I love the smell of BB's in the morning...smells like....

Growing up, and as a fully functional adult, one of the things I hate most of all is mowing the lawn.  Always hated it.  Waste of time, never looked right, drove me nuts.  Rider/push/old-school-spinny-blades-of-death - didn't matter.  So one of the things that I love about this place is that someone else mows the lawn.

Larry mows the lawn here (and for Kevin's other properties), and I try to do my best to clean things up when Larry gets here.  He beat me to the hose, but I cleared up the stuff down by the patio, the new clothesline, and eventually shuffled bikes.  Let me explain about the bikes.

One of the projects I'm doing is fixing the wall in the back.  (Other post about that later.)  One of the great challenges of that has been keeping the area clean, since Josh (my "teenager" downstairs neighbor, now 20) keeps dumping his crap in that back corner.  (Occasionally it's actual household trash, which is just foul, since he has a baby in diapers.)  I cleared out five bags of trash (after asking, and he declared it was trash - most of it this time was a kids plastic kitchen set that he'd left outside for the winter), and I piled the bikes over by the side of the house.  All eight of them in various states of repair.

So while Larry is mowing the lawn, I shuffled the bikes into a pile in the front yard, so he can mow the side yard.  I'm figuring that either Josh will move them back, or they'll just stay in the front yard.  No idea either way, and really not that worried.  

Josh's car is also parked in the front yard, and Larry goes to knock on the door to get Josh to move it so he can mow.  His wife answers, and says she's go get him up.  (It's 1:30 in the afternoon.  Just for the record.)

Larry points at the car.  "This isn't the driveway, ya know.  It's the yard.  Where the grass is and shit."  She nods, and goes inside.

So Josh comes out, and what I hear in the hallway is "I am not moving my fucking car!  And he can just put all those bikes back where they fucking were!"

He storms out and leans against the car, getting on the phone with someone (I'm assuming Wendy, his mother), and shouting into it.  "He's getting all up in my FACE!  Like I fucking need to jump when he says move the fucking car!  I'm not fucking doing it!"

The oldest daughter (she's five) comes out for a quick moment, then runs back in the house screaming from Josh yelling into the phone.

Larry is grumbling and shaking his head, "Well, if I have to put up with this shit I just won't mow the goddamn lawn here."  He shouts over at Josh when Josh starts ranting into the phone about the bikes in a pile, "I didn't even MOVE those goddamn fucking bikes!"

I decide this is the best time to go to Home Depot and get the concrete that I need to work on the back wall.  So I split quickly for Batavia, stopping at three different lawn sales, taking my sweet time, and finally getting the mortar and bricks I need to repair the back wall.

Upon getting back, the car is parked back in the yard, but the grass is short underneath it, and the pile of bikes is still in the front yard, along with a bunch of other crap.

(yeah, it's a bit of a tap dance to get into the house right now)

All being quiet, I decide to start some laundry before seeing how the bricks I measured for were going to fit in my attempt to fix the back wall.

The bricks fit (again, more on wall repair in later post - I will really try to make it interesting, I promise), and I went to get the laundry out of the machine to hang on the clothesline I installed out back a week ago.  

As I'm putting the laundry into a basket, Josh comes in from his car carrying the faux AK-47 BB gun he came home with a week ago (along with a paintball gun, which he shot at the back of the house and left orange paint on the wall that I hosed off.  In the area where the trash was.  There's a theme here...).  He had a pissed off look on his face.  I paused for a moment, heard continued silence, then took my laundry out to the line.

I'm about halfway through hanging it up when I hear what sounds like a tree branch breaking overhead.  I stop (the tree lost some major branches in the last windstorm), and I pause.  Then I hear it again, and see leaves exploding off of the tree right in front of me.  I instinctively crouch, and look for the source.

No....he can't be...is he seriously just shooting that thing out the back window?  He's not that stupid...

I go inside and bang on his door, and wait for a few moments.  Nothing.  No sound.  I shake my head, and go back out.

A couple of minutes later, and the leaves start exploding again.  I walk along the edge of the house, and shout up and the top of my lungs, "HEY!!!!  I'M WORKING BACK HERE!!!!!"

It stops.  I wondered for a moment if it was intentional, but scoped out the window later and realized he honestly couldn't see me from there.  He just wanted to shoot out the window at leaves to blow off steam.

I saw him on the path later on - he was coming up, and I was going to eat my dinner in the back yard.  He was carrying his middle son, who said, "Hi!"  (He's 2 and a half.  He's at that "HI HI HI HI" stage.)  Josh said nothing, taking a drag from his cigarette as he passed, in that unmistakable "I am too cool to talk to you" kind of drag.   

When I came back inside, I heard his wife screaming at him about the fact that he needs to get off his lazy ass and get some shit done around here.  (They've been married a little over a month now, and she's about five months pregnant with child number four.)

Given all that, I fully expected some sort of crap to happen tonight that was going to involve having to call the cops, but it's been quiet, for which I'm grateful.  Though I am idly curious to see how long the pile of bikes stays in the front yard.  And to see what tomorrow will bring.