Another Weird Neighbor Story

Here's something weird and...well, just weird. I have a weird life. Weird neighbors, weird relatives, weird colleagues. Maybe that's just the human condition.

Anyhoo, here's what happened tonight, just now, at midnight: I'm down in the basement, switching back and forth between Angel DVDs and Saturday Night Live, and suddenly I hear "squeak, squeak, squeak!" It sounds like the faucet on the outside of the house.

I get up and go upstairs to the front door. I open it quietly, step outside, and peek around the corner. Lo and behold! A garden hose snaked its way from my own outdoor faucet to my neighbor's backyard.

Huh.

Seriously. Who hooks up a hose to their neighbor's faucet in the middle of the night, to fill up buckets of water on his back deck?

My neighbor, that's who.

Shortly after I wrote about his backyard jungle, his current girlfriend showed up. She was hacking down the two-story weeds in his yard. By herself. At night.

"Hey, girlfriend," we said, introducing ourselves. "Where's The User?"

"He's home. Sick," she said, chopping down a 40-foot Giant Hogweed with a chainsaw.

"Wow," we thought. "How does he keep finding girlfriends to do his manual labor for him? He does not look like he is all that."

So now the weeds have been manicured, but apparently, he still needs assistance cleaning out the rental property. So he showed up tonight with a couple of friends and helped himself to our water. They filled up buckets of water and carried them indoors in the wee hours like confused vandals.

Not that his taking our water actually costs us anything. In Chicago, we still get semi-annual water bills based upon a nebulous and mysterious figuring that does not relate to the amount of water we actually use.

But still. If you were going to hook up a hose to your neighbor's house, wouldn't you at least ask them for permission first? I'm not so much of an Obamocialist yet that I don't care whether my neighbors are helping themselves on my property without so much as a how-de-do, you know?

Strange.

As I watched from my darkened kitchen my neighbor and his pals fill up buckets with contraband water, I wondered what I should do. Should I confront the nefarious water-stealing neighbor? Because I will totally confront dudes in the middle of the night. When C. Peevie was a tiny, sleeping baby, we lived in a neighborhood where people thought it was appropriate to drive up to a house and honk their horn in the middle of the night. I would get out of bed, throw on my robe, stalk across the street and accost the idiots who did not realize that the simple act of getting out of the car and ringing the doorbell would allow a sleep-deprived new mother to avoid going INSANE.

Mr. Peevie was sound asleep, getting his beauty rest in advance of running the marathon tomorrow. It didn't seem like a true emergency, so I let him sleep. I watched my neighbor for a few more minutes, but I decided in the end that it was just a case of Neighbor Lacking Appropriate Social Boundaries, rather than Neighbor Doing Nefarious and Harmful Bad Stuff; and I let it go.

It's very strange and boundary-crossing, don't you think?