Dog Fight

I’ve mentioned our rather crotchety neighbors, the Dietz’ before here where they lectured us on mowing 12 seconds after we moved in and here where they towed our neighbor's car for being near their illegal sprinkler system.

We’ve enjoyed a rather quiet relationship for them for most of the year we’ve had Wee ‘Burb. I figured it was because they never got around to giving us a present for the baby like some of the other neighbors, or really acknowledged her existence. But again, they didn’t tow my car, so I’m cool with it.

A few weeks ago, Scott came in and told me Mrs. Dietz yelled at him. Now it was 6 a.m. and he’d been working a lot so I was dubious as I said “she actually YELLED at you?” and he was all traumatized like “YEAH!”

So apparently the issue was a legit one. As I mentioned in my previous post, Cous Cous has an issue finding the perfect poop spot. So occasionally her favorite spot is on the line…or over the line…of our yard and theirs.

When she does cross the line, Scott does pick it up and bag it. I know this for sure because I often get halfway through my walk to discover I have no bags.

In the mornings, Mrs. Dietz has a creepy habit of hiding in the shadows and smoking…outside on the top of her deck, which by the way was taken down almost a year ago (just pointing out that for someone all worked up about image, she has a torn down deck and hangs out in her garage watching people go by). So she stands on these leftover pillars, basically, and I never see her except when Cous Cous goes nuts and barks at her.

But this time she stepped out of the shadows to say “it’s not very neighborly to let your dog crap on my lawn.” I kind of looked at Scott and said “Well, she’s kind of right.” I refrained from saying “I told you so” because we had this discussion and I said people without pets may be sensitive to us letting her go on the lawn, even if we clean it up.

So he tells Mrs. Dietz he’s sorry, that he does always clean it up. And she goes “I don’t care. Stephanie doesn’t do it, you know.” Um, once again, you’re not making yourself look great here, Mrs. Dietz, pointing out that you keep track of who takes Cous Cous where. But still, she has a legit complaint, and so far I’m not totally off her side.

Until Scott goes “Okay, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” And instead of doing the mature thing and saying “it’s no problem, thanks” or something else acknowledging that he’s said it won’t happen again, she repeats “I'm saying it’s not neighborly. And Stephanie doesn’t do it, either.”

Now he has no clue what to say so he just mutters “uh huh” and “sorry” again and rushes Cous Cous back inside.

So, this plagued him for awhile and then a week when he was gone, a tree blew down. The tree starts in their yard, but landed in ours. I told Scott we should pick it up so we don't have problems with them, but events got crazy and when he went out to investigate to see if we should call the city, he noticed it was gone and figured out Mr. Dietz had cleaned it up.

So he goes over to Mr. Dietz and gives him a cutting board that Scott engraved as a peace offering. And Mr. Dietz is super cordial, no thanks necessary, no problem cutting down the tree, etcetera. So we figure maybe it’s just Mrs. Dietz with the bug up her ass.

Well, we had a big turnout for Wee ‘Burb’s birthday, which coincided with a huge storm here in Suburbia. We did what we could to snowblow the driveway and the road around our house so that people could park. When a few guests came in rattled, we figured it was the bad roads. But after a few glasses of wine, the truth came out: apparently Mr. and Mrs. Dietz were yelling at people who parked too close to their driveway.

Not blocking it. Just too near it.

The snowbanks were too large to be parked ON their lawn, so I have no clue who they think they are yelling at ANYONE who parks on the PUBLIC street. And we don't have snow emergency rules out here, you just get plowed in if you're on the street.

A few people moved and a few other people resisted the urge to flip them the proverbial bird. Reports were they were standing in their garage and by their front door just shouting at people to move their cars! On my daughter’s first birthday! Which they ABSOLUTELY knew about.

So, it’s on. Official Neighborhood Enemies! Welcome to Suburbia, friends!

The Fifth Circle of Hell

You guys, I haven’t seen this much traffic in Suburbia since we hosted the golf tournament last summer. It’s frightening to realize that one street closing can cause such traffic Armageddon. And it does not help at all that said traffic is being re-routed through rotaries.

Some of you may know rotaries. You may know them as “traffic circles” or “roundabouts.” I have more colorful phrases for them, but around here they are called rotaries and they are just plain absurd.

Here’s the deal: the rotary has a purpose. It’s meant to manage traffic in an area that can not otherwise be easily served by a stop light or four-way stop sign. It’s essentially a large circle with (usually) two lanes that features (usually) 4 or more exits. If you are exiting at the nearest road, you take the outside lane and dart through. If you are going through the rotary to one of the further exits, you stay in your left lane.

