Secular Confessions

My parents call their next door neighbors the Anals...there is Mr. Anal and Mrs. Anal. It's been a long history...with lawyers and court involved and now they basically ignore each other.


Myles...your guest stories are funny! I admit I can be a bit of a pain sometimes but I would only do that with say my sister....anyplace else I'm a guest and I work extra hard to not be a bit of a pain or bother at all.


Mandy, that is a cool piece of furniture and that is so great when you find just the right thing for a space.
I have to admit that isn't my style but I also tend to not really like older things much unless they have special meaning to me....like a family piece.
My style is totally arts and crafts/mission. Which was funny when I was picking out stuff for the house and my sister was helping because her style is modern....but at least she was good at knowing what I would like. I would have LOVED to have bought an arts and crafts home like you see on HGTV but we just don't have really that style here. But when I buy furniture and other stuff....that is totally what I gravitate to.


On camping....Lydia...you are BRAVE! I would never take three small children camping...but than again, I don't think that I would take myself camping. I'm not so much an outdoors person and the only camping I have ever done is in my backyard as a kid.


I'm a bit bummed. Yesterday I was all excited planning a vacation for the end of August. We were thinking of spending 3 nights/4 days in Duluth MN. Picked the hotel (which happens to be decorated with arts and crafts LOL), was going to take a train ride and see the train museum since DH LOVES trains, was looking at doing a sunset dinner cruise on Lake Superior......but when we started adding up the costs of everything....gas, hotel, food, sightseeing, kennel for Cosmo (I found a suite one I might be willing to put her in but would have tour in person first but of course it's more expensive than a traditional cage kennel). Well it was kind of expensive. We have the money but will be shelling out the first big check for the adoption at the home visit and that will take us a little below the emergency savings. And I'm not going even further north (it's about 3 hours north of me) than I am in the fall/winter when it's even colder there than it is here. So I'm thinking we might have to put off this trip until next year in June.


For anyone interested, I added pictures of my portfolio pages to the FB group as that is a lot more private than it is here.

:wub: I just love your pics Jennifer.

My neighbors are alright except this one guy who I never see but hear him at like 11 pm working in his garage with all sorts of power tools, and he leaves his little dogs outside all day and they yap at anyone walking by. Even us, across the street, when we get in or out of the car.

There's a family across the street with a boy who's about 7 but we never see him. I think in the 3 years we've lived here I've seen him a handful of times.


The neighbors next door are an old couple and they seem perfectly nice but they keep a creepy naked baby doll in the window that faces our house and I'm dying to know what's up with that. I'm afraid I'm going to look over and see it in a different place one day, but so far it has stayed put. :)

The family down the street has 5 kids, most of them are teen/college age but they have an adopted girl who is 6 and Josh loves to play with her.

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Originally Posted by daylilies

The neighbors next door are an old couple and they seem perfectly nice but they keep a creepy naked baby doll in the window that faces our house and I'm dying to know what's up with that. I'm afraid I'm going to look over and see it in a different place one day, but so far it has stayed put. :)

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:lol:

Our neighbors are all very nice, except the house across the street seems to be rented out to college guys and they have had a few very loud parties. A few days ago we had a thunderstorm at about 4:00 am we heard two of them out drunk in the middle of the street that runs along the side of their house, which is the largest/busiest street in the city. They were waving a sword around at each other in the middle of the lightning and thunder. DH got up and was watching to see if they became a threat but he said they were just drunk and stupid.

Other than that, our neighbors are great. Our house is a fixer upper in a very nice neighborhood, a much nicer neighborhood than any of the other houses in our price range. It's actually one of the reasons we bought the house. But since we haven't had the money to actually fix up the fixer upper, I suspect we're the neighbors all our neighbors hate!

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Originally Posted by Gwenn

But since we haven't had the money to actually fix up the fixer upper, I suspect we're the neighbors all our neighbors hate!

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:laugh: That's kinda how our house is too. :(

Our immediate neighbors are great (where we're moving) but there are 4 guys in their mid 40's that all went to school together that kinda live all around us. They get together at the pond right next to our house and have gotten a bit out of control with their partying. Once they were shooting fireworks over our house and couldn't understand why I had a problem with that :eyeroll: Fireworks are illegal in NY, by the way.

Lydia, I just looked at your pictures and your blog. Beautiful pictures, and I always love reading your stories. You have a flair.

You ladies are cracking me up about your neighbors :laugh:!

