All over but the shouting

So they were here for a bit this morning, and then took off.  I took Sam back to his mom for an appointment, and they were gone when I got back.

I decided to get started again on foundation tuck pointing again, and after shoveling out some of the wall, and going upstairs to get coffee, I ran into Kevin and Barb downstairs.  Kevin was putting up the eviction notice, and we chatted for a while about the difficulties of being a landlord and the frustrations of the whole situation.  He mentioned that if they drag it out, it could take up to six months unless it can be proven that they've got somewhere to go, and that could complicate things.

Barb also talked me up to Kevin (everyone still thinks I'm moving downstairs - I'm still really not sure, for a variety of reasons) to see what sort of a deal I could get for downstairs, but I'm still not hiring the mariachi band yet.

Kevin asked about the washer power, and I told him one of the outlets ran off mine, but I wasn't sure which one.  I also said I'm sure that everyone could live without the washing machine for a bit if it meant they were gone.  He texted Wendy to let her know to cut the power as soon as she could.

Kevin left, accompanied by his girlfriend (I think), and Josh and company showed up ten minutes later.

They came rolling in at top speed, with Josh pulling the notice off the door, and getting the kids inside.  The rumor was that they were just waiting for the eviction notice to get the ball rolling at DSS for assistance, but I wasn't sure.

I finished with the wall, and moved around to the front, where I heard Josh ranting at his dad.  "They can't make me go!  I'm not going anywhere.  I'm not gonna get ripped off."

I decide this is the best time to go and get more mortar mix.  This is going to drag out and I'm going to have another four to six months of this bullshit...

Barb calls me over as soon as I pull in the driveway.  Josh talked with Kevin, and he's getting out as soon as DSS comes through.  I told her about what I heard him say before I went to go get concrete, and tell her I'm still not hiring the mariachi band yet.

I took Dante for a walk, and coming back, got motioned over by Emily, Barb's daughter.  "Hey, got some bad news for you."

I laughed.  "I knew it.  Too good to be true."

She nodded.  "So get this.  DSS is going to find them a place to live.  They will get an ungodly amount of food stamp money, cash assistance, and gas vouchers so Josh can find a job."

"Ummmm...this is bad news how?"

She looked at me.  "Aren't you pissed they're getting all this?"

"They're still leaving, right?  That's really what I care about right now."

So the upshot is that they're here until DSS finds them a place.  (Not sure what this means for the power, but that's not on my list of concerns.)

Does this mean they're going to take out the rotting trash?  Or how fast they're clearing out?  I have no idea.  But is means there is an end in sight.  Somewhere.  How soon is anyone's guess, but I'm hoping sooner rather than later.

And continuing...

Yeah, no such luck on the whole "they're gone" bit.  They showed up last night, spent the night, and left this morning.  Not sure if they've been back.  I know they had at least one of the kids with them, which turns my stomach, since I wouldn't have left Dante alone in that apartment, much less a child.

Ewwww.  Further postings as warranted.

The continuing shamble toward the end....

In all the confusion about whether or not they had to be out, the next door neighbor finally took the direct approach.  When Josh was pulling in to the driveway on Sunday last week, Barb called him over and asked him directly what was going on, since she'd been hearing rumors.

"We gotta be out 'cause my mom won't pay the fucking rent.  Bitch.  Doesn't do a damn thing for her grandkids."

So you're out.  Where will you go?

"Yeah, I don't know.  We're gonna talk to my dad, see if we can move in with him out in Gates.  Haven't talked to him yet.  I don't have a job right now - we all got fired for some reason.  So who knows."

After Josh went back over to his house, she smiled.  "And that's how you find out what's going on."

Monday I saw the last person I expected to see in all this...Wendy.

She was throwing all the lawn furniture into the back of a truck as I was walking up the hill from walking Dante.  "All I still have in there is a pair of shelves, and if I had a screwdriver I'd take them down right now."

I offered her use of a screwgun, but she declined.  "I need to get out of there anyway.  I'm gonna have to strangle somebody over there if I stay too long.  They're a bunch of crazy people.  She's a bitch.  I don't know how I'm going to deal with them - and you know I'm one of the most reasonable people around."

"Anyway, I told Kevin to write them an eviction notice and get them out.  We're done."

I was at work all week, developing curriculum, so I wasn't home during the day.  I got a message from Kevin on Tuesday morning, "So, are they out?"

"No idea - I'm at work.  Wendy said she was going to touch base with you about it all."

"Well - keep me posted.  I'm having car issues, so I've been staying with friends in Batavia the past couple of months so I can get to the gig at Settler's."

So I'm stuck on my own here.  Oh boy.

Tuesday night I'm walking Dante up the path, and a pleasant older woman (late 50s/early 60s) standing in the driveway asks me if I'm Josh.  I tell her no, I'm not.

"Where might I find him?"

He lives in the downstairs apartment, I tell her.

She knocks on the door while I'm walking up the stairs.  You can smell the pot pouring out of the apartment as Josh opens the door.  There is a mumbled conversation, and they head out to her van after she tells him, "It's raining, we can't do this outside."

I assumed at that point he was getting served his eviction notice, and hid upstairs.  It's been a crazy week for a variety of other reasons (work, etc), so I haven't been home all that much.  (Which of late, I honestly prefer.)

The entire weekend passes with no sign of them.  The neighbors told me he was making some sort of noise about squatters rights, and how he was going to fight the whole thing, but they also had a trailer in Chili that was being rented for them by Dan's ex-wife (the second child's grandmother - only rationale I can see for it).
Wendy came over on Sunday to ask me if I would pick up her mail, and also to show me the apartment so I could look at it and verify that it did NOT look like that when she lived there last.

