Wednesday 3 July 2013

Bob The Assholes Wife


It's been about a year since I last saw my neighbour Bob. I don’t know if he is working in the oil patch and comes out only infrequently, or if he has left his wife and moved in with some woman that has horrendous taste in men. For all that I know, he may have left his wife and the rest of us on the planet and moved on to giving God and the angels a hard time. He was/is a miserable prick!

The only time that Bob ever talked to me was when he wanted something. Oh, he would talk if I went over and looked him straight in the eye and said something like “How are you doing Bob?” He would mumble or grunt something unintelligible in his monosyllabic way, and I would come away feeling that we had had a meaningful and thought provoking discussion. Well, as meaningful and thought provoking as you can get talking to an asshole.

However, Bob and I did talk and in our way we had some sort of relationship. His wife has never said a word to either Louise or myself in the four or five years they have been here. Maybe she is pissed because just after they paid $400,000 for their house, the prices dropped and it is now worth about $300,000. It wasn’t my fault! No, really! I started missing Bob sometime about two winters ago when the sidewalk started to get shoveled in front of his house. Bob never shoveled, so I have to assume that Mrs. Bob is doing the work around the house now that he is absent.

Last fall, Mrs. Bob had a roofing company come in and do her house and garage roof. I speculated that maybe she was having the place spruced up so that it would be saleable for when the inevitable divorce happened. The roof was just a start, but nothing else was done last year and I guessed that Mrs. Bob just didn’t want the rainwater coming into the house. A month or so ago, a big truck with a cherry picker came in and they trimmed the trees until they looked like a bad artists interpretation of a tree.

Just this weekend, another truck with a bunch of men with extremely loud machines came in and started trimming hedges and digging and raking wherever they could dig and rake. Instead of a normal hedge trimmer, they were using this device that was about eight feet long and had about two feet of chainsaw attached to the end. I heard the old guy tell the younger guy that he’d show him how it worked once and then he is on his own. I was pretty sure there would be human limbs cut off before the day was done. Nope. Yesterday, a guy spent the day power washing the whole property from top to bottom. I thought at the time that Mrs. Bob must be washing Bob out of her life for good.

Today, there was a guy that spent the better part of the day leaning on his shovel and wandering back and forth. He started spreading black cloth all over the lawn and pegging it down just after lunch and before my coffee. It wasn’t until mid afternoon and after my coffee when a dumptruck loaded with woodchips (mulch) pulled up and a couple of guys started to cover the black cloth completely. I think they are done now, but who knows what tomorrow will bring.

I am expecting a “FOR SALE” sign, but I suppose that it is possible Mrs. Bob just wants the place to look nice for a change. I’ll tell you though, she has upped the ante so that now I am going to look after my lawn and flower bed just a little better than before. I kind of hope that there is the FOR SALE sign so that I can have new neighbours that don’t want anything from me but are willing to have a neighbourly chat over the fence every now and then. That would be nice…

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