Our neighbourhood

Way back in the day, when this house first went up for sale, we weren't able to see it right away because the sellers had to get rid of graffiti on the side of the house. At that time we wondered if the graffiti indicated a general problem in the neighbourhood or if it was directed at the sellers.

Yesterday we discovered that the graffiti was almost certainly targeted at the sellers. We met with one of the next-door neighbours - he's a contractor, which is probably great for us - and it seems that there was a big hate-on between them and the sellers, to the point of police involvement and possible court action.

We have no idea how it started, but it ended with a short chain-link fence built by the sellers on the property line whose sole purpose was to prevent the neighbour from easily backing his truck and trailer onto that side of the house. The seller also parked his car at the very end of the driveway right beside the fence to try and make it even harder to get the neighbour's truck back. the neighbour retaliated (in part, at least) by having his sub-contractors flip their cigarette butts onto the seller's property.

The chain-link fence was pretty ugly and served no real purpose so when the neighbour asked if we would allow the fence to be taken down - and that he'd do it himself - we said yes. They had that fence down within twenty minutes and the property does look better without it. His sub-contractor came around and picked up all of the cigarette butts too, which we appreciated.

This dispute had clearly had an effect on the entire court; in fact, the neighbour said that the sellers had only one friend on the court. After the neighbour took down the fence, another neighbour called him on his cell and asked what was going on. Ian spoke to that person :)

I'm sure that the neighbour minimized his actions in the dispute and that it had been going on a very long time. I hope that we never get to that point with anyone because the whole thing would have taken up so much energy and time. I'm hoping that we get along with all of our neighbours; we want to be the "friendly but keep-to-ourselves" kind of people on the block.

We also found discovered a new neighbour in the area: a wild turkey! There's so much wild, natural parkland around that we expect to see deer and lots of bunnies, but we never expected to see a wild turkey! It was pecking at a table spindle, for some reason. Here it is:

There's something about that spindle...

We didn't get any pics of it actually pecking
at the spindle, but it's about to do that here.