Tag Archives: difficult neighbours

DAY 24 UBC – DO WE HAVE A PROBLEM HERE?

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Do We Have a Problem Here?

Saturday night. I’m showered and in my pajamas already. Supper is still stewing in the Instant pot while I’m stewing on the keyboard. There are so many things I could get upset about. And I have been upset but one has to get over it. Or it could kill you. Life is full of quirks. I’m lucky enough to live between 2 women who are not easy to get along with. I wasn’t going to talk about neighbours this month. Then someone posted on Facebook about their fun with neighbours. Now, I just can’t help myself.

I’m really over my ire. I’m in that peaceful valley having come to my senses. There’s just no way that I can get them to see eye to eye with me. Really when 2 or more people are in disagreement, it is difficult to come to a consensus. Each one wants to be right and want the other person to agree with them. That was really a hard lesson for me. I thought I could use reason and explanation to solve our problems. Was I ever wrong. One neighbour would not even allow me to talk. She talked above and over me. After 10 years and when she started to throw rocks at me, I called the police liason for help. It took 2 visits over a year by 2 different officers to obtain some peace. Needless to say, she has mental health issues.

My problem with my other neighbour is not so bad now but it had been. We’ll just leave the past in the past. Now it’s just the light on her garage that she leaves on all night. It’s high and reflects through my bedroom blinds. She has changed it to a warmer hue but still…my sleep and I are disturbed. I could tell that she was not really opened to our suggestions on how to fix it. And rather than getting into a disagreeable disagreement, I took responsibility for my problem. I built a blackout curtain. It took some trying but I do have a fancy expensive Bernina sewing machine.

Now it is all hunky dory. With the blinds and curtain, the bedroom is black. I don’t have to lay in bed awake and cranky, thinking up ways of shooting out the light. I don’t have to get mad every time I see her or if that garage light stays on all night.

HOW TO LIVE IN EQUANIMITY

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I’ve come to accept that I am a striver, always trying, to do better, to be more. I am a restless soul. In this life, I will always be busy trying and trying. I will rest later – in my next life.

It’s not for lack of trying that I don’t get along with people. I’m feeling I’ve failed miserably in that department. It seems that I’m always thinking, thinking and thinking what else can I do, how else can I be, to get along, to please people. I feel I’m always lacking, that it’s all my fault. I should have. I ought to. Why didn’t I?

I am exhausted by it all now – this getting along with people, this pleasing them. There seems to be no pleasing. What about me? Don’t I deserve some consideration after all I HAVE done. I felt incensed. I felt like screaming. I did scream yesterday. I felt caught between a rock and a hard place. I was damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Trapped! So often in life, trying to live in equanimity, turning the other cheek.

I was harvesting my carrots in the raised bed yesterday. I kept seeing those little spruce trees wherever I stepped. In frustration and anger I stomped on them. The neighbour had planted them in our yard. She claims that it’s part of her yard. She weeds the strip along her driveway on our side and said she will probably until she dies. She hates weeds. She also has the Weed Man spray herbicide along the strip – right where we have our vegetable bed.

I have called the Weed Man office to complain that it is actually our property they are spraying and we have food growing there. They have put the information on the file but I will follow up in spring. Trying to deal with the neighbour directly in the past have not successful. It only made things worse. She comes back at you in a different direction. What is best is no interaction whatsoever. Sometimes I forget and then there’s hell to pay. It gets exhausting sometimes. I’m trying to look at it in a different way.

Those little spruce trees will grow taller. They’ll be a fence and barrier against the snow she likes to shovel into our yard. Take a breath. There’s a silver lining in every problem. Take another breath. She is teaching me a lesson. There is no pleasing other people. I have to take care of myself, living up to my own personal code of conduct. Take another breath. I’m over the frustration and anger.

 

READY, SET, GO

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IMG_3116It’s another day.  I still have a million and one things to do.  For now, let me rest in this space if I can, but difficult neighbours seem to be my cross to bear – especially the obsessive compulsive type.  Right now I can hear the constant whine of her leaf blower. It’s like hearing fingernails scratching on a blackboard over and over.  I don’t mean to be unkind but I wish she would disappear. It’s my evil twin speaking.

It stops and starts again, this never ending stream of irritation.  I will breathe and sip my cuppa and tap away on my keyboard.  There!  It has stopped.  Praise the Lord!  I close my eyes, unfurl my eyebrows and let my shoulders drop.  I am tired but it is a good day. The car is back from the shop with a set of brand new Michlin tires.  Have tread, will travel far.  No worries.  I am ready, set and can almost go.  It feels heady not to procrastinate.

IMG_3120Now if I can get to my tomatoes.  There’s no end to them.  Seems like I pick bushels of tomatoes and sunberries every day.  I’m complaining a little now.  Come winter I will be happy to have tomatoes for soups and spaghetti sauce.  And those little berries will be delicious in muffins.  Suffer now.  Enjoy later.  Oh, that whine has started again. It’s like being at the dentist’s.