Orbit Was Nice; Now, Back On The Planet
May. 21st, 2006 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousI hope you're all well. I haven't had a chance to check my friends list since Tuesday, and now there's no possibility of catching up.
First, there was Commencement Day.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mischievouspie, jaime_sama, and jaime_sama's consort G all graduated, so I spent the day at the ceremonies, and then helping set the food up for the party, and then at the party. Frabjousness, calloo callay, etc.
Then, there was another day of 6am blood tests, which, after being up all hours for a graduation party for people who had spent, on average, a decade apiece in grad school, was kind of rough.
The next day, Dan's parents were in town. My in-laws are smart, affectionate people who mean well. They really do. They always mean well. I'll stop there.
Saturday, we engaged in highly localized deforestation. Back when we lived in Highland Park, which was populated mostly by university professors and grad students, we got used to being surrounded by scruffy yards. The population of Highland Park was competing for publications and citations--they didn't need to engage in competitive lawn worship. South River's another animal entirely. We bet on gentrification when we moved here, and it's happening, sure enough, but meanwhile, our neighbors are mostly retirees from the brickyard that closed down decades ago, and they seem to derive immense satisfaction from competing to see who can have the largest number of virgin-mary-in-a-bathtub lawn ornaments on the most impeccably manicured grass. We, needless to say, are entirely without ecclesiastically approved concrete lawn ornaments. And our shrubs generally tend toward scruffiness.
One of our neighbors--Dan and I suspect it was the ones who listen to Rush Limbaugh while gardening--reported us to the town for having scruffy shrubs. We got a notice accusing us of having "an overgrowth of vegetation leading to blight." Blight? What blight? And if there were a blight, how could there be an overgrowth at the same time? I would think that blighted vegetation would be kind of stunted. Shows what I know.
Not only do I suspect that it was the Limbaugh fans who sent the town after us--I suspect they did it because we hosted the coven's last New Moon circle, and we held ritual outdoors. But then, these are the same neighbors who came out to watch me like a hawk once after a snowstorm, to make sure that, while shoveling, I didn't get any of my snow on their yard. I am so looking forward to the day these neighbors move to Florida. Sooner or later, that's where all elderly New Jersey neighbors go.
So we spent Saturday on the yard, because the town's shrub inspector is coming next week with his scruffiness checklist. Dan did lots of backbreaking labor involving shears and bow saws and a really impressive pruning device that looks like the perfect polearm for defending your city wall from invading Mongols. Maybe we can storm the house next door with it, once all this bureaucracy is over. Dan, le hallebardier. My most important task was to pull all our poison ivy; I'm allergic, but Dan's anaphylactically so. Every year, we kill back the invading tendrils of poison ivy, and every year, it comes back from its safe havens on the neighbors' properties. But do we accuse our neighbors of fostering blight? No, not even though this plant could actually kill one of us. Sheesh. Not surprisingly, I'm nursing a little poison ivy rash now.
Today, we went to a big in-law family to-do up in Brooklyn.tokeiwakamidesu's mom was celebrating her 60th birthday, so the place was mobbed with family and friends. The catering was excellent, but still not as fabulous as tokeiwakamidesu's father's cooking. One of the best things about the day was, of course, hanging out with tokeiwakamidesu. He informs me that a heartbroken friend of his at school read my anniversary post and decided to evaluate the relationship she'd just lost by comparing it to mine. Well, comparing it to mine, as I described it on its celebratory day, in a good year. Dan and I had two non-contiguous difficult years, back in the Middle and Late Cretaceous Periods, respectively--some of you will remember those years--and I wish I could tell that innocent Chicago undergrad that the slumber party's wonderful and true, but it's not the whole picture. (What is it Alicia says, in the patter she always does before performing her wedding poems? Marriage is hard, and a long marriage is hard for a long time, I think is how it goes. Also true, and also not the whole picture.) Anyhow, I have now weighted down my favorite cousin-in-law's carry-on luggage with the second half of the big book, which I haven't read in most of a year. I wonder how it plays.
I expect to finish this draft of The Novella That Will Not Be Called Bob And The Black Head Of Atho sometime this week, at which point I'll spend a couple hours printing myself a fresh copy of the big book, and find out.
First, there was Commencement Day.
mischievouspie, jaime_sama, and jaime_sama's consort G all graduated, so I spent the day at the ceremonies, and then helping set the food up for the party, and then at the party. Frabjousness, calloo callay, etc.Then, there was another day of 6am blood tests, which, after being up all hours for a graduation party for people who had spent, on average, a decade apiece in grad school, was kind of rough.
The next day, Dan's parents were in town. My in-laws are smart, affectionate people who mean well. They really do. They always mean well. I'll stop there.
