Evolution

Our community is reserved for people who are over 55.  People over 55 are a famously crotchety bunch.  Many of us are way over 55 and most of us are retired.  So if you're still young let me say this: do not fuck with old, retired people.  We don't have anything to do except keep an eye on our neighbors.  A critical eye.  We look out the front window and if we see someone we don't know we say: "Who's this?  What's he doing?" We don't like noise or messes or big dogs and we loathe children with all of their yelling and running around and making a racket.  Ironically, as people age they express a great deal more happiness and satisfaction in their lives but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who'd admit to that.  If you move into a community for older adults you'll find that there are more rules to follow than you can imagine. There are rules for infractions I don't know what the infractions are.  I assume they're made up infractions.  I assume that most of the rules - many of them seem petty and obvious - came into being because someone violated a common sense practice.  For instance, you are not allowed to wash your car in you own driveway, having instead to take it to kind of a washing bay.  I, personally, do not do this.  Call management and complain if you will but I'm not going to drive my car with all my car-washing gear and wet chamois and soaps somewhere else to do the washing.  There are car-washing establishments if I want to drive somewhere else.  I'm a pretty good neighbor and I get along with my neighbors so no one has ratted me out yet but I see some fluttering curtains.  They're keeping an eye on me.  They know what's going on.

Anyway, one rule is that you can't work on boats in your driveway.  Boat Guy did this.  And you can't store bags of crap in your backyard and - guess what? - there's the birth of Garbage Bag Guy who is the same Guy as Boat Guy which is doubly irritating while also being convenient when you finally get fed up enough to rat someone out.  You're supposed to have plants in your little front yard but the weirdos across the street don't do this but I don't care.  I like them.  The man next door is pretty deaf so from time to time he'll blast Mexican music while he's grilling skirt steaks or whatever tough, inedible meat he likes to grill.  Fair enough and no harm, no foul.  My car is loud when I head off to the Keep It Complicated meeting early in the morning.

So Boat Guy/Garbage Bag Guy has been storing a lot of wood and other random garbage-ey crap in his backyard which is definitely not allowed.   We shrugged and let it pass . . . until we had our second rat infestation in the crawl space under our house.  I have no proof that his crap is the genesis of the rats but if I was a rat a big pile of musty, dark wood might make a nice home to raise my rat family.  SuperK has now christened him Rat Boy which is an excellent nickname.  An excellent third nickname which is one nickname too many.   No plants in your front yard?  Eh.  Loud salsa music sometimes?  Meh.  Rats under my house which are expensive to eradicate?  Fuck that.