Oh what a tangled web we weave; the twists and turns in the simple sale of a small piece of land in Louisville. We’ve been abused for years by a crazy neighbor directly to the west of the property. We are his “most hated neighbors”, but he doesn’t reserve his abuse only for us. He has been flooding the city government with phone calls and emails for years, trying to get them to make us remove the trailer from the property (and incidentally kick out poor old Duane who had no money)(collateral damage I guess). Duane died and that renewed our neighbors wrath, making sure everyone in the city knew our lot was a nonconforming lot and we couldn’t do anything with it. So off we went into survey fees, architect fees, attorney’s fees, a 1911 plat, discovery of an illegal subdivision, current subdivision plans involving giving up five feet of the Roosevelt lot to the trailer lot with the attendant fees, the furnace in the unoccupied trailer mysteriously going out, pipes freezing, later bursting, a late night phone call that water had been running in the trailer for a week, gas and water shutoff, a contact to us from the city about “a public safety issue” reported by the crazy neighbor, a city inspector visit, the trailer no longer habitable, ….. and right in the middle of it all, someone suddenly discovers the vacation of the old alley that used to run between the trailer lot and the predecessor to the crazy neighbor. I remember the old alley, but I’d forgotten about it. It looked more like a dirt driveway that the predecessor to the crazy neighbor used. There is reference in the city records about the westerly five feet of the ten foot wide alley being assigned to the neighbor’s plat, but no record of the easterly plat being recognized as our property. After all these years, it turns out that the complaining neighbor misunderstood his own property line and built his own house dead on it, and put his fence five feet into our property. What a delicious irony, that by making us jump through so many hoops, it leads to the discovery of his fuck-up. Well, anyway, no harm no foul I say. He can remove his fence from our property, we’ll subdivide from the legitimate property line and he can deal with the city about having a house that sits right on his own property line with zero setback. Who knows if that’s a big deal or not. Maybe all he has to do is get a variance approved by all his neighbors……
Sparrows
Grasshopper sparrow. Nelson’s Sharp Tailed, Seaside, LeConte’s. A good sparrow day. A long day, started and ended with owls. We saw the short-eared owl out on the salt flats at dawn. Ended with the barred owl in the forest at dark, seventy-five miles from home. It was a good day.
Another challenge
Know how you park your car in the lot at the shopping center and when you come back out there is an advertising flyer stuck under the windshield wiper? Our daughter got one on her car. She parked her MINIVAN filled with KID’S CARSEATS and came back to find an advertisement for a singles club. It’s a card to fill out and mail in. It’s postage free; the club will pay the postage on each card they receive back. You may be ahead of me in this story, deciding what you might do with the postage-paid card, but wait! Before you drop that card in the mailbox in you head, let me tell you that each card included the warning: “mailers of blank cards will be prosecuted”. Ooh. Now there is a challenge. Wouldn’t want to tempt prosecution by mailing in a blank card. They might come straight to your blank address and arrest right you on the blank spot.
Another challenge…
Can you spot the owl in this picture?
We need…
We need professional help! There are four sparrows here we’re not going to get without professional help. They’re reclusive and hard to recognize from a fleeting glimpse of their backside as they drop back down into the grass or bushes. We’ve hired a local bird guide for a sparrow day. He thinks we can get all four…