Do you keep an eye on your neighbors? Do you know what they are doing?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’d like to know if other people keep a quasi-vigilant eye on what their immediate neighbors are doing…I live down a fairly long driveway, but we have houses close enough where if I looked out our windows I could see lights on in another house, or even if a window shade is up and it’s evening I can see inside their home. I don’t make it a point to gawk, ever, at our neighbors, but since last month when one of the neighbors teenage kids shot off his gun a few times, I have been a little more vigilant as to who is coming and going in and around their home.

The last place we lived was easy, we couldn’t see most of our neighbors unless the leaves were off the trees even then it was hard to see them. I knew on one side of me was an 85 year old man who grew pot in his corn each year, and on the otherside a young man and his partner who had an amazingly beautiful garden…No fuss, no worry just serenity.

How about you? Do you keep a watchful eye at all on your neighbors? Do you have at least an inkling of what goes on at their home? Do you care?

2

I keep somewhat of an eye on my neighbors. I have the same layout with them as you do. They’re old and disabled so if I see something blatantly out of place, I’ll go check on them or call a cop or something. They have a lot of kids and grandkids who I can’t keep track of, so I don’t keep track of run of the mill comings and goings.

I see the ambulance pull in a couple times a month, but they just come in, upright the old man, and leave with no lights a’flashing. If they stay for more than a few minutes, I’ll wander down there.

3

I keep a general eye out. There are lots of older folks around here, so if I don’t see someone for a day or two, I usually inquire. We have one neighbor down the street who monitors a police band radio and lets us know anything she finds interesting :slight_smile:

4

In the five years or so that our shared-wall neighbors have lived there, the police have visited them four or five times. The last time was about three weeks ago - four police cars at once were parked out front of their home. So yes, we keep a wary eye on their guests and comings and goings.

Once the paramedics came in the middle of the night and pulled the mom out of their SUV, where she had just been sitting and wailing and moaning. We heard her vocalizations in our sleep, and woke up just as the paramedics arrived. From that day forward, we realized that the two children who lived there were gone. The mom would periodically wail and cry in the middle of the night. The kids gradually started spending afternoons back at the house for awhile, and eventually returned after about two months. CPS, do you think?

So we’re the old codgers keeping an eye on these dopes in our neighborhood. Everyone else seems law-abiding and courteous and we help each other out by taking out the trash of a vacationer or letting them know if a stranger has been hanging around. No very old people around here that I know of.

5

No, not really. My one neighbors are outside a lot (teenage boys with lots of friends, ATVs and a pool) so I can’t help but know what they’re up to when they’re shooting hoops or racing RC cars, but I generally do not pay attention.

Everyone pays attention to me, tho. Maybe because I’m a single young woman and everyone else around me is a family/older couple. One time I was playing in the yard with the dog after I mowed the lawn, and I laid down to watch the clouds. When I sat up my older neighbor from across the street yelled “oh good! I thought you’d passed out!” :slight_smile:

Next to and diagonally from my house are families with teenage boys who have a lot of friends and a lot of cars. Those boys are always outside and I feel like they are keeping an eye on things. As far as I know, they’re all good kids, so I trust them to notice if something is awry.

6

I live in a townhouse, and my front door is directly next to my neighbors’ door. They always leave their door open, with just the glass storm door closed, so I can’t help but see inside as I come and go. We also share a wall, so it’s hard not to know what they’re doing a lot of the time.

So, my neighbors are a young woman, her stepdad, and her two kids - a boy about 10 and a girl about 4. The boy is very friendly and always says hello. The girl, on the other hand, has serious behavior problems - I can hear her screaming, crying, pounding and throwing massive temper tantrums all the time.

I’m pretty sure the kids don’t have the same father since they appear to be of different races. The mother doesn’t seem to work, or to have a car, since I see her and her kids walking to the nearby shopping center often.

The mother always has these kind of sketchy looking guys over whenever her stepdad is gone. I assume one of them is her boyfriend. Parking is scarce in the neighborhood, so they simply just park on the sidewalk in front of our house, for hours and hours. I say hello to them as I come and go since they’re usually standing out front smoking.

Recently, an ambulance showed up and carried the stepdad out on a stretcher… I never did find out what happened, but apparently he is OK now because I’ve seen him a few times since.