Dear Lord, it turned my stomach.  Piles of rotten food.  Trash everywhere.  Holes in the walls.  Dirty clothes everywhere.  And the STINK.  Oh wow.

I told Wendy I would happily pick up her mail for her.  And I assured my neighbor that come Wednesday morning, if they're not around, I'll do a little breaking and entering to at least get the three festering bags of trash out to the curb in time for pickup.

Wendy said she's going to cut off the power on Wednesday.  So we'll see.  But at this point, I think they are actually really gone.

THIS time, they're really gone...right?

One of the great farcical pieces in this whole neighbor saga has been the rumor/likelihood/bold-faced lie that they will be moving ANY MINUTE NOW.  It hasn't happened yet, but the rumors are circling, and I think they might have a ring of truth to them this time.

The rumor first started after that disastrous first summer here (I never wrote about it?  Seriously?  Damn, I have some writing to catch up on...), when Kevin told them that if I said word one they were gone.  Words one, two, and several more have been said, and still they remained.

Every once in a while they would talk of moving, or Kevin would talk of evicting them.  It didn't help that they owe him an extraordinary amount of back rent (I have heard everything from 5K to 23K), so moving wasn't an option, and Kevin always pulled back from tossing them out.

Dan moving out last summer was a serious glimmer of hope that things would mellow out (and they would move out), but even once Wendy moved out to be with her boyfriend, Josh and family have remained, despite being a pain in the butt and not paying rent in a regular way.

Kevin said a while back he was NOT going to rent to them directly, and he's standing by it.  The incidents of the last blog seem to have solidified them leaving, but there is another complication - Kaitlyn had her baby.  Like, just now.  (she only looked five months along)

She's a cutie (very jaundiced), and they haven't figured out where they're going to go yet.  And with them being two teenage parents and FOUR kids now, they're going to have a hard enough time trying to find anywhere to live, even without the social niceties issues.

I also talked to Kevin and he said he didn't say Tuesday, so he has no idea where that came from.

But the "we have to move" came from Josh himself.  So we'll see.  More postings later, I hope.

And continued fallout from insanity yesterday

Everyone was gone pretty much all day today, so things were quiet.  The landlord texted me this evening to ask about what happened, and I told him that Josh pretty much just flipped out on Larry because he wanted him to move his car so he could mow the lawn.  I also mentioned the aftermath with the BB gun out the back window.  

"Classy," says the landlord.

He then tells me that Josh's mother, Wendi, is dealing with the crap with Larry.  I told Kevin I'd mention the BB gun thing to Wendi as well, and Kevin said that would be a good idea.

Wendi and I...well, I've blogged about her before.  See here for an example.  She's nuts.  Certifiably.  More importantly, she really hasn't lived here for the better part of a year.  Which has been good.  But I REALLY don't want to talk to her.

But I have to.  This can't pass.  So I text her about the BB gun.  I tell her it happened, and that "I choose to assume he couldn't see me and it wasn't intentional."

Text comes back.  "I just asked him.  It wasn't the BB gun, it was his paintball gun.  And he didn't see you - he would NEVER shoot at someone maliciously."

Immediate text follow-up: "I would like to know what happened to the outside toys, kitchen stuff that I had for the kids went.  I was told they are gone.  I would have liked to know what was going on so there wasn't an issue."

Oh I am SO not getting thrown under the bus for this one.  I asked Josh about them.  He said pitch them.  I told her as much.

"I would never throw anything out without checking with him first."

Response back: "It's all good.  Just was curious."

And on top of that, the trash can in the hallway is now CRAWLING with maggots from whatever he dumped in it (I'll spare you the pic for that one), and there is another bag of trash in the driveway.

Seriously.  Just happened like a half hour ago.  

So what it comes down to is that I need an exit plan.  As much work as I've put in to the back yard, as much as I'm going to do this summer...it's a rental.  I don't own it.  I have no serious stake in it, from that perspective.  And if I have no plans to buy it (and I know the landlord clearly has no plans to evict them), then I need a solid plan to get out of here.

In the meantime, however, I will work on compiling the stories.

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.

Useful systems and tools for productivity

There are a million productivity tools out there on the market, most of which are useless.  I'm trying out a few of them while I'm also trying to change habits and kick-start a few things.  I'll share what I've been utilizing, and how it's been working.

There's a website called Zen Habits that has been leading the charge in habit formation.  Frankly put, most everything I've seen in the past year about habit formation seems to have stolen it outright from Leo, and he doesn't seem to care.  He's got a paid portion of the site called Sea Change (10 bucks a month) with special articles and a focus every month.  Last month was Getting Up Early (I failed to participate, plan on doing as a side project), and right now it's De-Cluttering.  http://Zenhabits.net

5 min Journal is an iPhone app I've been using - it's a Gratitude journal, remarkably uncomplicated, and really does only take 5 min per session (morning and evening).  I'm getting better about using it, and I'm trying to make it an every day thing.  It's a great way to start the day.

The 100 day challenge is a motivational program that is very direct and straightforward.  And the full program is...expensive.  Given my financial situation, I'm paying for as little as possible, but the motivational videos and other materials are great places to start.  I am setting my own "100 Day Challenge" that will bring me into the first month of school, so the idea of focusing on that long term is really helping me as well.

So those are the major ones I'm using right now.  I do get the regular emails from the Sethi brothers (Ramit and Maneesh), and I get a lot out of those, but those aren't so much systems.  Maneesh is working on a habit device called Pavlok, though a lot of his studies very closely mirror Leo's from Zen Habits, so I'm going to stick with Leo.  I've gotten some other reading suggestions that I'll talk about as well, and if anyone has any suggestions I'm open to them.