“And that, Madam, is a faithful narrative…

…of all my dealings with”…my neighbor. Oh. Oho-ho-ho! Yeah, baby! That felt good. This morning, we awakened to an envelope on our front door, containing this:

Dear YCU, Nina, and Fletcher,
Hope you are doing well.
We feel we are being very considerate by allowing you to drive your mower through our yard to enter your backyard to mow each time.
We would like to ask a small favor of you.
Can you possibly move the junk car that is under the tarp and the pink “pepto-bismol” tires car around to the back of your house so we will not have to look at them each time we drive up or each time we leave home.
We do thank you for your consideration of keeping the neighborhood looking nice.
Your Friends,
Stupid Neighbor + Nosy Wife

Uh-huh. Really. Now, we’ve discussed the neighbor before, how he came over on Christmas Day to bitch about the “Driveway War”, about how he was mowing the grass in the rain, erected (hmm…maybe that’s the problem…but I digress) a huge fence (there are pictures here somewhere, but I don’t know how to link) and an ugly shrub (our dog pissed on it while we were cheering him on and it died…bwahahahaha) to keep us from backing onto our own property to back out of the driveway, threatening to sue us if our dog charged him (again, there are pics somewhere of our dog in a party hat, clearly behaving like a Cujo), threatening to sue us again if our friends (who are all grown adults and legally responsible for themselves and their own vandalism) drove over onto their driveway and scraping it with their cars again, and threatening to put up spikes in the grass strip between the driveways to keep it from happening. Also, if he thinks our grass is too long, he’ll start cutting it himself at 0700 on a Saturday morning, without bothering to ask. Hard to argue that except for the time frame, but you get the idea. And they’ve only lived there like, a year. So. You can guess how I felt about this latest party foul they’d committed. I’d had Enough. So, I responded in like manner:
Dear Stupid Neighbor + Nosy Wife,
We apologize for the inconvenience, but you put up the fence, requiring us to drive through your driveway to get to our backyard. Neither of those cars belong to us and are here temporarily only, so please don’t be upset. And while you’re sitting around wadding panties at night, you might consider this: Which do you think is the bigger eyesore, a couple of temporary cars or an unmown grass field behind someone’s house? We so appreciate the attention you pay our yard and property, it is seconded only by a really nosy home-owner’s association president. Oh! Wait! We don’t have one! We will no longer drive our mower through your driveway to get to our backyard, but it will continue to grow up until a ramp can be constructed. Please do not contact us again, as you are not our landlord.

Thanks,
YCU + Nina

It wasn’t 30 minutes before he came over apologizing that he was sorry to have offended us, that we were welcome to come around the fence to mow, he’d be glad to help us if we needed it, etc. Hah. I got out of the car (we were leaving), stood nose to nose with the bastard, and commenced to loudly enumerating all the things that we’d done at his request, that we both worked for a living, we were just as concerned about the neighborhood, and that the cars would be gone July 1. I haven’t laid into someone like that (except the YCU, and we all know how he gets) in a long time. I told him that we want to get along, we wanted to be reasonable, and that I thought we had been. YCU didn’t get out of the car, which was probably best. I’d been wanting to deal with Stupid Neighbor for a long time, anyway, and besides, what was he gonna do? Call the cops? Yeah, they’d laugh at him. He apologized again, and I did likewise, since, after all, I did call them pantie wadders. Hmpph. I probably shouldn’t have, but I felt like being merciful. After all, he probably isn’t used to mouthy, pushy, over-bearing, completely and totally in the right women. We’ll let him start at the shallow end.