Basically, since we share a wall, I hear the kids running around a lot, and I also hear their phone ringing a lot.

Since the woman and her kids live with the stepdad, I have always wondered where her mom is. He must be a pretty nice stepdad, since apparently he is supporting the woman and her kids (the rent on our houses is pretty expensive; we both have the same landlord).

The mom is really nice and we say hello to each other a lot, and her son is always outside playing, and is really friendly. And they have a gorgeous black cat named Spider.

7

No, I don’t. I live in an apartment, and keep to myself. My neighbors to the right just moved, and I only found out because the shades are up and all the furniture is gone. My neighbors to the left I avoid because the man doesn’t speak English in any capacity and the two times he’s approached me, it’s been to babble something about my wireless connection. Uh, no, I’m not letting you use my connection. I pay for it, you can too.
When I buy a house, I plan to be slightly more involved, but not overly friendly or inquisitive. Unless he’s cute. :smiley:

8

I live in an apartment too and all I know about my neighbour on one side is that one time someone parked his car illegally and got him a ticket and he yelled at him for about a half an hour about it. He’s normally very quiet but that one night he was on a rampage about why people should be more careful when they borrow someone’s car.

On the other side is a very young couple and they guy is a bad singer and plays annoying sounding video games too loud all the time. When they have sex she is annoying as hell and it makes me never want to have sex again when I hear it. For the longest time I thought they had a birdcage in the bedroom but ever since I realized it’s them having sex I wish I still thought it was a bird. That also made me realize they can probably hear me having sex and I can only hope they think I have a bird. The bad thing is that before I realized how thin the walls were I was having a long distance relationship for a while and it never occurred to me that someone might overhear me on the phone long distance, if you know what I mean. So I avoid eye contact with them on the elevator. I also hear them fight a lot and they both whine at each other loudly at those times. The other night a loud crash and an “AARGH!” woke me up but I decided not to worry since it sounded more like the argh of a person who was surprised than the argh of a person who is trapped under a bookshelf.

9

I don’t care, but I’m naturally observant, so I see stuff.

10

I don’t. Most of our neighbors are younger than we are, and I’m hoping they’re keeping an eye on us. :slight_smile:

11

I’m also in an apartment, and just keep to myself. My downstairs neighbors make it hard to ignore them, though.

They’re a young couple, maybe a couple of years older than me, but they apparently aren’t happy together. Once or twice a week I can hear them screaming at each other. Well, ok I can hear his voice, but she’s the one screeching like a banshee.

They’ve lived downstairs since January and so far have woken me up 4 times? 5? The first time was New Years, and they were outside at 3AM. The next two were at 2AM when dude’s car alarm went off. That doesn’t sound so bad, but he doesn’t seem to know how to shut it off… The first time it woke me up, he ended up driving down the street with it still going off (it wasn’t someone stealing it, I promise). They don’t wake me up if they’re fighting indoors, but for some ridiculous reason, they simply HAVE TO go outside and scream at each other. It’s usually the same time of night, too: 2-3AM. There’s only been 1 time I’ve heard them fight during the day.

When they first moved in, they also made a habit of parking in other peoples’ parking spots. Jerks.

A month or so after they got here, the landlord called me and asked if I’d heard anything unusual. Barely here a month, and already neighbors were complaining enough that the management was looking into it.

I don’t want to know what complete strangers are arguing about, especially when one of them likes to screech and repeat herself constantly.

12

I do. My upstairs neighbors are more than annoying, and they often break the law. I don’t care if they do so in the privacy of their own home, but it gets ridiculous when they start taking over our stuff - as in we can’t leave our grill on the front porch because they are always drunk and knocked it over before, but I hate to lug it in, so I kinda just keep an eye on them whenever they are home. It’s not like I gawk in their windows or anything, I just leave the blinds open so I can see the front of the house easily. I kinda watch my neighbors on the one side, mostly because they had a car get broken into the same time as us, and they are usually gone for months at a time in the summer, so we watch their house (somewhat) just so nothing big happens.

Brendon

13

This thread reminds me, sadly, of the “people across the street”.

My husbands parents bought this house new in the early "70’s. We bought this house in the early 2’s.

Just after we moved in, a rain storm hit. I had the top off of the Jeep. I was standing in the window of the garage - I didn’t know it was raining.

