meet the neighbors
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|E|D|F|
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|B|A|C|
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= road
- fence
| fence
A me
B-F neighbors
Neighbors have come and gone since I've been here. B used to be an old guy named Marty, but I haven't seen him in ages, and when I brought Abby the cat over there to see if she was theirs when she hurt her paw (she was), it was a different old guy named Tom. In B's back yard is where the three college guys built a very shoddy 2x lumber + tarp yard shade, and while I was in the garage all day, the outer wall of which is on their property and cut off from me by fence and cinder block wall (I've never seen the other side of that wall, bizarrely enough), I overheard them easily, and learned that one guy goes to UCLA and is a musician. Another sounded 100% exactly like my old pal timb. I liked him automatically.
D is separated from my back fence by their driveway, but they have a tiny garage-turned-guest house that's right up against my fence. In fact, the roof overhangs my fence by several inches, and is low enough that I once casually cleaned out their gutters for them, because they'd never be able to get in the few inches between fence and back wall. In that house is the guy in the big house's mother-in-law. She's the one who feebly yelled "Please stop" when I was banging in shingles at around 9PM :)
I learned who she was when the cable guys gave me his number to call him. He just needed me to grant the phone guys permission to fix her phone line in my yard. The telephone pole that services all of us is on my property by about an inch, just inside the BED fence corner. The lineman have been in my yard probably 6 times now - once to hook up the Asian lady in C's house when she moved in earlier this year, once for that issue with the line in D's mother-in-law's tiny house, once when lineman came by (actually twice) because it was noticed that the T at the top of the pole had cracked in half, threatening electrocution and/or fire if the dangling electrical wires fell into our properties, once (two visits) recently to update something ancient in the lines, and just this past week a couple of times to run new fiberoptic cables finally. It's a busy back yard.
Just tonight, I had a second run-in with the guy from C. I should note that he's not with the Asian girl in C. C is the only official 2-house lot on my street. The houses touch, with entrances midway, and up front for the two separate families. The guy bought the place from a Mexican family this year, moved into the front one, and is renting the back one to the Asian lady - Trang - who seems to the best of my detective abilities to go to bed around 9PM. Everyone in this neighborhood is in bed, lights out by around 10PM. Definitely not a party town, except for the people in E, but I'll get back to them.
The guy from C, who waters the Asian woman in the back house of C's flowers, and is the one who noted my landlady's tree guy had dropped a massive quantity of Juniper branches on said flowers back when she had him decimate my trees' branches, popped his head over once to ask me about that, and leaned around to say high one other time when I was out sawing. He did so again tonight, probably because I plugged in the previous tennant's Christmas lights all around my back patio so I could get a bit more sawing done, and he saw those, and heard me working. We talked for a bit, and it turns out he's a neuromuscular therapist.
He was excited by all of the huge tree stumps piled up in my back yard. He thought they were oaks, then guessed 3 or 4 other trees before I said "Nope, just Ficus." "What?" "Fig trees?" "Oh." "They're pretty crap for woodworking - you can have any you like." That sparked a woodworking talk. It turns out he has another house in a more secluded region up north, and he's cut down a few oaks in his time, and had some couple of friends up there saw them up into boards for him with their portable mill. He said I need one, and I agreed. He's also worked on a lathe and made bowls. I didn't think anyone in this whole area even knew what a lathe was, but now I've found a kindred spirit. Doesn't sound like he does that stuff any more, but recommending a loud machine to me means I think I've found another neighbor who 'gets it,' and doesn't mind me making a bit of woodworking noise. Hooray! Now if only that old lady in D would kick the... no. I'd better not say that. I'll feel guilty ;)
Speaking of loud noises... I mentioned once prior in a post that I heard music, and tracked it down to the folks in E. For the second time, and I think the second 3-day holiday now, they fired up the band again at around 8:30PM. I was outside cutting up logs, shortly after meeting with the neighbor dude from C, who had left by then. They play loud, and it's good stuff, from the era of "Layla." The singer isn't so great - didn't sound amplified - but the bass, guitar, and drums are at very least 'bar' quality. It was awesome. Owing to the nature of sound and how it carries through my neighborhood, it was like having my own live band in my back yard playing old songs I like while I worked under the warm glow of large white Christmas lights. I could get used to that.
However, the guy from C returned - btw, he reminds me a lot of the guy who played Dr. Flox on Star Trek: Voyager - and said "Greg, you can't be playing that music for too much longer. I've got work in the morning." My stepdad has a son named Greg, and is bad with names, so I didn't correct him. I respond equally well to "Greg." He was surprised to find it was the neighbors on the opposite corner with a live band, but said he'd have to take care of it, and drove off. I expected them to go silent soon after, but they kept playing for another 40 minutes or so, albeit a bit quieter eventually. Maybe they struck a deal.
