My neighbor, Mr. Ohseedee

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I think I’ve snarked about my neighbor (the one in my front-and-center view) with his rather excessive yard maintenance habits. During the recent Great Blizzard of Ought-Fifteen, he set a new high.

In summer, this guy mows his lawn incessantly - at least twice a week, sometimes more. I’ve watched him go (in about four years) from a standard riding mower to a large-ish tractor mower to, now, about a $8-10k Cub Cadet ZTR. His yard is not particularly large, perhaps a half acre in all. It’s very slightly hilly. It’s very well bordered and I think he can “overmow” every edge. During the summer, it’s mildly crazy-making to hear him fire it up yet again. He mows in the morning. He mows in the evening. He mows in the twilight. He mows in light rain. He mows when it’s frosty. (This is Nwingland; we often get bizarre summer weather.)

Then comes winter. A dusting of snow; he’s out meticulously clearing his driveway (about 50-60 feet long, with a double-car pullout). There are at least four adults and thus four cars. One (Mom’s, I think) lives in the garage. Nothing much lives in the other garage bay, because (1) it contains a huge number of gas-powered toys and tools and (2) it’s only deep enough for a VW Beetle without the bumpers. So there are frequently three or four cars in the driveway that have to be moved to meticulously clear this snow-dusting away.

Then comes a normal winter storm. As the flakes taper off, out comes either the quad with the snow blade, or one of his three snow blowers. (I didn’t know he had three snow blowers. Daughter #3 has an upstairs window that looks right out at him and she’s utterly unshy about watching his shenanigans. She says he has three snow blowers in the Batcave.)

Then comes a big winter storm. He is outside clearing during lulls in the storm - which is not necessarily a bad practice, if you’re diligent and don’t want to face two-foot drifts all at once. But he doesn’t just do a quick clearing and go back inside for tea or coffee or beer or whatever. He completely finishes the job - plow, blower, shovel, broom, dusts the cars as he moves them, everything.

Now understand, I spent two hours doing just that this morning… *after *the Great Storm. I snowblew. I shoveled. I moved the one car that lives outdoors (Daughter #3’s; life is tough). I scraped the surface, trimmed the edges of the ~30 inch snow berms, I tidied up. But the goddamn storm is over, and that’s what you do when a storm is over.

Mr. OCD spent many hours outside, in what failed to live up to media hype but was still a big, pounding snowstorm that went on for well over 24 hours. Every lull… the OCD clan was outside frantically plowing, blowing, dusting, car-moving, sweeping, picking up stray flakes… in snow that then got so heavy we couldn’t see them any more, maybe 200 feet away. Next lull, there they were again.

Every time his big driveway lights went on, I had to resist the urge to make popcorn and sit in the window watching the entertainment. I also had to resist both the urge to go dump a lot of snow in his driveway (for which I lacked a convenient method) or tiptoeing across, in the latest 1-2 inch per hour snowfall, to scrape HA HA HA in his again-soiled driveway.

AFAIK, this guy is not any kind of public servant or emergency responder or critical personage - I think he’s middle/upper management at a car dealer. Even the other neighbors on the street who are yard-proud and snow-worriers are much closer to my end of doing things (when needed, and not in the face of nature’s undoing) than his. And his yard and house are nice enough, but no showplace - I used to live next to a guy who was tinkering on the house and yard 24/7/365, but it showed. Mr. OCD’s house doesn’t stand out in any way… and he has been unable to sell it in two goes in recent years. (Houses do not tend to stay unsold here very long unless they are overpriced or substandard.)

All I can say is that the 3-Stooges entertainment of the last 48 hours goes a long ways towards offsetting the annoyance of endless summer mowing.

2

Just you wait until a Buffalo-level storm hits and dumps six feet of snow in your driveway, and watch while he runs out of gas halfway through.

3

Compliment him a bunch, bake him cookies, and very subtly imply that he’d be your bestest friend if he took care of your driveway too.

4

Maybe he just really can’t stand his wife?

5

Is it snowblew or snowblowed?

6

Snow. Blows.

7

A friend of mine has a “workshop” for just that reason. Say a chair leg needs some glue. He takes the chair out to his workshop (part of a detached garage) and glues it, then watches the glue dry. He can’t stand her, but can’t afford a divorce. So, workshop!

8

Meanwhile Mr. OCD is bitching about how lazy you are for not being out there every lull to scoop your 3 snowflakes off the sidewalk.

9

An ex-neighbor of mine acted similarly. He had a few short trees near our property line. Every year when it was leaf-dropping time, we would be out there 2-3 times per day raking what few leaves had fallen since the last rake.

I am not making this up: I once saw him manually removing leaves from these trees and placing them in a bag.
mmm

10

That’s nothing. In college my roommate and I frequently woke up to the sound of the landlord mowing the grass.

But there wasn’t any grass in the yard.

11

Maybe he doesn’t like watching t.v.

12

That’s what I was thinking. Maybe his yard is his hobby. And he can afford expensive toys to make his hobby more fun.

13

On a long-ago trip through the southwest, I chanced to see a man vacuuming his lawn. The local climate was unremittingly hostile to grass, so he had put down astroturf. (Another gentleman had gone the lower-maintenance route of simply painting the dirt green.)

14

The lady across the street and over one house rides round and round cutting the grass every 3 days. First one direction, then the other way. It bugs me because of where my comfy chair is in relation to the open window.

Compared to other crazy neighbor stories not a big deal, but what a waste of time.

15

The man who lived next door to my family when I was growing up mowed his lawn every night. He used a push mower, so it wasnt really annoying. I think it’s the way he unwound after work.

My daughter is the same way - in attitude, not frequency or type of mower. When we want to mow her lawn as a favor she tells us not to because she finds it relaxing.

16

Amateur Barbarian, Please explain to me why you did not get the popcorn & watch the show. I watch these kinds of shows often. Heck, you could not dream this stuff up in one hundred years. They are very entertaining, more so than most TV shows. Do you think that he would be offended if he saw you watching him? Why?

17

I know right. I hate people who take care of their homes and yards. They’re all assholes.

18

Not all of them, but the ones for whom yard maintenance means firing up loud-ass equipment to achieve minor tasks can all go fuck themselves.

19

Who was it who lived across the street from Ladder Man, who would find a way to incorporate a ladder into any random yard or home maintenance project?

20

Mowers can be annoying but leaf blowers are the worst, I think. They are so much louder! But the operator usually wears ear protection which insulates them from how irritating it is for those around them without ear protection. And worse still, it brings out the damn OCD in everyone, from what I can tell.

It’s not the twenty minutes wherein your actually working that is so awful, I can abide that. But damn, the last thirty minutes everyone has to listen to while you chase first one leaf then another, down the damn drive is crazy making, in my opinion.

I could get behind a law that required they only work for thirty minutes in a row, then, you have to wait another hour before the damn thing will start up again. People would radically change how they use them, I think. For the better!

And it’s always the people with tiny little yards too!