Fortunately, my contacts arrived on Wednesday, right on time. :o)
Remember Psycho Woman?? The woman who would come outside to water her plants and her lawn after 10pm each evening? Yeah, her. I've found out more about her... grumble grumble...
When it snowed here (our one day of winter during the entire season), all the neighbors came out to sled down the street and be sociable. The folks who on the other side of Psycho Woman from us are rather unsocial, but they're really nice people. The wife told us that Psycho Woman is actually growing marijuana under her house, and that she deals it out of her home.
Great. Just dandy. And the thing is, we don't even live in the sketchy area of our neighborhood. We live in the nice end, not an area that you would think you would have a drug dealer living nearby.
Yes, I know some people don't think marijuana is a drug. But it's illegal, and I don't particularly want my family around it.
Now Psycho Woman has started up her normal summer activities. I don't sleep all that well anymore, being pregnant, because I can't sleep on my stomach -- the most comfortable position for me. Plus I am starting to sleep much lighter, so when Kurt wakes up in the morning, I'm aware of it, or if he's got issues of whatever sort, I usually wake up too to make sure he's okay.
Plus it's getting warmer outside during the day, and it's not cold at night anymore. Kurt and I are really enjoying having the window open each night, and that allows me to hear when people come to see Psycho Woman, especially since most people in our neighborhood have gravel driveways. And it's literally all hours of the day and night.
It's not just on the weekends; it's almost every night. People come by at 11pm, 2am, 4am, it doesn't seem to matter. It's not always the same car -- some of her "friends" have loud mufflers -- so it's not her coming and going every night. Her daughter's not old enough for a license (she may be 15 now), so it's not her staying out all night and breaking curfew.
J told me a couple days ago that she knows a lady with cancer who uses marijuana medicinally, and she's seen her husband going into Psycho Woman's house, probably to get another stash of weed. That I don't mind so much, but I don't know about all the other people that come by. And since her home is so close to mine, it makes me a little nervous. I don't know what kind of people they are, and what they would do late at night under cover of darkness. What if someone would think it's funny to throw something at my windows? My bedroom window would be the one they would hit, and that scares me a bit.
I already ran off a couple of kids last week. J told me later that they were there to collect some money that Psycho Woman stiffed them for mowing her lawn, according to the boys. I don't know about that -- I've only seen one guy mow her lawn, and it's someone her age and I think he lives there. But these two boys were loitering around her house for literally hours one Saturday. They would bang on her door, not get a response, hang out some more, then bang again. This was repeated for a good three or four hours, and of course, every time they knocked, my not-so-bright dog would bark because he thought someone was knocking on our door. Finally as I was making dinner, I saw them ripping some of her plants out of the ground, bent on destruction like so many boys in groups without adult supervision. I don't know why boys think it's so funny to destroy things, and why they do it when there's another boy or two around, but they do it. Seeing them destroy her plants was the very last straw for me. I slammed down the plate in my hand, barged out my patio door, and told them, very sternly, "You know, she works really hard to keep her yard neat, and it would probably be a good thing if y'all didn't destroy it!" They mumbled their apologies, and the next time I looked out my window they were gone. Good riddance.
But my dog spends a lot of time out in my yard now that it's nice weather. I don't know if some of these folks, or the kids that the daughter brings home (because they are NOT the type of kids to grow up into fine, upstanding citizens), would be the type to carry around a BB gun. What if they decided that my dog barks too much, and hauled off and shot him? I worry about that kind of thing, and especially now that I'm pregnant. What kind of environment is that to raise my kids around?? No wonder the neighbors on their other side are so anti-social. I would be too, if I had three kids under the age of eight like they do.
I can't really call the cops because I have nothing to report. Would they take it seriously if I told them that people came by at all hours of the day and night? I can't tell them about the woman who gets her medicinal marijuana from her -- one, because I don't want to get a sick woman in trouble, and two, because it's hearsay. And the same neighbor who told me she's growing marijuana under her house also told me that the cops know about her and the weed -- they just can't really do anything because there are so few officers out here, and she's minor in comparison to all the meth labs they have to deal with in the rest of the county.
It's just frustrating as hell to have that kind of thing going on so close to my own back door.