Saturday, we engaged in highly localized deforestation. Back when we lived in Highland Park, which was populated mostly by university professors and grad students, we got used to being surrounded by scruffy yards. The population of Highland Park was competing for publications and citations--they didn't need to engage in competitive lawn worship. South River's another animal entirely. We bet on gentrification when we moved here, and it's happening, sure enough, but meanwhile, our neighbors are mostly retirees from the brickyard that closed down decades ago, and they seem to derive immense satisfaction from competing to see who can have the largest number of virgin-mary-in-a-bathtub lawn ornaments on the most impeccably manicured grass. We, needless to say, are entirely without ecclesiastically approved concrete lawn ornaments. And our shrubs generally tend toward scruffiness.
One of our neighbors--Dan and I suspect it was the ones who listen to Rush Limbaugh while gardening--reported us to the town for having scruffy shrubs. We got a notice accusing us of having "an overgrowth of vegetation leading to blight." Blight? What blight? And if there were a blight, how could there be an overgrowth at the same time? I would think that blighted vegetation would be kind of stunted. Shows what I know.
Not only do I suspect that it was the Limbaugh fans who sent the town after us--I suspect they did it because we hosted the coven's last New Moon circle, and we held ritual outdoors. But then, these are the same neighbors who came out to watch me like a hawk once after a snowstorm, to make sure that, while shoveling, I didn't get any of my snow on their yard. I am so looking forward to the day these neighbors move to Florida. Sooner or later, that's where all elderly New Jersey neighbors go.
So we spent Saturday on the yard, because the town's shrub inspector is coming next week with his scruffiness checklist. Dan did lots of backbreaking labor involving shears and bow saws and a really impressive pruning device that looks like the perfect polearm for defending your city wall from invading Mongols. Maybe we can storm the house next door with it, once all this bureaucracy is over. Dan, le hallebardier. My most important task was to pull all our poison ivy; I'm allergic, but Dan's anaphylactically so. Every year, we kill back the invading tendrils of poison ivy, and every year, it comes back from its safe havens on the neighbors' properties. But do we accuse our neighbors of fostering blight? No, not even though this plant could actually kill one of us. Sheesh. Not surprisingly, I'm nursing a little poison ivy rash now.
Today, we went to a big in-law family to-do up in Brooklyn.
tokeiwakamidesu's mom was celebrating her 60th birthday, so the place was mobbed with family and friends. The catering was excellent, but still not as fabulous as tokeiwakamidesu's father's cooking. One of the best things about the day was, of course, hanging out with tokeiwakamidesu. He informs me that a heartbroken friend of his at school read my anniversary post and decided to evaluate the relationship she'd just lost by comparing it to mine. Well, comparing it to mine, as I described it on its celebratory day, in a good year. Dan and I had two non-contiguous difficult years, back in the Middle and Late Cretaceous Periods, respectively--some of you will remember those years--and I wish I could tell that innocent Chicago undergrad that the slumber party's wonderful and true, but it's not the whole picture. (What is it Alicia says, in the patter she always does before performing her wedding poems? Marriage is hard, and a long marriage is hard for a long time, I think is how it goes. Also true, and also not the whole picture.) Anyhow, I have now weighted down my favorite cousin-in-law's carry-on luggage with the second half of the big book, which I haven't read in most of a year. I wonder how it plays.I expect to finish this draft of The Novella That Will Not Be Called Bob And The Black Head Of Atho sometime this week, at which point I'll spend a couple hours printing myself a fresh copy of the big book, and find out.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Middlesex county streetscape
Date: 2006-05-22 12:07 pm (UTC)The neighbors reporting you to the town authorities is them saying to you "We dislike you, enough to take actions against you." Because if they were neutral, they would have let you know in person, several times, and cut the easy stuff themselves.
I think the next move is to get the inspector to define "blight". If the inspector seems open to the idea, you can present the truth according to you. I think part of his job is to mediate petty disputes, or at least filter them so that we all know that those people are fussbudgets and complainers.
"Blight" sounds to me like "We have too much shade". Which they might, it does make moss grow on the roof, and attracts squirrels, and their house might be feeling like a tomb. Other than that it makes no sense.
My landlady circumvented the problem by not having any trees at all, and stockade fences.
The scraped-bald overcultivated look galls me too. But the smaller the space the neater it has to be to look OK. I realize also that if all the houses along the street have similar front yards, it makes the whole space look bigger.
Re: Middlesex county streetscape
Date: 2006-05-22 03:53 pm (UTC)That the neighbors have abandoned civility is pretty clear. I'm remembering fondly the Pillage the Village competition that Vingolf Fellowship hosted for all the Norse practitioners at FSG one year. Fuzzy was the very best pillager, even if he did topple out of the canoe on the way back from torching the miniature abbey. Maybe he's game to go a'viking.