Neighborly Sorts
Connecting with neighbors new and old...
October is off to a pretty great start. My friend Richard and I had lunch at Cancun last Thursday and then headed to... well, some park.
He called it High Rocks...
And it was off of Dark Hollow Road...
And AllTrails couldn't seem to decide whether it was Ralph Stover or Tohickon Valley...
But at any rate, it had rocks that were pretty high, and it looked like this...
Fast-forward to Saturday the 5th; and I happened to be walking out to the kitchen to refill my coffee, when I stopped to peer out the living-room window for a moment.
I looked down to see our neighbor "Hardhat" from two doors down—standing on our front porch and looking up at me as though he had just rung our doorbell (which, like pretty much everything else around here, doesn't work).
He held something up for me to see...
She keeps her keys on a janky carabiner snap-hook that opens itself if you even just look at it the wrong way...
So, it's not unheard of for a few of them to jump ship on occasion whenever they feel like it.
I ran down and grabbed it—thanking him profusely and wondering how many of these other clowns around here would've instead pocketed the key in the hopes of stealing something valuable out of our mailbox going forward. (Hardhat absolutely shared this sentiment, by the way.)
Then I ran back upstairs and told Kitten,
So... Hardhat just saved the day. I think he andDitzNicole deserve some tomatoes from the garden.
But our stockpile here at the apartment was depleted.
And Kitten still had to run back out and grab some things at the grocery store first—during which she ran into Nicole outside and got the full story about the key...
Then Hardhat had come along, spotted the key, and figured that someone else might come try to steal it; so he took it upon himself to ring our doorbell and try to return it.
Call it a rarity, but... I don't like them very much.
As far as I'm concerned, he's the true champion of the day. And so, he gets every tomato.
Thus...
Later that evening, Kitten, the Molerat, and I piled into the car and headed over to my parents'—stopping at Wawa to grab a bite for dinner on the way—and Kitten and I raced against the setting sun to harvest every tomato we could.
We planted four plants back in the spring; but, with volunteer upstarts that sprouted from last year's crops, we have more than a dozen plants going strong... and they are absolutely puking tomatoes all over the place.
Meanwhile, my parents were watching Hannah and Liv while Kelly and Steve were out to dinner to celebrate their sixth anniversary... So, Liv promptly dragged Riley outside to play until well after it got dark.
Kelly snapped these pics when she and Steve got back from dinner...
Then it was time to deliver Hardhat's reward... at which point we found out his name is actually Rob.
Congratulations to them!
He was totally blindsided and super appreciative—especially since Nicole apparently went to school to study culinary arts.
It turns out that Rob also grew up in Bensalem (where Kelly and I did as well); and so we thought for a brief moment that we might have a bunch of common acquaintances... until I asked how old he was, and he said he's 28.
Oh well.
On Monday, Kitten took the day off to drop her car at the mechanic's so they could inspect it and service the control arm (inter alia).
But I guess it is kind of a good idea, since she's doing 90mph on the turnpike for an hour every day.
Later that afternoon, we took the opportunity to walk over to our apartment complex's rental office and see how to go about finally getting my name onto the lease.
But, Kitten's last name did change last year... and we figured certain third parties are likely to notice that when we submit our lease-renewal form in a few days... and so it's probably just easiest to go legit and tack my name on there as well.
Ruth's been booked for assault. Superstar does drug deals in the parking lot. Our old downstairs neighbors absolutely trashed the place while they lived here...
Is a boring old anarchistic bookworm even colorful enough to fit in around here, or do I risk giving this place a good name?
Guess we'll find out soon...
...But I decided to take a few lives on Wednesday, just to help my chances of being accepted.
I almost got carried away and squashed an ally by accident!
I went to lean on the post, and damn near put the butt of my palm right on top of him!
But this guy, I killed on purpose. He was trespassing on our tomato plants; and, in our garden, the penalty for that is death...
We had as much produce as we could carry; so, later that evening, we knocked on Jeff and Lillian's door, and on our new neighbors Keith and Rosie's, and we hooked 'em up with some farm-fresh herbs and veggies.
Then we walked over to Rob and Nicole's and gave them a box full of tomatoes, peppers, coriander, basil, rosemary, and a few heads of this year's garlic harvest that I'd saved for planting but didn't have space for.
Rob's exact words were,
Yes, well...