We have a crazy lady neighbor and that is what I call her "Crazy Lady Neighbor." She is always scowled up and has REALLY long dreadlocks, like to her knees. It makes me sweat looking at her since it is so freaking hot here and she has all that hair. She is growing tomatoes and zucchini in her front yard. She put some duct tape all around her chain length fence in the front, I guess to keep people from stealing her veggies but it looks ridiculous. Even though we don't live in all that great of a neighborhood, our yard is pretty nice as is the rest of our neighbors most of whom are seniors with elaborate tropical plants and cacti that are just gorgeous, then we have Crazy Lady Neighbor with her duct tape fence and tomatoe plants. Once one of her trees fell on our house, DH went to tell her and offer to help her or her son get it off our house as he didn't want to get the insurance company involved since even though it was a tall tree, it didn't do any damage as it was only about 6-8 inches in diameter. She told him "what you want me to do about it" and slammed the door in his face. He was shocked and wanted to curse her out without profanity (what I call him going off on people as he rarely uses profanity when he is angry, mostly very intelligent words but spoken in a very threatening manner). I suggested we push the tree back over the fence and let it hit her house to see what she would do about it then, since our house is higher than hers and realy if we would have done that, I'm sure her roof would have had a hole in it due to the force of gravity on the tree for that long of a fall (that is my beatchiness, I am a bad beyotch!) DH talked me out of it and just removed the tree himself, with me covering my eyes and yelling so much because I was afraid he was going to fall off the steep roof so much that he banished me to the house. We asked some of our other neighbors about her and they also think she is crazy. Our new neighbor said he tried to speak to her and she just looked at him and didn't speak and kept weeding tomatoes after a couple minutes, we told him she is crazy and he shouldn't speak to her since she won't speak back.

We had a drunk neighbor who got foreclosed on and doesn't live there anymore. He was much nicer than the Crazy Neighbor Lady. Once he fell of his porch though and scraped his face all up. DH found him in the morning, I guess he got drunk, fell asleep sitting on the steps and fell off and laid there all night. It looked HORRIBLE! We found out a few weeks ago that he passed away. He was a nice guy and a nice drunk, pretty quiet, didn't bother anyone. Ky loved the name of his dog, which was Hot Shot. I can only imagine what the dog was named after. DH thought it was probably rum.

Erin

When our neighbors up the road first moved in our first experience with them was seeing a man laying on the side of the road just below our driveway. We were coming home and I thought someone had been hit. I sent Rich & Tim to check it out and he got up and stumbled all the way up to his house. It was at the top of the hill and there was a tiny bank from the should of the road to his front yard. We watched him crawl up that on his hands and knees. Welcome to the neighborhood Danny!! :lol:

He was in his 50's or 60's. Nicest guy, really, but he had a severe drinking problem :( He died in the last year or so.

Our neighbors are all old....like ancient....my MIL and FIL were considered the youngsters til we moved in (they're in their early 60's). Everybody's cool, though. My 80 year old neighbor brings our garbage bin up the drive after the garbage men have collected the trash....and she bakes us cupcakes nearly every week...really, we are looked after. I <3 my neighbors.

I'm afraid we're the crazy neighbors in our current neighborhood. A few weeks ago we were having a bon fire and my sil was over. We had good buzzes on and decided to take me & Conner's tandem bike out for a ride. We must have went up and down our road 4-5 times that night. It was pitch black, we were drunk, the small attachment for Conner makes my mountain bike difficult to balance (especially with a small drunk on it!) and we were laughing hysterically. The next day my brother said he, Chad (Rich's young cousin) and Rich sat out by the fire listening to us laugh all the way down the road. :D I wonder what stories our neighbors tell their friends about us.

LOL ...better than drunken sword fighting on a major street in a lightning storm, at least!

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Originally Posted by Gwenn

LOL ...better than drunken sword fighting on a major street in a lightning storm, at least!

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Hmm...

:angel: Maybe next time...

Josh did the cutest thing today..
We were at the grocery store, and he said "I need some secret ingredients!" and proceeded to pick up tomatoes, a lemon and a small package of peanuts. He was all excited and was trying to talk to the cashier about it, who was less than impressed, sadly :(
So he wanted it all in a separate bag and he carried it out to the car, and we got home, and he wanted to slice up the tomatoes, and he squeezed half a lemon into the bowl, added the tomatoes, and two different kinds of salted peanuts (essentially the same thing but one was in a can and one was in a bag), some sliced cheese and a little salt. He mixed it all up and tried it, made an awful face and said "I think next time I'll make it without lemon juice" :D

LOL Kate that is really cute!

Lol Josh! That is hilarious!

Kate, that is so funny!

Kate, does he help you cook? That is a great story!

:wub: He's too cute Kate!!!

He does help sometimes...I'm still cautious about a lot of things I probably shouldn't worry so much about, but I don't let him use anything but butter knives and he can't handle raw meat. Fingers go in mouths too much still...
He doesn't like getting close to hot pans, but he likes to help measure and mix things.

