Kill the Nieghbors
He snapped at something that had been building up. I can relate to him and how easy it was for him to snap.....
I've had some issues with neighboring kids going through my puny little yard (they moved in Nov). To try to keep the peace, I tried to keep quiet......Their 14-16 yr old girl was too lazy to walk into the street of the cul-de-sac, so she used our yard as her "short-cut". Just about every day, she'd walk right past the hedges in the front yard, often peering into the house. All her punk-friends would do the same thing. I often had kids that I had no idea who they were, or where they lived, walking through my yard and often looking inside of the house. They sometimes brushed against my cars and would even climb or hang on my two huge Bradford Pear trees. The Bradford Pears were so big, that I actually lost two branches in a storm and often was afraid of loosing more, resulting in me having to cut the trees down, or a branch breaking while the kids were climbing them and me getting sued. I once came home from work and found five of them sitting in a circle in my yard playing with a puppy, and one of the kids was sitting on my front poarch. This type of activity continued, even after asking her to stay out of the yard. If I said something, she'd stay out of the yard for a few days, but would still walk through it if she thought I wasn't home (I often will ride my motorcycle and the car will still be in the driveway).
When I was growing up, I was taught to respect my neighbor's property. I remember walking around the perimeter of yards to take "short-cuts", while not walking through certain yards, especially those of people who didn't have children of their own. Anyway.....
This one time, I'd had enough of it. I was talking to my wife while pulling into the subdivision. She told me that a group of 8 or so kids were walking through the front yard and hanging on the trees, again. When I got to the house, only the neighbor kid was within earshot, so I told her to tell her freinds to stay the f*ck out of my yard and to quit hanging on the trees in my yard. She snapped back with a string of profanities, telling me, for the most part, it was none of her concern. From that point on, I was constantly having trash thrown in my front and back yards and rocks large enough to potentially damage my lawn mower. At first I picked it up and threw it away, then, I started kicking it in the street. If I kicked the trash into the street, they'd make it a point to throw it back into my yard. I even set up a video camera in the window, but made it fairly easy for them to see from the yard. Amazingly, the trash in my yard stopped any time the video camera was in the window.
My main dilemma was that the parents wouldn't do anything about it. I'd had enough run-ins with them, such as for their kids and friends parking their cars where they were blocking my driveway, that I knew they wouldn't do anything about it. They let the kids do whatever they wanted, and often, would leave on their pontoon boat for a whole weekend, while the kids stayed home. I was thinking of getting them on film and getting trespass warrants, but I know they'd just get other friends to come walk through the yard or throw trash in the yard (or who knows what else), so it was essentially a no-win situation. Vicki and I were starting to look for property elsewhere. We'd considered a split-rail fence, but figured that would promote them to sit on it, and probably climb it just to further tick me off. I'm just glad that they moved this past November, because I was starting to get at my wit's end with them. The whole family was nothing but white-trash, anyway.....
Yeah, I can see where the guy was coming from. He did go overboard, but, I know where his thinking came from.
