My Other Neighbor

Perhaps I attract conflict. Certainly I know, and usually tell everyone, that I rub people the wrong way. Even my real estate agent, when he was trying to be funny, pointed to me to say that he could see me abusing my husband but my husband was a sweetheart. I found that curious because I certainly haven't done anything to harm the agent. In fact the last time he handled a sale I refused to let him use his own money to make up the difference between the asking price and the sale price which he wanted to do.

Since I have been detailing problems with one neighbor, I thought I would provide details of the problems with the other neighbor. We lived on a corner so our adjacent neighbors were to the west and to the north. The northern father was previously described. The first western neighbor was just as obnoxious but in a different way.

When we first moved in to the house, as I previously wrote, I was alone supervising the new kitchen. The house was pretty much a wreck but it did have electricity and water even though it did not have a kitchen. One afternoon, when I was down in the basement, I heard a very odd noise, a sharp crack, that didn't sound exactly like a gunshot but like something similar. Now this house was enormous, more than 10,000 square feet so wandering around empty rooms looking for what might have caused the noise was a job. But I found a newly broken window with a pellet or projectile from a small weapon in an upstairs bedroom. I looked at the hole in the window to see where it might have come from and the obvious culprit was in the house next door.

I went next door with the projectile in hand and knocked on the door. I asked the young woman who looked no older than 18 if she had any clue why someone from that house would have shot a hole in my window. She looked at me and replied immediately that it was definitely her younger brother using his mother's gun.  Okay--wtf--I asked her if either parent was home. She said they were having an "evil divorce" but that her father owned the house. I asked her if I could speak to him and she said  he wasn't there but he would come to my house as soon as he returned. He did show up the next day and asked me what I planned to do about the incident.

I had already called the Salt Lake City police department to report that someone had used a firearm to shoot out a window in a residential setting. The woman who came told me that I had destroyed any evidence because I had picked up the projectile and left without making a report. I did ask her if it was legal to shoot weapons in the city and she said that it wasn't but that there wasn't enough evidence to charge anyone.

So the father did pay to have the window replaced but when people asked me if I didn't prefer Utah to California I had to say that so far Utah was a much bigger danger to my health and welfare. In the short time I had been in the house I had been broken into, robbed, and shot at which hadn't happened at all in Sacramento

The more curious part of the window incident was that both parents in the acrimonious divorce were child psychologists. "Physician heal thyself." 

But that was not the end of problems with people living in that house. Stay tuned.