For those of you who missed the house-building saga (lucky you!), my uphill neighbor is one mighty tacky man, an uncouth slob (and I'm being nice about it). During our construction, he dumped his trash on our property and stole gravel and other building materials.
Our property is behind his as viewed from the road, and our house is angled such that a large portion of his back yard is visible from our front-facing windows. Not a big deal, really, because there is a nice row of trees between the two properties that make a passable screen. The whole development used to be a pine tree farm so all the trees are planted in tidy rows and very close together. Being so crowded the trees grew upwards very quickly but only the very tops are green. The bottom 2/3 are dead branches. Not pretty, but still screens the view.
'Till last weekend. Doughboy decided to remove the lower branches that mercifully screened the view. He's got a bit of a Tim Taylor complex in that he was using his chain saw to remove little twiggy branches that could easily be broken off by hand or sawn close with a stroke or two of a small saw. Nope. Chainsaw. He sawed for days and piled his truck high with brush (which we found scattered along the road for miles, when the twiggy trail went cold we found the brush pile thrown into a small hollow by the side of the road. *sigh*).
To better clean his property, he used his lawnmower to break up the branches on the ground into smaller pieces. He was itching to use the lawnmower for *something*, I guess, 'cuz he hasn't to produce much of a lawn. It's mostly dirt. Anyway, I've never witnessed anything funnier: him pushing that lawnmower through the trees and the machine sputtering and dying 'cuz the branches choked it up. He was finishing the job this morning. Too funny.
Sometime recently some cinder blocks showed up, along with some lumber and a pile of gravel. The gravel looks suspiciously like the gravel used by the developer (*hmmmm*). And I believe he's going to build a shed--- right on the property line. I think we'll have to make an emergency run to the nursery to get some large, fast-growing evergreen trees. grr. Because his backyard is on a hill, he is having to build up footers to make a level platform. He even has a new tool- a tech-y looking sight level on a small tripod. So far, we have footers four cinder blocks high on the down hill side and not a bag of mortar in sight. It'll be level alright, but wobbly as heck. Couple that with the fact that one of the footers is sited on the exact low spot where all the runoff water from two yards and the road runs.... this'll be interesting.
*DEVELOPING*