Won't C'ya Be My Neighbor?

Let me first preface this entry by saying that I have some great neighbors.  They aren't the Wysteria Lane-chaining-people-in-the-basement types.  In fact I have almost a "nice" war going on with one of them. 

The ones to my west and I are in the who can do nice things for the other one first race.  It currently is centered around the garbage cans.  For the past 3 weeks it is a race to see who will take out both of our garbage cans and then bring them back in.  For the record, I look like the sucky neighbor.  Instead I have this really nice older gentleman in really poor health dragging my trash up and down my hill!  Ok, so then I thought I would make him brownies or bread or something only to find out that he is diabetic plus has chronic pain and the meds he takes makes him lose his appetite.  His grown adult son is so very proud of the new job he got he actually brought me one of his bonus's (it was free tickets to a home show, but still it was a big deal to him.)  Yup, bottom line, I suck.

The neighbors to the east of me are a bunch of science geeks.  All book smarts, practical smarts, ecological smarts, but not a lot of people smarts.  These individuals bike uphill in the snow to preserve the ozone.  They are also the ones responsible for getting me set up on the wireless goods.  (Yea!)  They also do projects simply to test their hypothesis if they can actually do it.  Last spring the two guys got on top of my roof with their climbing gear to help clean out my gutters (they were securing themselves with harnesses from my chimney simply to improve their rock climbing skills simultaneously.) 

Last weekend they decided to "build" a barbeque.  This consisted of rocks, dirt, wood, and the grill off of one of their trucks they are constantly rebuilding.  I didn't know this at the time and came home to my whole house smelling like a forest fire.  Hello?  Charcoal?  Ever heard of it?  I was furious (of course after it took me about 2 hours to figure out what it was, stop going outside to smell around the house, and turn off my swamp cooler).  I poked my head over the fence and asked them to put the fire out.  They did, but they also apologized I didn't get a proper invitation to come join the fun.  The next day I found that my lovely aspen pads I so proudly replaced in the spring, are now permanently saturated with the smell of smoke.  Its a good thing its fall.  However, in all my sustained rage I marched over there to tell them again to not ever do that again and that they are welcome to use my BBQ from my porch anytime.  They apologized profusely and asked if I wanted to see the wedding photos.  So, yours truly (sans wedding gift or belated card) sat down to look at photos of their modest beautiful wedding at some National monument and feel like a horse's ass.

I figure by now, I'm on eternal garbage duty for both sides.