But he did.

14

No f’ing clue. The way my house is situated, we don’t see much of the neighbors on either side of us. We’re also not in a very “neighborly” neighborhood which suits me just fine.

15

I don’t deliberately keep an eye an out, but I am friendly with most of my neighbors. We’ll often see each other when out working in the yard and exchange pleasantries. If their daily routine (at least the part of it that happens when I’m at home) was significantly disrupted, I’d probably notice within a week or so.

The harpy who lives next door is constantly screeching at her children, so the whole block always knows what she’s doing, particularly in the spring and summer when we have our windows open.

16

Ok, I must be missing something but I don’t get this post at all.

17

This thread is very entertaining. :slight_smile:

Yeah, and I meant to write more than that before I posted.

Our neighborhood is rural, and there is a fair amount of distance between houses. The neighbors across the road are farmers, and very nosy. “What was the box truck doing at your house the other day? There were a bunch of cars last Friday. Did you have a party? I saw your mom come by yesterday.” And so on. I find their manner annoying. They are also the same age as I am (early thirties) and so I guess I think they have enough things to think about without managing my life, too.

We are much closer to the Girls, who are two never-married sisters in their late seventies. They are utterly loopy, completely naive, and very sweet. They ask a lot of questions, too (“I saw the furniture truck at your house! What did you get?”), but I get less annoyed with them. They also keep packages for us if we’re not home, and want to know what we ordered. I showed them a Le Creuset pot the other day, and they were fascinated. But if I need any adult toys, I won’t be getting them UPS. :smiley:

18

I guess I didn’t really answer the question, did I? I don’t keep an eye on any of the neighbors but The Girls. Everyone else is too far away, really. The Girls, though, I see nearly every day as I go in and out of the driveway or walk out the lane to get the mail. Especially in the summer, if I didn’t see at least one of them for the whole day, I’d be scurrying over to make sure they were alright. Which they would totally eat up. They really are darlings, even if they are a bit nosy.

19

Yeah, we keep an eye out. Our former across the street neighbor was an alcoholic shut in and we’d kinda watch to make sure he went out once in a while and that the lights turned on and off in a normal pattern–mostly we were checking that he was still alive. Now that he sold the place (which, now that all the drifts of garbage have been cleaned out and it’s for sale again) we watch the prospective buyers come by, look through the place and then bolt out the door to their cars and go screeching away, grimacing in horror. Yup, it really IS that bad in there!

I keep an eye on my catty corner neighbor’s place because she keeps horses and goats there sometimes–one time a couple of kids “borrowed” her horse without asking and I let her know what happened so she could go track them down. She’s a single woman and while her son was deployed to Afghanistan she found it very comforting to know she could ask the SO to come over and help her with projects she can’t handle alone.

My next door neighbors tend to be drunk and fighting a lot, forget to watch their kid, lock the poor guy out of the house sometimes, leave trash fires burning unattended in a fifty five gallon drum and have many, MANY visitors per day who zoom in, dash inside for about a minute then screech away–looks uncannily like dope dealing to me! Yeah, we watch them like hawks. Sometimes we go out with our cameraphones and take pictures of license plates when it gets too egregious–tends to chill the traffic out for a while.

Our other next door neighbor had a triple bypass and my SO wags a finger at him when he’s out too often sneaking cigarettes–we also busted him eating butter cookies he wasn’t supposed to have and was also feeding to our pudgy dog. He got a bit of a scolding for that one, but his wife appreciates we’re keeping an eye on him while she’s at work. We also play fetch over the chainlink fence with his dog to keep him from getting too porky.

The neighbors across the street have a big Rottweiler that used to get out all the time before they built the fence and the only reason why he hasn’t been hit by a car is that the SO would catch him and tie him back up. Wonder if they ever figured out where those carabiners came from that were attached to his collar? We also find it amusing to watch their slutty teenaged daughter sneak in and out of her window at night, and they have a ten year old with anger management issues (he looks like a poster child for fetal alcohol syndrome) who will sometimes try to hit or throw rocks at our dogs so we keep an eye out for him, too.

Yeah, we’re nosy, what of it? :wink:

20

I wave at all my neighbors, but have no idea what they are doing and probably wouldn’t even recognize them if I bumped into them at a store.