It takes a village

A friend of mine/fellow blogger recently wrote about rescuing some plants from a long-abandoned house. I have the opposite problem: next-door neighbors (son and his mother) who do nothing to keep up with their property other than occasionally mowing their lawn. Notice the pictures of the shrubs I posted. These people no longer walk between these overgrown beasts to get to their front door; they now cut through the grass. I know when I took Jordan trick-or-treating there this past Halloween, I pretty much had to turn sideways to get through. I think Kate Moss would be challenged to fit!

The owner of the house is somewhere between mid 20s and mid 30s and is completely mobile; in fact, I have seen him attempt some type of martial arts in his backyard. So why is it so hard to trim these shrubs? We have shared hedges, and if you looked at them head on/between our two houses, you would see his side growing wildly and ours looking neat and trim. Brian has threatened many times to go over there and trim the hedges and shrubs. I told him he should offer to do it for a low price. That way he could make a little money and the place would look better. And if the neighbor said no, maybe, just maybe, he would get the hint.

I have also noticed on several walks that sometimes an empty bottle or wrapper sits in their front yard near the street. Most likely they did not put that litter there, but how can they not notice it and not want to pick it up (rhetorical question)? As I have written before, I often walk through my neighborhood picking up litter, but I am hesitant to collect it from people's yards. If they don't care enough to pick it up, why should I?

Home ownership is not for everyone. And if I did not have Brian, I would not own a single-family house; there is just too much work keeping up with everything. But if you are going to own a place, you should be willing to keep up with it or else hire someone else to do it. People should have to sign contracts stating this, right along with their house agreement, don't you think?

Let's build something together!

That is one of my favorite slogan's (Or is that a tagline? Over a year removed from a design firm, and I can no longer remember). It belongs to Lowe's, although I am more of a Home Depot gal. But suffice it to say if someone handed me a $5,000 gift card to Home Depot (or Lowe's), I would be ecstatic. If I had $10,000 to spend, you could hear my shouts of joy from miles away. The things I could do with that money. Well, the things I could have Brian do with that money anyway. I love walking around Home Depot and admiring the fancy bathroom sinks and tubs. I look at the lighting and think about where I would put each fixture. I touch textured and colorful tiles and wistfully look at the fancy kitchen cabinets. I admire the various carpet styles and blinds. I look at the fancy front-loading washer and wonder what it must be like to have a steam dryer. I even look longingly at the vacuum cleaners because I can no longer buy a replacement filter for my eight year old mo...

Summer in review

This summer I made it a point to try to take at least one pic of Jordan whenever we went somewhere, which most often was a park. I wanted to capture all the great, fun things we did this summer, knowing that it was probably going to be my last summer not working for quite some time. So here goes. I have expressed my love of Frick Park, particularly Blue Slide Park, in other posts ; it really is one of our favorites. And this summer marked the first one I did not feel the need to follow J around like a little puppy dog. I actually let her run around and explore, though, admittedly, I would panic if more than three minutes went by and I had not seen her. In the pics above, J is at the end of the blue slide, and then hanging several feet above concrete (which scared the crap out of me). We also visited another section of Frick Park, the area on the corner of Braddock and Forbes, a few times. There is not as much to do as Blue Slide, but we go there to mix things up a bit. In the p...

If only I had taken pictures of my detoured drive

When I moved to the Burgh just over 14 years ago, I had a lot of anxiety about getting from "here" to "there." I found the city, which is triangular, and even some of the suburbs quite confusing. On top of that, a lot of the signs were of little help. Clearly they were put up by either natives who had no need for directions or people with a sick sense of humor who thought it would be funny to put signs in random places, leaving off important roads. At some point, I got over that fear of driving to a new building downtown. I don't recall when it happened, but eventually I just figured most of the city out; and when I had to head to a new place, I just drove around, no longer with a feeling of dread, knowing I would eventually get there. But on Sunday morning, that awful, long-ago feeling returned, thanks to the closure of the outbound Fort Pitt Tunnels. I had to pick my mother up from the airport, so there was no avoiding it. (For some reason, my family think...

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