Sick people, firefighters and birthday parties. It's one of those mixed up kind of days......

Geez.  I have tried to get on here and write something for the past two days.  I started one post and it was so boring I deleted it.  But honestly, nothing interesting has happened - a doctor's appointment where I got mixed news on my arm, more physical therapy, and, shockingly, 165 more overnight packages.  Don't y'all want to hear the nitty gritty on all of that?

Since y'all seem to enjoy the stories about my crazy 'hood, I'll tell y'all about the girl diagonally across the street from me.  Well, it's kind of about me being a big ol' scaredy cat mostly, but she plays into the story.

The house I bought was a foreclosure.  A same-sex couple owned it (which really has nothing to do with the story, but I've told y'all I am wordy and give too many details when I tell y'all stuff).  One was a real estate agent and the other was a designer so when the housing market crashed, they were both kind of screwed.  According to my next door neighbor, they had top-of-the-line everything in this house.  And in the middle of losing their house, they also lost their love for each other and their relationship ended rather badly from what I understand.

They stripped the house and took a lot of it with them.

They took the kitchen counters, the backsplash, every single appliance in the house, a portion of the kitchen floors (I don't get that either, but the tile down one side of the kitchen was gone), a bathroom vanity, toilet handles in 3 of the 4 bathrooms, faucets in 2 of the bathrooms, 15 lighting fixtures, and a few other miscellaneous things.  My move was a complete and utter pain and did not go very smoothly.  My movers pulled out of my driveway at 10 minutes before midnight and you can imagine how much we all loved each other by that point.  The night I moved in, my mom (who came from Texas to help me move) and I had to squat over the toilet because my bank was an absolute nightmare to deal with and I know that doesn't make sense, but trust me....it's my bank's fault the toilet wasn't clean and that we had to squat and I will tell y'all that story at some point.  So there we were squatting over the dirty toilet and we had to pee by flashlight because I had no light fixture in the only bathroom that had hardware on it to flush the toilet.  My mom and I had to use only that bathroom for showers, etc. because of the condition the other bathrooms were in, and four days later my contractors discovered that the entire bathroom was being held up by God himself because the entire subfloor was rotted out from water damage and they didn't understand how my mom and I had not ended up falling through into the crawl space while taking our morning showers at some point.  Fun is what the first few weeks in my house was full of.

In other words, I had to have a lot of work done to the house when I moved in.  And I lived in it through the construction and never plan to repeat that mistake as long as I live.  So I hired a contractor.  He is my sister-in-law's niece's husband.  Keep up.  He and his business partner are both part-time contractors and a full-time firefighters for the City of Atlanta. 

One Sunday morning a couple of weeks after moving in, I was awake pretty early and around 6:30 a.m. I heard sirens coming down my street.  There were two firetrucks and an ambulance, and I watched out the window as they stopped at the house diagonally across the street from me and took someone off on a stretcher.  I said a prayer for my new neighbor I had not met that she would be okay.

What I didn't know early that Sunday morning is that ambulances and firetrucks would be stopping by and taking her off on a stretcher on a fairly regular basis.  I didn't know there would be times they came by and I would be so accustomed to the noise that I would stop noticing it completely.  I did say a quick little prayer for her each time I did notice though.

One night I was in the living room working on my computer, the TV was on, Bailey was flopped out on top of me, and I was chilled.  But then instead of chilled, I was scared.  A white light started scanning the front of my house.  It kept going back and forth across the bay window in my living room and I honestly thought someone was in my front yard with a flashlight and they were about to try and break in.  I whispered to Bailey to get off me, and I slowly got up from the sofa.  I then got down on my hands and knees and crawled across the living room, through the entry way, and into the dining room so I could peek out the leaded glass window and see where the person was. 

I slowly crept up until my eyes were just above the bottom edge of the window and that's when I saw the scary person!

My contractor was driving the firetruck which had stopped at the house diagonally across the street for the girl over there, and he had a spotlight which he was scanning slowly back and forth across the front of my house.  He was grinning from ear to ear and waving.

I ran outside (in my pajamas, sock feet, hair up in a bun, no bra) and started yelling at him how bad he had scared me.  And he was cracking up.

.....Imagine I have a great segue here.....

For the first 2 months in my cast, I was under doctor's orders not to drive.  When I finally could drive once he had me just in a cast and no sling, I was running errands every spare minute of my life because I was behind on everything.  And my hippie friend was starting to help me in my yard.  So one Friday night after work, I stopped to get some flowers and other things for yardwork, and then went grocery shopping.  As I drove up to my house, the ambulances and firetrucks were across the street.  I got out of my car and began unloading my groceries and flowers and I heard a man whistling.  He wasn't whistling a song, he was whistling like men whistle at hot women.  So I didn't look up because I assumed some hot girl must be walking up the street or something.  Then I heard someone right behind me in my driveway say, "Hey girl!  I'm whistling at you!"  And it was my contractor again.

He said he can't possibly come on a call right across the street from me and not try to mess with me somehow.  Sadly, the girl across the street is fairly young (in her 20's) but very sickly and has been picked up by ambulance at least 9 times that I'm aware of in the 6 months I've lived across the street from her.  Even though some guy who lives there (there are a variety of people living there and I don't know the relationships of them all) drives a medical transport van, they always call 911 when she gets ill.  So my contractor will probably have plenty of opportunities to mess with me.

Which all leads me to this question:  don't some of you want to come over and experience all of the nonsense in my 'hood?  Last year Letha, Sadie and I met for the first time and took silly pictures and had a great time getting to know each other.  I was thinking we should have a satellite birthday party for June again this year and I'm offering up my house for the party location.  Do the Atlanta peeps (or anyone who feels like driving to Atlanta) want to do this?  If we do just snacks, etc. I can handle it all.  If y'all want a meal, we could to a pot luck because I'm going to be honest....I don't cook entire meals for parties.  I barely cook meals for myself.  Anyone interested?  If so, leave a date suggestion in the comments and let's get this celebration in the works!