My neighbors annoy me indirectly. Otherwise, there’s almost no interaction.
There is a security door to the building and my front door is along the same wall, so whenever the door is allowed to slam shut, I can feel it in my apartment.
Also, although wood floors are nice, they are not nice when there is what sounds like an Obese High-Heeled Ladies Bowling-Ball Basketball championship game going on upstairs.
Still, I can’t really complain. Secured access, rules against pets, rules against smoking, and no one has kids or anything loud.
Neighbors seem pretty cool. Across the street and next door the guys are always working on their cars, which isn’t too bad except when it’s 1 AM and they are running pneumatic tools or even better, checking the exhaust.
The lady next door, you can tell her personality is 180 degrees from me. Extremely outgoing, opinionated, loud. But still, nice.
Anyway, I was clearing all of the shitty plants from in front of my house the summer after I moved in. She stopped me before I could plant grass and convinced me to let her plant a flower bed. I said I didn’t think I could maintain it she said it’d be fine. She’s a fantastic gardener with an impeccable yard. Mind you she also did not have a job so she had time to tend everything.
Well the flower bed, while beautiful, came to be a huge pain to me because the area was so weedy. I couldn’t keep up with the weeding and the dead heading and the pruning. It stressed me out a ton and it always looked bad. I was working my ass off just to please the neighbor.
I told her I was going to remove half the bed one summer and told her if she wanted any plants please take them. She convinced me otherwise and had me pay some kids $250 to weed it and put down mulch. Nothing improved. The next summer I just hired a different company to come pare everything down a ton.
Now my front bed is worry-free and my neighbor doesn’t talk to me hardly at all. Her husband is just as shy as me so he doesn’t talk any more or less. And her kids are handsome young men so they only talk to me ironically.
Oh, god, phlegm and spitting would make me insane. It makes me sick to my stomach to hear or see it.
Our neighbours are great: single lady on the left, single man on the right. Single lady occasionally has the music on, but it’s “classic rock” and to my taste, so I don’t care. Single man on the right sometimes works on projects in the driveway, say, involving a boat, but I don’t care. Boats are good things. Single lady puts up with our chihuahua peeing on her lawn, as ours is all bark mulch and shrubs, and I make sure any solid deposit is picked up. Single guy puts up with the trees/shrubs that encroach on his space. We are lucky!
Last night I was sitting on my front porch having a cocktail when this guy I had never seen before rode up on a scooter, took off his helmet, walked up to the porch of the loud family across the street, opened the front door and yelled “Hey Greg! Don’t be fucking up your life by fucking with them bitches!” Put his helmet back on, got on the scooter and drove off.
I looked at my wife and said, “tha’ts good advice.”
Now we imagine scooter guy as this superhero who drives around DC yelling advice into people’s front doors: “Bob, dont’ be sticking your dick in that blender!” “Sheila, that scarf clashes with that blouse!”
Thanks for the clarification; I’ve seen cases where the cute little doggies got to stay inside, while the “guard dog” had a crate outside or a rope line. I hope when this K9 retires he gets to enjoy some inside spoiling. Don’t they usually get to stay with their handlers after retired?
That’s pretty funny, as our cute little indoor doggies are Mojo the German shepherd and Sebastian the great Pyrenees! And yes, when the other dog retires, he will also come home to be a spoiled pet. (Assuming he mellows out a lot. He’s a sweet boy, but intense to the point of being a little nuts. Great for his job description, less great as a pure pet. But he’s only 3 now, so he may calm down as he gets older. But even if he’s never a “lolling about on the couch sharing the kids’ ice cream” pet, he’ll stay with us and be more pampered than he is now.)
As for “usually,” every agency with a K9 unit sets its own policy/policies. Tony used to work for a department that didn’t allow handlers to adopt their retired partners. When he moved to his current department, they were just establishing a dog unit, so he made a proposal to the sheriff: that Tony be allowed to provide his own appropriate and trained dog. For liability reasons, the department buys the dog from his handler ($1.00 and a bill of sale) and sells him back at the end of service (whether retirement or job change.) Others in the unit have donated military dogs, so there’s a different arrangement - one guy got fired, and his dog went to another handler. So… short version: it varies.
Lacunae Matata - My neighbor down the road retired from the police force at the same time his dog was ready to retire. He kept the dog and the city will pay for the dog’s food, supplements and medical care for the rest of the dog’s life. I think that’s pretty decent of them.
Don’t they usually get to stay with their handlers after retired?