These are not necessary for where we live. At all. But for some reason, Suburbia decided that they just…I don’t know. Look cool? Save money? I truly do not know. What I do know is, they suck. Let’s be honest, 90% of the population can’t handle a simple merge onto a highway, much less make a quick decision when faced with four routes to choose from in a big circle.

I’ve studiously avoided the rotaries as much as possible. But now because they are building a hospital on my usual route and it took me 6 minutes to get a left turn light, I am forced to take the rotary. As a result, I am pretty sure Wee ‘Burb’s first full sentence is going to be a string of expletives, followed by her mimicking the sound of a horn.

The lanes are clearly marked, if you are going straight (yes, because somehow going straight is an option in this messed up version of a rotary), you go in one lane. If you are curving, you go in another.

I’m not without sympathy here. A confession: when I discovered these in MA, I would do about anything to avoid them. I would go miles out of my way just to make sure that I did not have to enter the vortex of speeding cars. But I was 16, a new driver, and I got over it. And when I did have to face it, I followed the logical setup and nobody died.

Mostly, people just stop and stare for a minute or two. Occasionally, a car in the rotary thinks the one merging on to the rotary has the right of way and stops for a minute or two.

But a few weeks ago I saw, hands down, the most insane and idiotic thing I have EVER witnessed…for sure with rotaries, possibly with all driving in general. This person in front of me stopped dead to look at the signs, presumably. And then realizing they had missed their exit, they backed up!!!

Let me slow this down for you: they backed up…on a circle! It’s a circle!

You will, I promise, get to your desired destination. You will not, I promise, be stuck like in European Vacation pointing out: “Look, kids, Big Ben!”

I think I may need to start walking to the grocery store.

Blog About the Devil and She Appears

Ok, holy small suburban world!! I'm in Target perusing pajamas for Wee 'Burb, who has THE BIGGEST feet ever...I'm talking no footie pajamas can contain her. Anyway, I hear a familiar voice telling the kids to climb back into the cart and I look up from adorable monkey pajamas and who do I see: SUBURBAN WORKING MOM FROM THE POOL! Only, I am realizing now she's more than likely a Suburban Stay-at-Home mom who just happens to be very poised and put together. Now I hate her even more.

The best part?? Guess what she was buying with her perfect little suburban spawn? SWIMSUIT COVER-UPS! You can't make this stuff up!!

Come and Knock on Our Door

I think it may be inevitable that when you become a homeowner you become your parents. I am slowly embracing the fact that some days I care about whether my hosta will survive a freeze, that my garden is overgrown, that there’s too much trash in my can, that there are still remnants of our roofing project in my yard. Two years ago if you told me these would keep me up at night worrying about being the “junk house,” I’d have laughed in your face and gone back to sleep happy in my down comforter.

But recently I’ve had more than one moment that so channels my mother, it’s become a family joke. The family joke actually started long before my arrival in the ‘burbs. It started when I was a teenager living in Arizona and my father came home one day to find my mom proudly cleaning the house with a new product. She’s showing him how it can be used on tile and windows and even furniture and the entire time he’s following her going “where did you get that?”

After 10 minutes of my mom proving how fantastic this new cleaning product was, my dad finally took her by the shoulders and asked her again where she got it. He’s thinking the worst: my mother, left to her own devices while we were both in school and she wasn’t yet taking college classes, had become a shopping channel addict. It happens to good people, you know. There’s probably a 12-step program dedicated to it and I’m sure my father would have had it on speed dial before the intervention was over.

But, in fact, the truth was much worse. Under duress, my mother admitted how this beloved cleaning product came to be in our home. It was courtesy of a convict.

Allow me to set the scene. We lived at the base of a mountain, our nearest neighbor at least a city block away, our driveway so long you couldn’t see the end of it from any window in the house. The house is surrounded by cactus and the few trees that survive in Arizona. Any of you remember Neve Campbell’s house in Scream, how remote it was? Yeah that was ours.

Anyway, so the doorbell rings and my mother, alone in the house, swings it wide open and comes face to face with a man in a white button-down shirt and jeans. I wasn’t there, so naturally I picture the guy from Office Space, pretending to be a reformed crack addict, but really an unemployed IT worker. Only this dude was a legit convict: we know this because my mother tells us he presented her with a badge identifying him as such.

