Dear Jenna:
Three years ago my husband and I first moved into our house. One day shortly after moving in we noticed that our next door neighbor was mowing our lawn. My husband confronted the neighboror about this and they had a bit of a blow-out. The entire neighborhood happened to be outside having parties and get-togethers and they all witnessed this tense situation. Ever since then we haven't really gotten along with that neighbor, even though at one point my husband apologized to the neighbor. We don't like the idea of our neighbor hating us and have considered apologizing a second time and giving him a gift to try to mend the relationship. What do you think about this? Should we bother?
Signed, Hated in the Northeast
Dear Hated-
I think mowing the lawn sucks...I would've walked out and handed him a 2o and reminded him the bushes in front needed a little attention....
Once you show people that you are an uptight prick it is very hard to change their minds....A second apology is just pathetic....Snub them when you see them and they'll start thinking you are the ones that dislike them instead of the other way around...Reverse psychology....
She is soooo wise! I'm going to tell Hay what she said in hopes that he'll stop worrying what others think of us. If we moved away we wouldn't give those neighbors another thought, so why give them thought time while we live next to them? (Don't get me wrong, I love the neighbor's wife and kids, they rock, but the Mister is a freak.)
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2 comments:
My mom is always psyched when her neighbor mows her lawn ;)
I should have added a question to the quiz about Poppy's favorite activity. I absolutely adore mowing the lawn, which is why I was angry about him doing that. The neighbor had actually mowed our lawn a few days before we moved in then apologized to my dad (who is our neighbor on the other side), but then when he first met us he didn't apologize to us. So, there was tension from the beginning.
I just don't appreciate people taking advantage of us. The guy is a total freak about mowing, but our property is not his to tend to. He's actually removed the front yard property marker and changed the mowing pattern so that it actually looks like we have squared-off front yards instead of the pie shape that it is.
His excuse for mowing our lawn the day that Hay confronted him was that he received his electricity bill and it was $400 and that the sewage pumping station our house shares with his house must have accounted for the bulk of that (cuz, ya know, me and the Mister are going to the bathroom 50 times a day and shoving food down the sink and taking a bunch of showers in which we wash our dishes) rather than taking into consideration that his family was running two A/C's running at full blast day and night, and doing laundry and cooking for 4 people. He threatened to put up a 20-ft fence and Hay countered with "go ahead! Then you won't mow our lawn anymore!" It's just a horrible situation and of course it's what sticks in our memory forever.
We had a really passive-aggressive neighbor at the last appartment we lived in before buying our house, so I was really hoping for a fantastic neighbor experience, but it just didn't pan out that way. We get along great with the other neighbor, but probably only because he's my dad. I'm not convinced I'd get along with my dad as a neighbor if he wasn't related to me...
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