I didn’t explain it well. I had put a tarp over my open Jeep. I couldn’t see the Jeep to see that the tarp had blown off. Neighbor across the street could see that 1) I had tried to cover the Jeep against the rain (so I did care if it got wet) and 2) the tarp had come off so the interior of the Jeep was getting soaked.
He just stood there and stared. Didn’t bother to let me know my car was getting soaked.
I didn’t bother to hide my laughter when his drunken ass slammed his truck into his brick house, either.
We can only see 3 houses from our farm, but I keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. I have pretty much always lived in the country and I enjoy the “neighborliness”, if that’s a word.
The old couple across the road definitely keep an eye on us. Mary, or as she is known in the neighborhood, “Old lady power walker” often stops by if she sees me in the garden or working outside and always has detailed, sometimes bordering on disturbing, observations of what we’ve been up to.
(as an example, I tried building an igloo in the backyard a few months ago, as refenced in this very popular thread, which I thought was invisible from the street. But I saw OLPW last weekend and she said “I saw your igloo, it looked very nice!”)
OK, that makes way more sense. From your original post, I was thinking maybe your husband’s parents died or something and there was rain and he cried…something horribly melodramatic like that.
I only have contact with the folks across the street, and the folks across the driveway. The folks across the street have video cameras, and have taken the opportunity to aim one over my way. Actually, they keep an eye on me more than I keep one on them.
The folks across the driveway keep to themselves; I occasionally speak to the husband.
The folks next door to me (I live in a duplex) also keep to themselves, but that’s because there are 9 extra relatives living there that aren’t on the rental agreement.
A few apartments ago, I had an elderly neighbor whose daily routine I knew just well-enough to know if there was something wrong. Didn’t put any effort into it. I only knew the aspects of his routine that intersected with my own. Like walking home in winter, if the lights weren’t on by 6pm, I’d probably have noticed. If I checked and they were still off by 8pm, I’d probably go knock on the door to be sure he was okay.
That’s how they found out my grandma died when I was a kid. The neighbors checked in on her when they saw her house dark in the evening. She’d died peacefully during the day and the change in evening routine (no lights on by 7pm) alerted the neighbors.
I hope you thanked him/her for just looking instead of…oh…making sure you were still alive.
We have one odd neighbor that we don’t watch, but we don’t not pay attention too. When we bought our house the original owners mentioned that he get’s alot of packages and leaves alot.
So we watched, yup, almost every single day he gets a few packages (from USPS, UPS and FedEx) and within minutes of the package arrival he’s leaves the house and get’s back home about 10 or 15 minutes later. That’s odd in and of itself, but then usually at least one or two times in the middle of the night he drives away and get’s back just a few minutes later. I have three gueses
1)Something illegal (drugs etc)
2)Maybe he’s into ebay so he’s always buying and reselling items (that would explain the constant deliveries and always leaving, BTW there’s a 24 hour post office about 10 minutes away)
3)He does the Ham Radio thing. I don’t know why that would matter, but for some reason I always figure it has something to do with that. Now if I could just figure out how to get my scanner to pick up Ham Freqs I’d listen in and see if I could tell what’s going on.
Like I said, it’s not that I follow him around, but even when we have out of town people staying at our house they’ll comment on it.
There’s a family across the street that aren’t really great neighbors. Well, compared to some described here they sound great, actually, but they can be a little noisy, lots of activity and mess sometimes as well. Lately I’ve been watching a lot because, on MLK Day, I got up to find their house being auctioned and I’m keeping an eye open for them to move.
Otherwise, not really. I’ll watch for the boy across the street to be outside so I can send my son out to play with him. That’s about it. The man next door died and it was six months before I knew.
I know nothing about my neighbors and don’t particularly care. Kind of sad since I have owned the house for seven years. My “ex” husband knew every one of them. Names, work schedules, what they did for a living, when they were out, how many kids, if they had a landscaper etc etc. I found it very creepy when I would catch him spying out the window. I wonder if he used binoculars when I wasn’t there??!!
Let’s see…across the street, the entire block is a church. But it’s a Lutheran church, so even when it’s busy, it’s pretty darn quiet.
Next door neighbors: One side is a middle-aged single woman who works three jobs, so we don’t see her all that much, but we know who she is, and that she doesn’t do much to keep up her house. We’re kind of hoping she decides to sell sometime soon: We’d like to offer $30,000, and tear it down (we’d end up with a nice big lot on the corner). The other side is a gentleman somewhere in his 90’s, who we talk to a bit when we’re outside working. Our houses are about 5 feet apart (both right near the lot line), so we’d hear any sirens or things like that, but he gets visitors daily (he may get meals on wheels delivered), and his family is around a lot, so I’m not too worried.
Behind the house, on the alley: Directly behind is a rental house (college town, lots of rental housing), owned by the son-in-law of the older next-door neighbor, currently rented by college students (but when we moved in, there was a family there (who moved out in the middle of the night)). My wife and I have introduced ourselves, and loaned them shovels from time to time, but I would guess they’ll be gone this summer. On either side of that are rentals-one is a duplex, currently rented by two elderly women with health problems who don’t leave the house much. The other is a house that is for sale for a price much, much too high for this area, listed with an out-of-town realtor, that really needed someone living in it, so it was rented out this fall. I don’t really keep an eye out on any of them, but I have a general sense of what’s going on.