rob did a time or two. It's more of a sort of indefinable camaraderie even though we had little in common other than living next door to each other. He looked out for us and we looked out for him and while we definitely had completely different cultures and lifestyles, sometimes people "connect" with each other irregardless of other circumstances. I was really sad when the landlord raised the rent far above what Louie could afford and I thought her cruel and callous until I paid attention to my own property tax increase. Ouch! After that we've had various neighbors to our north side, but no one stays more than a year if even that long. Usually it's a revolving door of college roommates, but this last group didn't speak English so there was no way we could "connect" with them. Maybe the days of really knowing your neighbors have long passed, but I think there needs to be at least some minor level of interaction with the people who live next door to you. Then again, thinking about some of my neighbors from past neighborhoods, maybe no interaction is best! Oh, the stories I could tell from my days living in a Section Eight neighborhood.

Section Eight is a designation for low-cost or supplemental housing. My former house didn't have that designation, but all the houses around me did. This meant that the residents were disadvantaged in some way, usually by virtue of mental illness but sometimes it was just economic status. I usually got the crazy neighbors. They came and went, but some hold special memory status. Like the family to the south of me where the husband worked on cars obsessively day after day. He was definitely nuts and would do a brake job over and over when he wasn't screaming at his wife or his kids about something stupid. He would also wrap rocks in plastic bags and put them in my trash can which would weigh the can down so much that the trash men wouldn't pick it up. It became a game where I had to keep my trash cans in the garage until right before trash day and hope that he wouldn't stuff it with rocks before the trashmen came that day. He also liked to put empty cat food cans wrapped in plastic bags in *my* trashcan instead of his own. And he would obsessively saw wood into little pieces on his back patio, but I never saw those scraps in my trash can. I guess they were "pure" enough for his own. And then there was couple to the north of me where the wife was breastfeeding her three year old in the backyard while talking to me over the fence. I'm not against breastfeeding, but that was kind of creepy - breastfeeding a three year old! Ah well, I guess you do what you have to do with a limited food budget. They moved after repeated robberies which were common in my neighborhood, though never at my house. This despite the fact that I had several windows with no locks and a hollow core front door with no deadbolt. I lived in a neighborhood rife with gangs and drive-by shootings were routine, but I never had any trouble. My lawnmower sat happily in the front yard for years with no theft. I attribute this success to the fact that I had a pit bull, a race car and listened to heavy metal. Therefore, I was "cool". All the same, I was more than happy to move into Rob's house in a safer, saner neighborhood. Oh, the one dude I do miss from my old neighborhood was a man I called "Rip Van Winkle". He lived at the end of the street in a house where the windows were all boarded up. He was tall and very skinny with a beard down to his knees and only came out in the neighborhood in the predawn hours in his white boxer shorts. He would scamper down the streets picking up trash, furtively looking to and fro and if he spotted another human out and about he would rush back to his house with his bag of trash. Fortunately for us in the neighborhood there were few people out and about in the predawn hours so we had the cleanest streets in the city.