Oh, I know, some of you live on vast acreages and never have any problems with your neighbors. Or you have perfect neighbors. I don't want to hear about it, this isn't about you.

Our neighbors to the east have all kinds of house guests all the time, plus four or five children, maybe six. The oldest is a 12 or so girl, then there's a 10 or so boy, and then a pack of youngsters down to maybe 2, mostly boys. The house guests, judging by their cars, come and go, staying for a night or two every couple of weeks, and there is a 20-something woman who is there most of the time. All in a small 3 bedroom house.

One of the overnight guests has started showing up in a big rented Penske truck about once a week. He often arrives late at night, and the most recent truck had Indiana plates, not that that means anything in our mobile society. The first couple of times he parked it across the street in a sort of overflow area that all the residents of our street use because our driveways are short and our curb frontage on the street is not very large. But lately he has started parking it in front of their house, trying to shoehorn that big truck between their driveway and the edge of our driveway, but it still blocks half their drive.

Thursday was trash day and when the trash truck came, the Penske truck was blocking the sidewalk where our neighbors' trash and our trash were waiting side-by-side to be picked up. So the trash guys missed us, and we were going to have to take our trash in and put it out again on Monday. Not a big problem for us because we don't have much trash, but the neighbors more than fill their trash cans every time, so they would have a problem storing it all over the weekend.

Mr. Troutbend had bowling so he just left it there and went away. Pretty soon the truck guy came out, loaded their trash and our trash in the back of that truck and drove off to track down the trash guys. Fine by us, since they caused the problem in the first place.

These are the neighbors who had the two yappy chihuahuas that never shut up, night and day, for about a year. When I got back here in October they were gone. Thank goodness for that. Not to say it's peaceful around here, there are still other yappy pests, but at least they go inside at night.

Today they've got a guy over there to paint the trim on their house (the rest is stucco that doesn't need paint). This poses a problem for Mr. Troutbend because their house is going to look better than ours, and can no longer point to them as needing painting worse than we do. He will need to hire someone to paint for us because it's a tall two-story house, and it just kills him to pay for work on the house. Never mind the danger.

It needs doing, regardless of the house next door, so I'll offer to pay for it out of my money, maybe that will help him decide. One thing for sure, we're not going to hire their painter because he did some scraping and then disappeared for a month, and finally he's back but his paint sprayer doesn't work. I think we can do better than that, or at least I hope so.