No really, who is the asshole here?

Opinions:
Me or the other?

Neighbor leaves cat out all day. It’s low 20’s, windy and blowing snow. I am talking about all day, since before 10am and it’s now 9pm. Still not home.

I just spent about an hour putting together a weird little shelter on the porch, bringing out food and water, trying to call the persons number and when not getting a call back, calling animal rescue to find out what the cat’s needs were likely to be. (Turns out there is no law saying you have to have a shelter for your outdoor cat. That sucks balls). Walking over to the “friend/SO’s” house to see if they were home and could let the cat in, NOT.
The cat was crying and climbing up the screen door!
Oh and also tried to call the neighbor who cat sits it.

But really, am I just totally a control freak who is so overstepping here?

Edit: The cat sitter called and gave me the authority and a code to let her in. So I grabbed all my crazy stuff and took it back home. Now I have my yard-sale cat carrier all scrubbed out and nice for my cats, so that is bonus, to get me off my ass to do that.

No More

I can’t talk about IT anymore. Too painful. I’m Hank Hill about these things...

This morning I am baking many panfuls of brownies to take to this awesome bunch of (far up the hill) neighbors. They were so nice, trying to help. So there are three pans in the oven and the house is starting to smell intensely chocolatey.

I finally let Little ghee out this morning. She came running back when the garbage truck went by. Then out she goes again.

AM Earworm

After a particularly sleepless night. I’d been asleep about a 1/2 hour when at 12:30 am the neighbors decided it was a good time to blow huge strings of ladyfingers. Now I love blowin’ shit up as much or possibly more than the next guy, but why pick 12:30 to start?
Anyway I couldn’t get back to sleep till about 3am and subsequently woke up every hour and a half or so until 9. And this was playing, without provocation in my head -
All Night Long - The Maryjane Girls
And it’s continued all day.

OK then...

The neighborhood just gets weirder. Today as I was walking out to go to the drugstore an old street man was peeing his way across the street. He looked at me, I looked at him and his knob and he just wandered on up the street after pausing briefly to zip up.

Kuchen

I’m sitting around lazily drinking coffee, mucking on the computer, listening to muziks (Oliver's current passions are The Bottom 99, Dead Meadow, Black Mountain, Black Keys and The Espers so there’s been alot of those) and eating coffee cake (boughten - not my amazing, fabulous, sour cream pistachio one).

Suddenly I really think, not passing thinking, focused thinking, remembering how my Mom always liked to have a coffee cake ritual on Sunday mornings. I think by the time I was the only one left home she knew it was a safe bet because traditionally I didn’t like coffee cake. Good thing she never discovered Entemann’s that might have changed the safety factor.
I never understood her fascination with the tea ring style, pecan or almond dotted drizzle glazed, flaky style, coffee cake. Until now. Now I can get a decent one down on the corner and it’s just packed full of things that are just bad. And it’s really fun to eat one too many pieces of it, buttered, with a cup ‘o’ devil joe liberally laced with half & half. It’s downright petit-bourg-ie and decadent.

So as I sit and savour my sorta, suburban style, indulgences I watch the squatter couple from around the corner walk into town, if l'm any judge (and there’s reason to think I am) to make a couple bucks of her butt, to support the habit I am also relatively sure is a factor keeping them spiraling in the squatter nebulae. I feel really weird having drawn police attention to them on occasion, but then again when footprints in the snow indicate someone from that direction has been peering in my and my neighbors windows, as well as a rash of petty thefts from cars parked near their back door have occurred, other than engaging with them face to face, it seems like the most likely way to make sure they know that we know they are there and are keeping an eye out.
But jeez all this ”us” and “them” talk. It’s frustrating to have to be on the creeped out side of that. I really couldn’t have cared less until the funky shit started happening. And the thrice nightly trips past our house to the dope house are also weirdly disconcerting. The police have been singularly unhelpful and I can see why. But it really feels like one of those powder keg situations, we’ll get a reaction when it’s actually a chain reaction and I’m betting it won’t be pretty.

The cars, the bars

"I’m going to Detroit and I’m never coming back
Ya I’m going to Detroit and I’m never coming back
Ya I’m going to Detroit and I won’t be back
I won’t be back"

Borax

I learned recently that my neighbor, Radiolady, has to sell and move because she just can’t afford this area as a single. She just put so much work into the house and garden it’s a damn shame. But for the kind of money she’ll then have available, she could move to New Center or Hamtramck and have a huge house with only a 400 or maybe less, monthly. I’ve got to say this is tempting stuff.

I could get, outright, a cool old house in Hamtramck and pocket 200 grand. I wouldn't need to work for a while with that kind of change. So it wouldn’t actually matter so much that I’d be nowhere near anything I know and love. The other tempting option is the same trip only in a different direction, out into the country. But then you’re much more car dependent, and everybody knows my feelings about driving, I frickin’ hate cars. But I don’t like big cities either. Face it, I'm an Ann Arbor girl.

I guess it’s just the lure of making that money off the house. While I find it pretty gross and wierd and creepy that the value has just about tripled since I bought it, (in better financial days obviously), being REALLY poor other than the house, sucking the money out of it seems like good, clean American fun. This place costs an average of ten thousand a year to keep up, and thats just keep up, not doing anything major to better it.

Maybe I’m just dwelling on it today because it’s the first day of art fair here, and no, I’m not going to capitalize it, it doesn’t rate it in my opinion. The traffic in my neighborhood just septupled. I can hear the goofy suburban ladies inane conversations from my bedroom window as they sojourn into the thrall and if Oliver wasn’t sleeping I’d probably open the windows and put on very loud Black Sabbath. For her pleasure.

Then I’ll go down and look at my kitchen floor with the holes in it and the 4 layers of linoleum that I’m trying to get stripped off to get to the wood to make the repairs. Then go to take a shower using robogrips to turn on the broken faucet in the really slow draining tub and I am so very tempted, so very tempted, to just move to Niles or Watervliet where there’s no traffic or commerce or alleged art at all, and I bet I could get a fabulous house for REALLY, REALLY, cheap. Probably with an inhouse plumber thrown in.