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Originally Posted by daylilies

He doesn't like getting close to hot pans, but he likes to help measure and mix things.

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Now I want to get together with you, Conner and Josh and bake cookies because Conner loves to help with those things as well. I really believe Josh and Conner would be the best of friends. :wub: They sound so much alike!!

I don't think that's too cautious Kate. I have just started to let Savana peel potato and cucumber and such. I also let her and Kai grate cheese. I have also let both Savana and Kai slice bread but only with my very close supervision. I wouldn't let them touch raw meat either.

I am so so so so tired!! Sawyer will not stay asleep any more! He used to get up 3x a night to nurse and go right back to sleep. The past 2 nights he's been up every hour and last night I had to rock him back to sleep every time, then I'd doze off in the rocking chair which I cannot do or I get the sore neck/headache.

At what age do you think children are capable of understanding it's not ok to interrupt? Dbf gets so angry when the kids interrupt and while I don't love it, I just think it's a really hard thing for them to have control over. Especially Kai since he doens't have more than a pocketful of self control as it is. During naptime I'm going to see if I can find a good article to show him so he stops humiliating them for doing it. Like last night when someone walking their dog stopped to talk to us and Savana wanted us to watch her new trick. Dbf was, like, mortified and I was trying to explain it's not that big of a deal. Sometimes I want to scream, "GENTLE REMINDERS!" in his face. lol

LOL Bridget.
Josh interrupts...a lot. Sometimes he will interrupt with "Excuse me". I don't know...

Chrissy, I know! Oh there was something about dinosaurs I wanted to tell you...but I forget what it was now...

Kate what a cute story :wub:

We got really lucky our immediate neighbors are the best! We have an old old couple on the one side of us who are super sweet! The old man accidentally got grass on my truck when he was mowing his lawn one day, so I walk out there and he's washing my truck :wub: On the other side we have a couple about my parents age (in there 40's) there nice and we get along, but all they do is argue! Argue with each other, argue with there kids, its madness over there! They are nice though and help us out when we need it and vice versa :)

Down the street is another story. There are a bunch of pill popping druggies :eyeroll: There harmless though. None of them come near our house, they all know the older couple has cameras in there yard (also pointed at our yard per our OK), we have a bull dog, and the other couple has a pit. They look mean, even though they are both big babies so nobody messes with us :P

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Originally Posted by bridgetwu75

Sometimes I want to scream, "GENTLE REMINDERS!" in his face. lol

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:laugh: On one hand, it would kinda be funny if you did.

Every child is different, as I'm sure you know. I can't remember when Bobbie and Jesi stopped. Sydney will still occasionally interrupt and she's 12. Not in a rude way, but she gets excited and wants to share something and just bursts forth with it. I don't even worry about it with Conner. Actually, I don't ever tell him to wait till I'm done talking. I'll stop what I'm doing and listen to him. It's one of the things I just kinda talk about with the kids. I'll say, "ok, we'll get a snack in a minute but next time try to remember to wait and say 'excuse me' if you see I'm talking to someone else." I think it's something most people learn eventually and it's certainly not a big enough deal to get worked up over, imo.

Here's a couple on interrupting (which I think would probably bother us once past a certain age...both of us had moms that were pretty strict on things like manners and behavior....but who knows since I let the dog get away with more than I ever thought I would LOL).

http://www.preschoolerstoday.com/art...e-please-3208/

http://www.ivillage.com/interrupting...top/6-a-128355

Oh goodness....I had planned to be a packing fool this weekend because we haven't even gotten started yet and we only have about 2 weeks and my landlord just emailed me and said someone is coming to look at the place at 6:30 on Friday and then 3 more people are coming starting at 1 on Sunday. :shocker:

Goodness, when am I going to have time to pack? :cry:And of course she politely requested that we have the place as clean as possible...which I will do and would do anyway...but man, it's going to be rough while trying to pack too.

Oh Chrissy that has got to be SO stressful :hugs: It will all work out somehow!

Chrissy, I would just pack like you would and not worry about the place being shown. I think that most people understand that you need to pack to move out! I certainly looked at places before that people were in the process of moving when I was shown the place and I moved in anyway. And I got out of the townhouse early last year so I found the renter myself and showed her our place while we were packing.

Moving and packing sucks though....so stressful!

Jennifer, do you think it would be ok if I remained in the house on Sunday? They're showing it for a solid 3 hours and I think that's a lot of time to be away. I know realtors usually don't like people there, but it's not like we're the sellers. I'd even have the kids be elsewhere (well, Conner. :P ) I just don't know if I'd be overstepping.

And then who knows, maybe by Sunday afternoon I'll be more than ready to take a forced break.