bring it on NG; Part I

Oh it's on.

So ON.

The New Girl has thrown down the gauntlet. The CRAZAY MOFO NEIGHBOR CAGE MATCH!

The players....

Prior to moving to this Quiet Corner of Connecticut, Spouse and I resided in Hamilton NJ. Please understand that the name "Hamilton" is simply a nice way to say "Trenton". For anyone who is not familiar with the Garden State let me just say...Trenton, while being the capital, is at best a reemerging city.

(If I actually had the power of strike out font I would have so used it right there, right before reemerging would have been "depressed, questionable and sketchy".)

We lived next to those people.

There was Nick and Elaine; Elaine's son, his girlfriend and their daughter; The handicapped Uncle (who after 3 years of living there I never saw, and I had been in the house.); Elaine's friend Mary; Mary's two sons and one of the sons girlfriends; 12 rabbits, 4 guinea pigs and who knows how many gerbils all living in cages in the kitchen; 3 dogs; 2 parrots; and one cat.

Thirty one souls living in a 1500 square foot house. A house which wreaked of urine, feces and mold.

They had a one car driveway, in which either Elaine's truck or Nick's large passenger van were always parked. In the street were the following:

• Nick's first van sat disintegrating in front of their house. It was so bad that standing next to it you could actually see through the body and across the street.

• The pink Ford Taurus which was in front of their other neighbors house. In 3 years this car never moved.

• The white car in front of our neighbor's house on the right. This appeared from no where one day and in a year only moved when it actually went up on cinder blocks over night.

• The blue car. It's really only descriptive point was that it had 1/2 a steering wheel. When I asked Mary's son #2, who I believed to be the owner, why he did it; he simply told me he thought it would look "bitchin".

• Mary's van which was not registered or legally licensed but heck, it ran!

• I don't know which of the girlfriend's Volkswagen which ALWAYS parked in front of our house. It. Drove.Me.Mad.

• Elaine's brother's car. This car played a cameo roll. Appearing for weeks at a time but never moving.

• Elaine's old green pickup truck was replaced by a Volvo station wagon which was then replaced by a Saturn which she bought without Nick's permission (or you know, credit) and he made her return the next day, which was replaced by a new pick-up truck, which was totalled and then replaced by her current truck. ...this all happened in the matter of a week.

• Our neighbors across the street old pickup truck which was bought with the express purpose of preventing any of Nick and Elaine's family of cars from parking in front of their house.

While Spouse and I were lucky enough to have a driveway ~only one of us could park in it at a time. That left the other (me) fighting for room with the above list of cars and the inevitable onslaught of visitors (again if I had the strike out font that would have read "scummy drug dealers and buyers") that came to and from Nick and Elaine's house at all hours of the night and day.

Next: the dogs, the yard and everything in between.