I don't know anything about the folk(s) in F, save that there's an old lady who likes to freak out at businesses on the phone. She's comical at worst, and since the house is butted up against my corner, they're never out in a yard near me, so there's no real interaction.
Anyway, as I said - no point to this. I'm just taking a break from a lot of projects. Tonight I:
* worked/am working on finishing up a spalted hollow-form bowl from some mystery logs I picked up via craigslist this week
* swept down the whole wood storage shed - roof included - and filed flush all the nails sticking under the eaves from the shingles
* will be heading out soon to Thompson's Water Seal the gables finally - I haven't worked on the shed at all since January 1st of this year
* just finished a load of laundry - gotta fold it all before I head outside again
* will begin designing the rolling lathe stand I'd love to complete by the end of this 3-day weekend
* cut up ALL of the large piles of eucalyptus and pittosporum branches I had piled up on the back patio - they're ready to burn at the next backyard weenie/s'mores party
* moved the now very dry silver dollar gum branches (for distillation use) to a new, cleaned location, and swept up about half of the back patio, including the messy spot they'd occupied.
* filled half the green waste bin with cutoffs, dust, twigs, and leaves from the patio area. It looks so much nicer out there already.
* finally swept down the long rug that runs down my entire laundry room. The washer overflowed the sink a couple of months ago, soaking it, so I dragged it outside and threw it over the Ficus pile to air out. I never finished sweeping out the room, or patting that thing down. I did that tonight, too, and now I have a nice, carpeted laundry hallway once more. Feels good.
This doesn't include the other things I want to accomplish, like major clean-ups in the house, cutting up of a lot of scrap pine boards for burning, finishing up sweeping the patio, moving the fig logs and swapping the eucalyptus logs (the huuuge ones) from my lawn up onto the cement so the grass can grow back in where the eucs were, and so the logs don't deteriorate, and also a project for mom that's a bit involved (woodworking). I want to clean up the garage a lot as well, and prep for building the cabinet that's going to go under the router table on its shelf to hold all of its parts, getting them up off the workspaces and out of my hair at last. That's going to be a fun, rewarding project, maybe next week. Phwew. Busy times.
Also, a fellow LumberJock is in town, and it would be nice to be able to meet up with him.
|E|D|F|
-------
|B|A|C|
=======
= road
- fence
| fence
A me
B-F neighbors
Neighbors have come and gone since I've been here. B used to be an old guy named Marty, but I haven't seen him in ages, and when I brought Abby the cat over there to see if she was theirs when she hurt her paw (she was), it was a different old guy named Tom. In B's back yard is where the three college guys built a very shoddy 2x lumber + tarp yard shade, and while I was in the garage all day, the outer wall of which is on their property and cut off from me by fence and cinder block wall (I've never seen the other side of that wall, bizarrely enough), I overheard them easily, and learned that one guy goes to UCLA and is a musician. Another sounded 100% exactly like my old pal timb. I liked him automatically.
D is separated from my back fence by their driveway, but they have a tiny garage-turned-guest house that's right up against my fence. In fact, the roof overhangs my fence by several inches, and is low enough that I once casually cleaned out their gutters for them, because they'd never be able to get in the few inches between fence and back wall. In that house is the guy in the big house's mother-in-law. She's the one who feebly yelled "Please stop" when I was banging in shingles at around 9PM :)
I learned who she was when the cable guys gave me his number to call him. He just needed me to grant the phone guys permission to fix her phone line in my yard. The telephone pole that services all of us is on my property by about an inch, just inside the BED fence corner. The lineman have been in my yard probably 6 times now - once to hook up the Asian lady in C's house when she moved in earlier this year, once for that issue with the line in D's mother-in-law's tiny house, once when lineman came by (actually twice) because it was noticed that the T at the top of the pole had cracked in half, threatening electrocution and/or fire if the dangling electrical wires fell into our properties, once (two visits) recently to update something ancient in the lines, and just this past week a couple of times to run new fiberoptic cables finally. It's a busy back yard.
Just tonight, I had a second run-in with the guy from C. I should note that he's not with the Asian girl in C. C is the only official 2-house lot on my street. The houses touch, with entrances midway, and up front for the two separate families. The guy bought the place from a Mexican family this year, moved into the front one, and is renting the back one to the Asian lady - Trang - who seems to the best of my detective abilities to go to bed around 9PM. Everyone in this neighborhood is in bed, lights out by around 10PM. Definitely not a party town, except for the people in E, but I'll get back to them.
