Talk about beautiful! I was really impressed with it’s fullness and size. There are some I’ve seen that are just as big but have hardly any flowers.

Here’s my magnolia tree:

Mine’s obviously younger. We planted it maybe the second year we lived here. It was just a stick then. Seriously. Ha.

So the other day we got caught outside by Neighbor Lady and as we stood there talking to her, she was asking us if the magnolia was a tree or a bush, or what. Well, duh, it’s a magnolia, it’s a TREE. “Oh, well then,” she says, “you should have cut off the lower branches when it was smaller.”

Uh, lady, mind your own magnolia!

Okay it’s just a small rant. I get tired of her telling us what to do, how to garden; especially when our plants are clearly thriving.

I wonder if she wonders why she hasn’t seen me since probably August 2007 or before, even…

I am sick and tired of walking out in the yard with my little boy only to find another dead blackbird in the grass, or in today’s case: on my porch. Do you know how traumatic that is to a bird and animal loving three-year-old? Do you know how nasty that is? What if he touches one before I realize it’s there, or, heaven forbid, our stupid dog eats one? Do you want to pay their medical bills?

I don’t care if the blackbirds eat the birdseed meant for the purple martins. I don’t care if the blackbirds try to live in your purple martin houses.

STOP SHOOTING THEM!

I guess it would be one thing if you’d just clean up your own messes. But, no, you have to shoot them with your little low-powered gun and let them fly over to our yard and die.

I have a few words for the lady next door, too, if I ever find out that she is indeed shoving dead birds found in her yard into ours. Or aiming her lawnmower just right so that they purposely fly into our yard in a million little pieces. I could swear that the bird I found two weeks ago was last seen in her yard. It’s interesting how it mysteriously appeared at the edge of our patio where I almost stepped on it.

I’m going to have my husband have a talk with you about this as soon as possible. Should it continue after that, I’ll resort to more drastic measures. I’m not above throwing the dirty, soon-to-be fly ridden creatures back into your yard. All I need is a pair of gloves. I’m also not above reporting you to the city, if that’s what it takes… and maybe a few other things that are brewing in my mind.

STOP SHOOTING THE DANG BLACKBIRDS!

I got door-to-door salesmen yesterday. Now this is weird because in all of my six years of living here, we’ve not had one of these before. Not one. We’ve had a politician, once. But no salesmen. The doorbell rang and I ran to the door because I hoped against all hope that it was the DHL or UPS man bringing my new camera or memory card or candle supplies. I was sorely disappointed. E was in his room where he was supposed to be taking a nap, but he freaked when he heard the doorbell. He thinks all doorbells = MeMaw. So I get there and it’s these two punk college students and the one is right there, the other is off to my right, about ten or more feet away from me on my patio. I’m like what the heck? It takes this kid forever to get out why he’s there. I ask again what company he’s with, he says a singleword with a tone of voice an attitude that assumes I’m supposed to know what he’s talking about. I don’t. At one point I think I know what he wants and I say I’m not interested and try to go back inside. He laughs and looks at me with this look that makes me stop and second guess what I think he wants. He says, “I guess no one’s told you about me yet.” with a tone of voice that makes me wonder if he’s sent out by the county for a survey or something. He’s rattling off names, common this-town names, first and last and I’m just like WOULD YOU GET TO THE FREAKING POINT? He was so slow and… strange… …and looking at me so weird… it took me forever to figure it out. He was selling something afterall. “Books for little ones that will help prepare them for what they will be doing in school.” Ooooookay, I get it. NO. No books. I’m tripping over them in every room as it is. I say I’m not interested again and I get the same look and laugh and so I’m just like, look, my kid is in there by himself, I am going inside now. He knew I had a little kid before he came, he said something to that effect when he started. So I watch out the window and they just stand there for a minute. I’m still trying to figure out why the other guy was standing so far off and not saying anything. Okay well it was all just weird.

Reminds me of another time for some reason. This car pulled up outside as I was putting the dog out on his chain as I getting ready to leave. They parked directly across from my lilac bush (as seen in these photos), not on my side of the road, on the neighbor’s side. The dog got free and ran over to them and I had to go get him. There were three people, two women, one man. 50′s and 60′s in age. This has been a while ago, so I don’t remember what all was said then, but I start to go back to the house and I realize that they’re not walking up the road to my neighbor’s house on whose side they parked, no, they cross my back yard to walk over to my other neighbor who’s house/land does not even border my road! What would they have done if we’d had that fence we want? Sheesh. The guy was almost tripped because Rimshot ran out the back on his chain because I didn’t know he was going that way. Had he been tripped, he coulda fallen on the patio and hit his head, and we could have been sued because it’s our property and our dog, even if I did not authorize their being on my property. Now they were walking aimlessly around neighbor lady’s backyard like they didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. I had a kid to get to the doctor’s so I had to go. I went back in and got ready, came out, put the dog in, and was trying to leave when they started talking to me from her carport where they were all sitting. They started asking me for cuttings of my lilac bush. I’m like, I gotta goooooo, take what you want, lol. Thankfully, where they were parked did not pose a problem for me to get out of my garage, or I’da been ticked. When I came back but half an hour later they were gone.

