Occasionally you meet a kid who makes you wonder what sort of magic formula his parents had.   The next-door neighbor at my MIL’s house has one of those kids.   He’s fifteen and a bundle of ‘willing to work his tail off for you’ energy.   He makes his mother proud.

     G and I had more or less butchered the giant lilac bush and honeysuckle mess at the front side of the house.  I got as much of that sucker trimmed as I could reach last Wednesday and Sunday.  (We had to do something to work off the frustration of no one showing up to buy things.)

     Today while we worked on the basement, the kid, worked on the remains of the lilac bush/honey suckle mess and had it down to a two-foot high cluster of stumps.  With the ‘help’ of his young brother, he hauled all the brush to the back yard and even raked around the stumps!

     I can’t believe how much brighter the living room is with that mess gone.  If only the MIL had let me trim it all these years, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

     I spent most of the day yesterday dozing in my chair.  Those meds are kicking my butt.  I somehow have to make it over to the MIL’s house today to begin the excavation of the basement.  We have now reached the part I’ve dreaded the most.

     Currently, we’ve put a halt to yard selling the stuff and will put an effort into making the garbage men hate us again.  I foresee many, many, many bags of garbage hitting the curb. 

     Anyone who wants to help or is in need of amusement can find G and me down in the horrifying basement with our masks and work gloves on sifting through the YUCK.  Just follow the screams….

     After going totally bonkers while setting up the new internet connections yesterday, I am not in the mood to do any writing here.  Instead, I’m going to wish you all a good day today, go crawl away into a corner, and curl up into a fetal position. 

     See you all tomorrow.

     Moreover, never grocery shop with your husband when you are both hungry!  Geez, I bought more than the usual snacks with him along with me.  I sent him off in his electric cart to find coffee and creamer.  He came back with that and a ton of cookies, blocks of cheese, salami, and various duplicates of things I already had in my cart.  I sent him away to ‘put some of that back.’  He did.

     Nevertheless, we spent much more than I’d planned to spend.  I’d gone in the store with a very small list and yet I came out of the store with five bags of groceries.  Next time I leave him at home and snack on something before I go.

     After my father in law died in 1998, my mother in law became more and more reclusive as time went by.  Try as we might we couldn’t get her to go anywhere or socialize with anyone.  She became the invisible woman in her neighborhood.  Yesterday I heard a lot more about her from her neighbors than I knew.

     The neighbor from across the street came over and during the course of our conversation; I found that the most he ever saw of her was her hand reaching into her mailbox.  (She had a lovely porch to sit on and never used it.)  Her next-door neighbors hardly knew she existed, they thought my husband lived there since they saw him more often than they saw his mother.

     The saddest thing is, I’ve met many of her neighbors over the last several months, and they are very sweet and kind people.  She never gave them a chance.  She constantly complained about them to my husband or called the police for many an imagined infraction. 

     Each neighbor that I’ve met from every house and apartment near her, no matter what their age, have all been wonderful.  The woman directly next door, in the apartments, has sent her kids over to help us move things outside and then back in each time we’ve been there.  Her kids are so nice.  I’m sure they would’ve run errands for my MIL at any time, but she never gave any of her neighbors a chance.