The guy from C, who waters the Asian woman in the back house of C's flowers, and is the one who noted my landlady's tree guy had dropped a massive quantity of Juniper branches on said flowers back when she had him decimate my trees' branches, popped his head over once to ask me about that, and leaned around to say high one other time when I was out sawing. He did so again tonight, probably because I plugged in the previous tennant's Christmas lights all around my back patio so I could get a bit more sawing done, and he saw those, and heard me working. We talked for a bit, and it turns out he's a neuromuscular therapist.
He was excited by all of the huge tree stumps piled up in my back yard. He thought they were oaks, then guessed 3 or 4 other trees before I said "Nope, just Ficus." "What?" "Fig trees?" "Oh." "They're pretty crap for woodworking - you can have any you like." That sparked a woodworking talk. It turns out he has another house in a more secluded region up north, and he's cut down a few oaks in his time, and had some couple of friends up there saw them up into boards for him with their portable mill. He said I need one, and I agreed. He's also worked on a lathe and made bowls. I didn't think anyone in this whole area even knew what a lathe was, but now I've found a kindred spirit. Doesn't sound like he does that stuff any more, but recommending a loud machine to me means I think I've found another neighbor who 'gets it,' and doesn't mind me making a bit of woodworking noise. Hooray! Now if only that old lady in D would kick the... no. I'd better not say that. I'll feel guilty ;)
Speaking of loud noises... I mentioned once prior in a post that I heard music, and tracked it down to the folks in E. For the second time, and I think the second 3-day holiday now, they fired up the band again at around 8:30PM. I was outside cutting up logs, shortly after meeting with the neighbor dude from C, who had left by then. They play loud, and it's good stuff, from the era of "Layla." The singer isn't so great - didn't sound amplified - but the bass, guitar, and drums are at very least 'bar' quality. It was awesome. Owing to the nature of sound and how it carries through my neighborhood, it was like having my own live band in my back yard playing old songs I like while I worked under the warm glow of large white Christmas lights. I could get used to that.
However, the guy from C returned - btw, he reminds me a lot of the guy who played Dr. Flox on Star Trek: Voyager - and said "Greg, you can't be playing that music for too much longer. I've got work in the morning." My stepdad has a son named Greg, and is bad with names, so I didn't correct him. I respond equally well to "Greg." He was surprised to find it was the neighbors on the opposite corner with a live band, but said he'd have to take care of it, and drove off. I expected them to go silent soon after, but they kept playing for another 40 minutes or so, albeit a bit quieter eventually. Maybe they struck a deal.
I don't know anything about the folk(s) in F, save that there's an old lady who likes to freak out at businesses on the phone. She's comical at worst, and since the house is butted up against my corner, they're never out in a yard near me, so there's no real interaction.
Anyway, as I said - no point to this. I'm just taking a break from a lot of projects. Tonight I:
* worked/am working on finishing up a spalted hollow-form bowl from some mystery logs I picked up via craigslist this week
* swept down the whole wood storage shed - roof included - and filed flush all the nails sticking under the eaves from the shingles
* will be heading out soon to Thompson's Water Seal the gables finally - I haven't worked on the shed at all since January 1st of this year
* just finished a load of laundry - gotta fold it all before I head outside again
* will begin designing the rolling lathe stand I'd love to complete by the end of this 3-day weekend
* cut up ALL of the large piles of eucalyptus and pittosporum branches I had piled up on the back patio - they're ready to burn at the next backyard weenie/s'mores party
* moved the now very dry silver dollar gum branches (for distillation use) to a new, cleaned location, and swept up about half of the back patio, including the messy spot they'd occupied.
* filled half the green waste bin with cutoffs, dust, twigs, and leaves from the patio area. It looks so much nicer out there already.
* finally swept down the long rug that runs down my entire laundry room. The washer overflowed the sink a couple of months ago, soaking it, so I dragged it outside and threw it over the Ficus pile to air out. I never finished sweeping out the room, or patting that thing down. I did that tonight, too, and now I have a nice, carpeted laundry hallway once more. Feels good.
This doesn't include the other things I want to accomplish, like major clean-ups in the house, cutting up of a lot of scrap pine boards for burning, finishing up sweeping the patio, moving the fig logs and swapping the eucalyptus logs (the huuuge ones) from my lawn up onto the cement so the grass can grow back in where the eucs were, and so the logs don't deteriorate, and also a project for mom that's a bit involved (woodworking). I want to clean up the garage a lot as well, and prep for building the cabinet that's going to go under the router table on its shelf to hold all of its parts, getting them up off the workspaces and out of my hair at last. That's going to be a fun, rewarding project, maybe next week. Phwew. Busy times.
Also, a fellow LumberJock is in town, and it would be nice to be able to meet up with him.