And the part about my driveway reminds me of something else. Before we got the neighbors that share the road with us that we have, we had some other neighbors. These people were moving to an apartment so they were selling a lot of stuff and had an auction one day. We went to leave that day and came out of the house to find cars all up and down the highway and our road, and even the auctioneer with his big butt truck partially in our yard, tearing up our grass with his fat tires. We could hardly get out of our garage (it is right on the road and the road is not all that wide). Steve was soooo mad he made the one guy get his truck outta our yard.

Yeah I wish we had that 6-foot privacy fence we want…

But, ya know, we really are nice people. When that neighbor who shares the road with us needed to put out a new water line a couple of months ago and the guy behind us who, we thought, was friends with the first guy, refused to let him dig on “his” easement to put the waterline in, Steve said, heck, I don’t care, go into our property as much as you need to, just be sure and fill it in and get grass going again. And, really, I don’t think the second neighbor could really object to him using the easement because the city owns the easement… or maybe it’s the phone company, or something, but that neighbor doesn’t own it. Well, if he wants to be a jerk, so be it…

Ehhhhh… what?

We call this woman Neighbor Lady and we try to avoid her because she likes to talk and talk and talk and she’s nosy and kind of bossy. My mom used to be appalled at this and would tell me to “be nice” to our neighbors. We’re nice. We just don’t want to talk.

She’s always telling us how to take care of our plants and how we’re doing it wrong and such. Well, Steve must be doing something right, his roses look better and bloom longer than hers.

There was one time she was so offended and stopped me one morning when I was leaving for school; she was upset because Steve had marked the property lines. I told her honestly, we were thinking about getting a fence… I didn’t tell her it would have been a 6 foot privacy fence. She was just appalled that he would mark the property lines and “no one’s ever needed to do that before,” and “I told so-and-so, ‘I don’t know why he’d do that,’” and things like that.

Then there was the time my mom and siblings were down on a Friday afternoon and we were going to go to supper. We all walked outside the house only to find her and two other neighbors walking around our back patio, smelling Steve’s roses. I took it in stride, but it really pissed me off. Sorry, maybe it’s the country girl in me, you don’t do that crap. Stay away unless I invite you.

There was the van she tried to sell and our friends/neighbors (were friends before neighbors) wanted to buy it. They were going to give her above Blue Book value but suddenly she starts accusing them of trying to cheat her, and says that it’s worth $10,000 (please!) and so-and-so’s going to give her $10,000 and how dare they try to cheat her and I think she even told the husband that he was stupid. Then she has to start bringing it up with us, she knows we are friends with them; Steve had to say, “look, they’re my friends, we’re not talking about this.”

This woman has a way of offending you but in a way so that you don’t notice until later when you think about the conversation, and you think, “Hey! She insulted me!” But by then, it’s too late. But she also has a sweet side – she did give us two small braided rugs when we moved in and a wall hanging for Elijah just before he was born.

So, back to today. Steve says, well, he doesn’t know if we’re going to sell it or turn it into a rental house. We had a good laugh when he told me this, he said her eyes got really big and she said, “OH you don’t want to do that! It’s so hard to find good renters and they don’t take care of the place and you have to fix it.” Blah blah blah. Honestly, we have talked about this all before – he would like to maybe turn this place into rental property when we can finally get out. He seems to think if we put the rent up high enough (yet decent), the only people who could live here would end up being good renters. I say it doesn’t matter, we’d be taking a chance. But that’s all another story.

So, here I am, thinking, how serious is this friend? Steve says that Neighbor Lady went inside to call this friend after he talked to her. He told her what it appraised for last time, but he accidentally lied and upped it by $2,000, but that wasn’t on purpose. And then he says since then we’ve put work into it – we have. Last time it was appraised, none of the upstairs was finished yet. And she says we “wouldn’t have to work on it anymore” because this friend’s son is a carpenter. Okayyyyy…

I’m also thinking that unless this person is really serious, then I don’t want to mess with it. I mean, we are SO cramped in here right now, so there’s a lot of stuff laying around cluttering up the place because there’s NO WHERE to put it… and by this I mostly mean 537 candles. So before anyone would look at this place, I’d have to do some MAJOR cleaning. And we’d need to do some trim work and painting probably. And I am just not looking forward to that unless this will come of something.

And, the last thing I want is someone coming by here out of the blue wanting to see the place. That SO does not go over well with me. I have to be prepared. I don’t even want my friends or family coming over without calling. Where I come from (which isn’t exactly here) that’s almost rude. I neeeeeed warnings.

So I guess I will just try to get this place straightened up some more and sit around and wait and see if we hear anything about it again. If not, oh well. But if this person is really serious about this and can afford to pay what this place is really worth, even if it’s not completely finished/remodeled… then… wow… awesome… let’s get the heck outta this house!