Les Bonnes Choses

I don't know if I've written about this story before now -- I may well have, but I can't be bothered to go back and check, and in any case, it's just a preamble to the follow-up:

Shortly after we moved into this house 5 years ago, we had our immediate families over for our first New Year's day lunch. An hour into our lunch, our doorbell rang. It was my next door neighbour, and, as I had never met him, my introduction to him was by way of his complaining that he did "not want the street in front of [his] house to be a parking lot for my friends". Now, bear in mind that we live in the circular part of a court that has no island. That means that everyone in the court, for all intents and purposes, has a parking lot in front of their house. I suppose I could pace it off and do some math to figure out how much parking space we have available, but it should suffice to say that it is quite ample, and that he should have no concern for the ability of any of his house guests to find parking. An aside: in the last 5 years, I have observed that he seldom has guests. I should also point out that we also seldom have people over, let alone regularly parking in front of his house. The take away message here is that, from the moment I met my neighbour, I could only conclude that he is an ass with a bizarre territoriality that extends to the public roadway in front of his house.

This past fall, he had his driveway sealed. As one often does, he parked his van on the street in front of his house while the sealant was curing. It's been well over a month. He still parks his van in front of his house. Now, I don't want to give OCD a bad name, but this guy gets up in the morning, moves his van from his garage on to the street in front of his house, where it sits all day long like a sentry. Then, before he goes to bed, he moves his car back into his garage for the night.

I guess all this is to say that I live next to an idiot.