You have to understand two things: One, my mom is a nurse in addiction medicine and was ready to go back to school to get her degree in psych and she’s a big believer in second chances; and two, at the time we had a 100 pound yellow lab named Rudy.

Rudy was all bark and no bite, but I will confess when we first rescued him, he scared the crap out of me. Seeing 100 pounds of dog bare his teeth makes you not so much want to question whether he’s serious or not. So my mom figured nobody would mess with her and therefore she gladly let the reformed convict in to the house to demonstrate this wonderful product that would change a housewife’s life forever.

This is what she tries to explain over and over to my dad as he is shouting at her in disbelief “You ordered WHAT from WHO?” I think there may have been a few other choice words baked in there that weren’t suitable even for my teenage ears. But the bottom line was my dad was less than thrilled.

My dad could deal with the money spent on Boy Scout wreaths and Girl Scout cookies and gift wrap from elementary school drives. But this was too much for him to stomach: the fact that my mother opened the door to a solicitor over the age of 10 was bad enough, but the fact that said solicitor was traipsing through our house with his ex-convict badge and cleaning our couch cushions while potentially casing the joint was the last straw. My mother was forbidden from engaging with any door-to-door salesman ever again.

So, I’m a few months into this new house and I see my neighbor in the yard with her little daughter and I wave and go in the house. A few minutes later I hear my husband calling me outside, where in a vain attempt to throw the trash out, he’d been dragged into a neighborhood huddle. Those of you in the ‘burbs know what I am talking about. One neighbor asks how you are over the hedge and then suddenly five neighbors mill about to pet your dog or say hi to your kid and all of a sudden it’s like a pack of soccer mom football players all huddled trading gossip and apologizing about the one blade of grass that’s over an inch tall in their otherwise immaculate lawn.

Trapped, I walk over and meet the neighbors from two houses down, who have two adorable girls who are 10 and 7. Said adorable girls, who have been in school for maybe a week, are already selling Christmas wrapping and candy. I am so my mother’s daughter and can’t look in their little eyes without buying SOMETHING.

$50 of gift wrap later, I’ve apparently made a name for myself because suddenly our house is swarmed with kids carrying the same elementary school folders full of order forms. And guilt overtakes me and another $50 later, I’ve got more gift wrap than Hallmark.

So now a year later it’s September again and the doorbell rings and I seriously consider hiding because I trip over the rolls of wrapping paper I didn’t use last year every day and now I’m pregnant and hormonal and the sight of kids is just going to mean I have to call my mortgage company and try to explain that my check is late because an 8-year-old with cute blue eyes convinced me five rolls of penguin wrapping paper wasn’t enough.

I peek through the window and to my relief, it’s a college-aged kid with a clipboard. This part is easy! I can turn away the myriad “we will do your windows/roof/garden/whatever for super cheap, just hire us and help us with college tuition” salesmen out there. They don’t quite pull on the ‘ol heartstrings. So I open the door prepared to tell them “I purposely married a guy who’s handy so I don’t have to depend on randoms like you” when I was blindsided.

Apparently one of my neighbors has sent this young man my way armed with the knowledge that I’m pregnant (in fairness, it may have been obvious when I opened the door, but the fact that news of my impending motherhood had spread to solicitors was vaguely disturbing)and did he have a deal for me.

He begins by asking me about children’s books and I try to stop the spiel. In addition to being a soft-hearted second chancer, my mother is also a hoarder and had informed me more than once of her excitement at handing over all my baby books. So we were going to be more than stocked. Which is what I tell him.

Now I may have underestimated the value of a college education because this kid is good. He comes at me from a different approach. As part of his job, he’d like to know if there is anything in the children’s book world that I would like to see more of. I vaguely say that one thing we were considering is trying to find books that expose babies to Spanish because we were hoping to make our little one bilingual and we didn’t have any books that were for younger babies learning language.

Then all of a sudden he’s taking notes, we’re sitting together on the stoop and my husband is cooking dinner and wondering if he’s watching our baby’s future stepfather here as we huddle closely over a catalog.

My good friend Tage wasn’t interested in the goods or my kid, but boy did he have a deal for me! A package of, get this, bilingual Spanish/English books on first words, shapes, and numbers. He pulls out a set of 4 beautiful hardcover books and places them on my lap as I am sitting on the stoop. I caress them (those of you who know me well know my special relationship with books) and look up into the hopeful eyes of a man I am now convinced will own me and this country upon graduation and suddenly I am getting my checkbook and spending more on books than I spent on groceries.

