Uh-oh. Perhaps you live one street over from me. There’s a house there with somebody living in the back yard, two siblings contesting control of the house which used to be their mother’s, and a ton of people in and out of there quite a bit–oh, and the cops show up now and then and arrest someone.
I left out “Toyota guy” who had a Toyota from like the first year they had Toyotas and like the upholstery was falling apart and everything and he finally gave it up but up until I left he was still clipping his yard (when he did) with hand-held grass clippers.
I’ve been known to pinch a penny 'til it screams but COME ON! I would drive by and see him on his hands and knees “snip snip” live a little man!
We used to refer to the people on one side of us as the Joads. Between the menagerie of animals and kids and extended family living there, the yard has looked like a bomb went off in a junk shop for the past three years while they remodeled the place.
“Fat Girls”
We have “The Smokers” across the street (outside smoking ten times a day on their front step), and behind us is becoming the Crazy Lady Who Lets Her Dog Run Around Off-Leash. That one might need shortening. The new neighbours next door seem to be normal - the jury’s still out on them.
Used to live next to a really bad garage band, the kind that would play (think bad punk by a hair band) for about four minutes, then sit around talking about how great they were for an hour. Went on like that for years. We decided the band’s name must be “Sour Cream”… because nobody could tell if they were any good.
We actually have pretty decent neighbors at the moment. Except for:
That Punk Kid aka Bike Thief: loser kid lives next door plays his music loud, steals bikes, doesn’t go to school or have a job. His mom and sister are Ok, though.
That Family that Lives in Victor’s house: They aren’t so bad now, but we really liked Victor and his family, a lot. They were great. They had financial problems and lost the house. This family moved in. They did something to the fence when moving in that led to slats falling out. Later their back yard canopy/easy up thing flew through the fence in a wind storm. They didn’t even bother to help fix the fence or pay or anything. They let their small child (3-4 yo girl) play unsupervised in their yard where she teased our dogs, poking her fingers through the slats. They never bit her or anything, but they did bark at her because they’re really friendly. The parents got upset with us because our dogs were barking at their kid. They’ve been here a couple years and are better now, but we don’t know their names.
Honorable mention goes to Ping Pong Guy. He’s not annoying at all, but when he first moved in like 12 yrs ago, he and his friends were always in the garage playing ping pong. We actually like him and his wife. We know their names but we still refer to them as Ping Pong Guy and Girl.
The rest of the dozen or so neighbors we have, we actually like.
Does she look like the Lucky Charms Leprechaun?
When I was in graduate school, my friends and I rented the top floor of a two-flat house. The downstairs apartment was occupied by four guys, all of whom were big guys, who spent most evenings, and every weekend, getting hammered (and playing their stereos loudly). We called them the LBDs – Loud Beefy Drunks.
When my wife and I were first married, we lived in an apartment building. One year, the occupants of the apartment below us were a gay couple; one of them was an aspiring Broadway singer (though he didn’t have much of a voice). He would practice his singing in the evenings (and we often had to ask him to stop when he’d be singing past 10:30 or 11pm. We called him Mr. Showtunes.
We now live in a house. Our neighbors two doors down (and on the other side of the alley) have a dog which spends most of its days outside, and barks at just about everything. My wife has dubbed the dog Barkasaurus Rex. Last year, they got a second dog, which was quiet at first, but quickly learned the “bark at everything” trick from his partner in crime. My wife has dubbed dog #2 Bark Sidious, since she figures he’s the “Sith apprentice” of the original dog.
We call one of our neighbors “Javert” because he actually played Javert on Broadway.
At our last place, we lived by a girl that we called “Big Boobie Frownie Face.”
When I was in grad school, the house on one side of me was “Larry, Daryl and Daryl”. Three middle-aged men lived there. One of them (Larry) was the only one that talked to me. After five years there, one of the Daryls finally asked me a question, but it was far from a conversation. I could never figure out their relationship. Sometimes, I thought they were brothers, sometimes long-time roommates, sometimes a gay threesome. They were also prone to loud arguments in the middle of the night in the backyard. Can’t have any arguing in the house! Let’s share it with the whole neighborhood!
On the other side was Opera Guy. He would play opera at full blast and walk around naked, singing along. He was also occasionally known as the Preacher, because he would stop you on the street and lecture about the end of days, loving Jesus, repenting your sins, etc.
I only have normal neighbors now.
Have you not heard anyone Irish speak ever? One of my fave boy band members is Irish and he could be talking about the Communist Manifesto and all you hear is “Oh faith and b’gorrah they’re after my lucky charms!”
I’m cracking up at so many of these!
My brother used to live in an apartment complex, his upstairs neighbors had these two kids who we referred to as Leadfoot and Cannonball. I don’t know what the hell they did every morning, but it sounded like a pair of elephants leaping off the top bunk. Repeatedly.
The guy who lives behind us and mows his lawn at 930pm (even in December) waking up our kids is currently called “guy who we wished would fall off his roof while hanging his Xmas lights”.
It was just two guys who built a place next to our cabin by which I mean a DUMP there is no humblebrag implied here. And we also called them Larry and Daryl. They invited us over and there was a Tears for Fears album. Nuff Said. I think a huge argument entailed where Laverne and Shirley was invoked and mom said “that’s different!” and I said “HOW!”
My ex and I had Dick and Dora Dork as neighbors when we were in our early thirties and had kids at home. Dick and Dora were older and no longer had kids living at home. Well, HUMAN kids. What they had was Michael the Obnoxious Yappy Pomeranian, who liked to piss on our stone planter. We knew that damn dog’s name since they were constantly screaming at him. Dick and Dora spent a lot of time and money fixing up their front yard, but the effort was never quite, well, finished correctly. They put redwood lattice on one side of their front porch to give themselves more privacy, but the opening was about 18" taller than the standard 8’ lattice they used, so they just overlapped another 4’x8’ sheet on top and screwed the whole mess to the side of the house. They put several concrete statues in the front yard, like full size deer. The whole yard area was only about 150 square feet, so it was like having the cast of Bambi (in unpainted gray concrete) in the front yard, but no prep work was done to the ground underneath, so all of the statues leaned at weird angles.
I did sort of feel bad for them when someone stole all of the statuary, since they did put a lot of work into the yard. What I really wanted to do was tip the thieves!
We have the Veggies, because I can never remember their names and they are vegetarians. Quentin, for the guy that looks like Tarantino. The King of Nowhere, for the old guy who thinks quite highly of himself. A young guy who never talked to anyone, so his winter name was Grog and his summer name was Toolio the Poolio guy. He set up a above ground pool that more or less caved in.
We had the North Korean Precision Parking Drill Team living next door to our townhouse. They had three cars and only one assigned parking spot for their townhouse, so people would be running outside all day and evening to move cars around to “guest” spots so they could all have their cars nearby. We were pretty sure they had a spotter at a window so they could send someone out the second a spot freed up.
The grouchy old lady downstairs is the Grumpallo. She bangs doors a lot, and is generally unpleasant.
Haha - A friend of mine who lives in San Francisco was telling me about the guys down the street with the broken-down Kahrman Ghia who would have to laboriously push it across the street once a week on street sweeping day. For years.