Part 1 of the neighbour who hates us
I remember the afternoon when the music started. It was Sunday, April 2nd, at around 4pm. Katr and I were in our dining room, playing a game of Wingspan, when we started to hear loud shitty death metal blasting from what seemed to be NWHU's house. It was a pleasant day and the windows were open. The music was so loud I could Shazam it from inside the house, but I wouldn’t, because it was so shitty.
I poked my head out the back door to see what was going on. Up on NWHU‘s balcony, she had a little boombox set up with the speakers pressed up against the balcony railing, pointed directly at our house.
I wrote down the time the music started, closed the window so we wouldn’t have to hear it and went back to playing. But I was shaking with fury. She tried to Noriega us in our own house! Also, it’s not like we are the only people who can hear this music. Literally everybody else in the neighbourhood was being blasted by death metal on a Sunday afternoon. For, as it turned out, three full hours.
The tarps were one thing. This music blasting is really next level. Who does that? It was bananas. But when she didn't do it again for the rest of the month, I figured she had gotten it out of her system.
Speaking of the tarps: it turns out that anger tarps take a lot of maintenance. It was springtime on Vancouver Island and it was windy and rainy. At least once a week, she and her son had to be out in the yard, adjusting the tarps, trying to keep them from falling down or breaking the branches on the various trees she's tied the tarps to, so I was not surprised when, at the end of April, she gave up and removed them.
I hoped she had taken them down because she was over it. But then I remembered that every spring, NWHU leaves for an entire month. I don’t know where she goes, maybe home to hell. But from the end of April to the end of May, we had a golden time.
But as we all know, nothing gold can stay. Back to some boring details about the pool.
It turns out that the bylaws say that the WATER part of the pool has to be a minimum distance from the fence line but your pool decking can be right up against the fence. Guess where ours ended up? HA ha!
The proximity of the decking to the fence was a bit of a surprise to us too, but I think we wouldn't have worried about it if NWHU wasn't already SO FURIOUS about the pool.
I remember saying to Katr that when NWHU returned and saw the progress that had been made, she would completely lose her mind.
I...was correct.
(To be fair to NWHU, the way the pool deck was positioned along the fence, if you stand on the front edge of the pool deck, the fence is only waist high. If you wanted, you could stand on that corner and peer into her yard. This is the area we had promised to cover with privacy greenery, but I imagine that might have been hard to envision in the moment.)
Probably my favourite incident during this period was one evening when I was in the kitchen, looked out the window and saw NWHU on a ladder slowly lowering an extended measuring tape over the fence into our yard.
I opened the window and yelled "NWHU, DO YOU WANT TO JUST COME OVER TO MEASURE?" and she called back "No, this is fine!" HAHAHAHAHAHA
The next day, she took a bunch of photos over the fence and our masons called her a Karen.
Armed with her measurements and photos, NWHU called her city councillor. She called the mayor. She called the local building inspector and his boss and his boss's boss.
We received a notice from the chief inspector of the city that we were going to have to have an inspection from the city's chief bylaw officer to make sure that everything was aligned with all the permits we'd received and all the bylaws.
This was obviously stressful for a lot of reasons; shit had PROGRESSED, so now there was no way to move the pool if it turned out the fence line was not the property line (although short of getting a survey done, which she would have to pay for and we knew she wouldn't, because she's cheap, there was no way to 100% disprove that the fence line wasn't the property line and also, they built the fence around this big tree that's in both our yards, which seems like a weird thing to do if that's not the property line BUT I DIGRESS).
She also accused us of raising the grade of our yard higher than the bylaw limit of four feet. Fortunately, this wasn't an issue because we'd dug into the high part of the yard, so the pool deck was just matching the current grade of the yard.
The chief bylaw officer sent our local building inspector out to inspect the pool and report back to her. We knew this guy, because he was the same guy who had already signed off on the previous two inspections. He rolled his eyes as he described the stink that was being made at City Hall by NWHU. Apparently she was well known to them, thanks to her fighting the development that went behind us a couple of years ago. He assured us that short of hiring a lawyer to dispute where the property line was, there was nothing she could do about this pool. Because we had followed all the rules. And because we and our pool contractors are not idiots.
He wished us luck with NWHU.
(Sidenote: in the middle of all this...Pumbaa went blind! So we were all pretty fucking stressed out.)
Once it became clear that we were not going to bow to her demands and she had no legal recourse because the city was all "this is fine", NWHU returned to her audio terrorism. We started to take videos every time she blasted her boombox at us. Although I have to say, she did switch up the radio stations frequently and I did Shazam a few good songs.
Then one morning, just after 5:30 AM, which I happen to know is the time NWHU's son leaves for his daily sports team practice, a car alarm went off. It sounded like it was in our yard. It went off for about a minute and then shut off. Then about 15 to 20 minutes later, it went off again.
At this point, I would put nothing past NWHU. I took my phone and busted out the front door in my pyjamas and took a video of her big truck parked as closely as possible to our house with all its lights and alarms going off.
Over the course of that weekend, she set her own car alarm off seven more times, once at midnight, ripping us from sleep and filling me with so much fury, I could not get back to sleep for two hours.
I did a lot of microdosing during this period, just to keep from constantly screaming.
I thought I could do this in two parts but I was wrong, sorry, there will be a third part. Stayed tuned for the thrilling conclusion but also, here is a supercut of some of NWHU's greatest hits.
And for those following along, a 50x50 update:
Books read: 23
Air fryer uses: 35
No-dessert days: 10 (hahahahahaha)
Vegetarian meals: 49
Meditating but not while in bed: 9