When my father hears this story, I get the earful my mother got. How could I, pregnant and everything, sit on the stoop of my house with this college kid and get conned (that’s the word he uses repeatedly, despite the fact that I tried to point out that I paid money and got goods in return, some people call that shopping) into buying children’s books? How could it get worse? What were we thinking?

So this tirade is in my mind when a month later the doorbell rings again. At this point I confess I’ve already spent another $100 on wrapping paper and candy so I have satisfied all the little neighbor kids and quickly become a favorite sucker (if we have less than 50 kids this Halloween, I will be shocked. I am sure word has spread). Knowing there’s no way it’s kids, I send Scott down to tell whatever vendor it is to kindly go away.

Ten minutes later this man is in my entry way spreading out boxes of meat. You read that right…boxes…meat. There’s zero way to write this and not make it sound insane. It’s up there with a meat raffle…for those of you not lucky enough to have experienced THAT Midwest tradition, rural bars across the Midwest host meat raffle nights where you literally buy a raffle ticket and if you win, you get your choice of meat, which is laid out on a pool table for your perusal.

No raffle ticket necessary today, though! This man is a door-to-door meat salesman and he has charmed his way into our house through my dear husband. As he’s waxing poetic about prime cuts and marinated meat and less than $3 a pound, I’m watching Scott’s eyes light up and seeing his hand reach for his checkbook. Now, there’s a voice in my head going “don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it,” but who the hell am I to say no after I’ve spent a small country’s GNP on wrapping paper and wreaths? So he writes out the check and sets about filling our freezer with meat.

My dad heard this one and you could see in his face he was considering disowning all of us and running away. He's convinced there's some sort of signal on our house, like the hobo code in the olden days, there were symbols for houses where work or food could be had. He continues to dine out on the story of how we bought meat from a truck and my mother bought cleaner from a convict.

But I’ll tell you a secret: our house growing up was spotless and I just had a damn good steak. Viva la Solicitor!!

Confession and Introduction

Confession: I DID actually grow up in the suburbs. However, being raised by native New Yorkers, I had sort of an odd upbringing in the sense that I didn’t feel a lot of the “suburban experience,” at least as I am experiencing it now. Granted, we knew our neighbors, and when I was a kid I rode bikes with them and did lemonade stands and all those quaint childhood rituals, so I wasn’t totally citified. I just never felt truly at home in the suburbs where I would go to school and hear teachers say to other kids “oh I had your mom in class” or had a mom ask my mom “you’re the black Stephanie’s mom, right?” The second I turned 18 and graduated high school I was on the next flight to Boston, determined never to return to suburbia again.

I kept my word until I turned 30. My then fiancé and I had been living together in a very small condo near the city and it was time to make the leap to a house. We looked at about 40 houses and could not decide what to do. The younger part of us, “Young Hip Urban Us,” wanted a cool starter house in the cities, dreaming of pushing our baby’s stroller through the streets of Minneapolis, getting ice cream at the mom and pop shops, buying outfits at the little boutiques.

Then the market tanked and reality kicked in and we realized a starter house could end up being a 10-year commitment. We began to factor in school districts, resale value, all the adult things we’d been studiously avoiding as problems for “Future Us.”

So Future Us began to explore the suburbs, trying to stay as close to the city as possible. And our realtor kept leading us further and further West. When she mentioned the city we currently live in, we thought, not for the first time, about firing her. Because there was NO WAY we were going to live “out there.” I had heard tales about that city when I was growing up. I recall being jealous of them because they always got school off when it snowed since the dirt roads weren’t plowed fast enough or kids couldn’t get around on their tractors.

Our realtor was determined it would meet all our requirements and more, and we very grudgingly agreed to see a few houses and witness the new highway that supposedly meant we could get to the farm land in under an hour. We were dubious to say the least, but true enough, we did get there in about 30 minutes from the condo. It wasn’t ideal, but it would mean less than a 45 minute commute for both of us, which was one of our deal-breakers.

In addition to the highway, the neighborhood boasted miles of trails for biking and walking, a beautiful new community center, steadily rising schools, and even a Target or two. And once we saw the price tag on a house with a yard, a playground in the back, easy access to the trails, we were sold. And thus began what I have to say has been one of the strangest rides of my life, including wildlife, door-to-door salesmen, and more adventures to come, I’m sure. If you can relate, share your goofy suburban stories, and if you’re one of my city friends, well here’s to you! I’ll always be a little jealous of you, but I have better stories, so there!