Ketchup

It's been a crazy week. The good news is that I'm turning the final corner into the big explosive end-game of Mind Plague, which feels great. I've said this before, but, man, do these people get into a lot of trouble! Ha ha.

I'm having a great time following this new adventure, but it will be a strange milestone in my life when this book is done. I really, really like my heroes and their supporting cast, so I'm both sad and excited to start thinking about wrapping up the trilogy.

The bad news from Bonerville, unfortunately, is that I've sunk waaay too much time and energy into a minor war on my street.

We live on a quiet dead-end road up against several square miles of open space, which is awesome. There are eleven houses here, most of them dating back to the early 1960s, and Diana and I are the newcomers on the block even after having moved here in 1998. Some of these families are the original builders who bought their half-acre lots in the now-pricey hot spot of the east San Francisco Bay Area for $3000. That's right. A half-acre in surburban SF Bay Area for three grand. W0w!

There are no less than three homes on our street where three generations have lived or even still live. Those roots go deep, and, of the other eight households, no one else has been here for less than twenty years now.

Except for one lot. About two years ago, a pair of brothers bought one of the old houses after the owner passed on. It was barely more than a shack, really, maybe 1300 square feet, one tiny building on a big, sweet parcel.

They swore up and down that they had no intentions of knocking it down and building a new house, to which we all wrinkled our foreheads and said, "Uh huh." Sure enough, they knocked it down and started building. Slowly. Painfully. It's been thirteen months and they're only now getting close to done. In the meantime, there have been endless trucks up and down the street, and, jeez, why are people so dull and inconsiderate? Often there were so many vehicles parked helterskelter on both sides of the road in front of the site that you were lucky to squeeze through at all. Sometimes we even had to stop, get out, and find the one particular boner who'd left his fender sticking out into the narrow lane. Duh.

In the meantime, the brothers also continued to lie to our faces about their plans. For instance, they explained that the house would be one-story so as not to affect the views of the folks uphill, except to say that "there will be some rooms on the second floor beneath the roof." Right. Aren't the rooms in a house typically under the roof?

They've put up a gigantic 5000 square foot two-story monstrosity. They also had the street ripped up (and badly patched) in three places while making upgrades to the sewer, gas, and water lines... but they say it's not their fault, it's the utility companies, as if the utility companies came along at random and the work is wholly unrelated to their new construction.

Some of the folks on the street are super pissed.

But it gets better. These guys have also run their landscaping out nearly onto the roadside, ignoring the easement requirements of our private little homeowners' association. Just about everybody has been down there talking to these guys more than once, explaining that they're creating a bottleneck in the road and that there really needs to be off-street parking available. They'll be asking $2.3 million for their mountain-sized mansion, which is big enough for at least two families, and we've pointed out that the buyers may have teenagers or maids or, you know, friends, not all of whom will be able to park in the driveway. So where will they park? Right in the street?

These guys are hilarious. They know exactly where the property line was found. It was surveyed and marked, but one of 'em must have had a bright idea afterwards. They extended well past their line into the common property of the thoroughfare.

All they want is a giant yard to help sell their boondoggle of a home, for which they're over-budget in a bad market, but they say there's no problem. They even suggested that the buyers of the house will just have their visitors park on the lawn, as if people who buy $2.3 million dollar homes would dream of rolling their Beamers through the landscaping! When I called them on this bullshit, they claimed that what they'd really said was that we (the other residents of the street) would park on the lawn, which makes even less sense. Why would I park on the mansion's lawn? I have ample parking on my own lot up the street.

At last, these turkeys graciously allowed that they'd run the landscaping out too far and that they would move it back one foot. Only one foot. And only if we dug up the sprinkler system ourselves and paid for the new PVC etc. ourselves. Moving five sprinkler heads back twelve inches would run about fifty bucks in labor and material, a nickles-and-dimes joke that they could absorb without wasting one breath, so it was nothing but a slap in our collective face.

You can imagine how well that went over.

It's been talked to death, and everyone's irritated as hell, and I have better things to do. Fortunately, because we live on a private street and in a tight neighborhood, the homeowners' association is passing a new addendum to our bylaws to specifically deal with this parcel's infractions of the easement requirements at their expense. Democracy in action. If they don't comply, they'll find themselves in civil court, which isn't going to help sell that monster, either.

Did I mention that I have better things to do? I'm glad we're finally closing down on this b.s. How was your week!?!?

Labels: Catching up, Mind Plague