The Neighbors Moved Away

So they played loud music.  Music that I wasn't fond of.  That's not too big a deal.

But first impressions?  Boy, when they were checking out the place prior to moving in, and those kids were running through our yard, across our deck, and making leaps off our deck onto the grass below, that did not bode well. 

But, hey, I was impressed when the dad sent the kids over with an apology when the boys' party guests ran through my garden and trampled strawberry plants.

We were surprised last November when we arrived home after work to find Christmas light in OUR tree.  And a mega-ugly job of lighting up our huge old maple trunk.  It's hard to find Christmas lights done in an ugly way.  But these were!  And these lights were burning for three months, pouring light into our bedrooms at night.  In March, when the neighbor finally took down the lights on his eaves, we were hoping the lights on our tree would be removed too.  No such luck, though.

And then they moved.  The landlord apologized to Gary for whatever trouble this neighbor had caused: apparently other neighbors had been complaining for quite a while.  We saw that these people left a mess for the landlord to deal with, tossing garbage out at the back of the property rather than leaving it for the garbage pick-up.  It seemed characteristic....

So we headed out to remove the lights from our tree.  How did he accomplish this "decorating"??  The lights strands were STAPLED to the tree.  Fifteen feet high.  We have a huge ladder, and the only way we could remove these light-strands was with wire cutters and the extended-handle pruning saw.  There's still garbage up in the tree that we couldn't remove.  When we put lights on the indoor tree, we usually have one person standing on each side of the tree, passing light-strands back and forth.  HOW did this guy wrap lights around a 4' diameter, 15' in the air?  No wonder he didn't want to remove the mess!

We have a better feeling about the new neighbors.   Hooray!