I’m not really interested in the direction the conversation is taking, and I feel like I’ve helped push it there. So I’m going to delete my posts, apologize for participating, and just leave my initial comment for spiffy, which is all I need to say about this subject.
-Tom
That seems silly. You participated and we responded. Why delete the prompts rather than stop adding to it? Does not matter if we all have different takes. You are cutting the conversation to ribbons if you do that. Own what you wrote on your own forum. :)
Thanks for the support, Tom! Freedom is all well and good until it trods on someone’s else’s, and when one freedom involves antisocial or unhealthy practices, it ought to perhaps not trump any mitigation of it when it intrudes on others.
While I admire all of you who can apparently tolerate any amount of abuse that comes over your wall and into your castle and soak it up with a smile, it’s in my rights to not take it kindly. If I were talking about a special needs kid and his barking dog being an issue, then certainly, I’d be the asshole, but we’re talking about smoking, that thing which kills people after extracting all their hard earned cash their whole lives.
That said, I will of course approach her and ask her gently, and then ratchet up the attitude if things don’t go my way, because as was noted above, she can decide to not like me for my asking, but it’s not like we’d be on good terms otherwise.
Perhaps I posted in this thread not so much to look for solutions, but to bemoan the impotence of my situation. I do like the alien costume suggestion though. I think I’ll do that, too.
I’m about as anti-smoking as a person can get but I’m also a parent of two young girls. So my first thought here is definitely try talking to her.
You’ve already declared her lazy, compared her to someone dumping shit into their yard on a daily basis, and assumed she’s set in her ways with no interest in changing based on absolutely nothing but your own judgement. A single mom with a 4yo has likely got a lot more to worry about than if her smoking is impacting her neighbor. She could be completely unaware of what you’re going through and open to making adjustments in order to make a new neighbor friend that she could sorely need. Or she could start smoking more just to spite you. Who knows? Only one way to find out.
Knowing how difficult it can be to raise kids with a partner, doing it on your own has got to be exponentially harder. At least give her the chance to prove she’s as awful as you imagine her to be before you start the alien attacks.
My neighbors own 3 pomeranians that will constantly bark at anyone that is outside.
It is annoying, but I live with it.
I guess it’s lucky I’m having my Michael Douglas Falling Down moment on the internet and not on a crowded freeway, then, huh.
Good luck! Hopefully it will get better.
Having trouble with neighbors can certainly be problematic. We have chosen to move on more than one occasion due to conditions with neighbors we just weren’t willing to live with. Fortunately, they were apartments and much easier to bail on. The first time our son was newly born and there was a young couple that we were sure was dealing drugs. Every Friday afternoon there was a constant flow of people running up and down the stairs and only staying a few moments. The landlord wasn’t willing to do anything about it so we just left and found another place. When we moved down state and our son was 6 months old, we had a teenage boy below us that stayed at home all day while his mom worked and he would blast music all the time and neither the apartment complex management nor his mom would do anything to help us with it, so we bailed on our lease and found a small house to rent for a similar amount. It didn’t help that my wife is fiery as hell and I worried for her and my son’s health when she would get all fired up and yell at them and confront them, especially as I was at work all day and especially with the drug people.
It isn’t so easy when you own the house, of course. We have been fortunate in the current house we live in that we bought 20 years ago as we have two single ladies that live on one side and across the street that have been there as long as we have and another older lady that lived many years on the other side that recently passed, and now another very elderly gentleman lives there. We are lucky it has been very quiet for many years other than the occasional dog barking down the street.
To completely stereotype every smoker I have ever known, this will not go well. Smokers think everyone else is overly sensitive to it. (I am sure there are a lot of considerate smokers out there, I just have never met one.)
I worked at a place that had a lot of people coming into the lobby. We had butt cans at each entrance. The ground around the cans was covered in cigarette butts. It used to drive me insane.
Just saying it’s possible she’s smoking outdoors to limit her kid’s exposure. If one is addicted, I actually find that admirable. Of course the best solution is to kick the habit but we’re not all made of tougher stuff, especially when battling depression (making assumptions). Hope it works out for everyone.
Speaking of crappy neighbors, I need to ask everyone in a mile radius to quit lighting off their crappy fireworks all day for the next two weeks.
I’m wondering how bad that’ll be at my new place. They were legal where I was living before in Bothell, and my street would be like a warzone until 2-3am the next day.
They’re illegal in Seattle proper, but I also live near a stretch where the regard for the law is tenuous at best.
It’s still easy to get them, so I don’t think the King County laws will have much affect.
Just had some kids drop some sort of large firecracker into the trash can in our parking lot. Doesn’t look like any damage. It’s going to be a fun couple of weeks.
The illegal activity near me seems to be more prostitution and drugs than general mischief-making, so I’m hoping it’ll be somewhat quiet. Hard to tell, though.
I don’t know if this will add to the discussion or not, but I quit smoking last summer, and I before that had subjected my neighbors to the smoke. I knew that I was behaving selfishly, but I never did much more than move away 50 feet when asked to while one neighbor ran a window air conditioner (which would apparently suck the smoke in). I didn’t feel great about the behavior, but I wrote it off, largely because I was depressed and not doing great in general. Smoking felt like my only escape from my tiny apartment. It was messed up.
Now, I have a new who neighbor who smokes outside our building, and with summer here in full swing, I am on the receiving end of this and it’s pretty bad.
I have no qualms about approaching him, but I’m not exactly looking forward to it. It’s mostly just a question of strategy. E.g. do I approach him before approaching the landlord, or do I just talk to the landlord first. Because once he’s aware that it’s an issue for me, I lose whatever benefit there is of anonymity. Also, he has very serious cognitive issues and suffers from memory loss in a big way, so there’s that issue to think about.
Here’s a strange neighbor etiquette story. Several years ago the next door neighbors starting raising chickens for eggs (we live in a city, not rural, but we all have yards). They’d let the chickens roam free and often the mother-cluckers would wander into our yard. One day a chicken wandered over to me while I was grilling, uh, chicken and I opened the grill cover to send a message. The chicken moved on.
Anyway, one day sure enough our 20-pound terrier had had enough of the annoying chickens. He chased one out of our yard into theirs, running through the invisible fence we maintain to keep him from straying. The desire to get that chicken apparently outweighed the knowledge that he’d get shocked in crossing the line.
Once in the neighbor’s yard, our dog chomps down on said chicken, injuring it. My wife comes running out (I was not home) to retrieve the dog. She picks up the dog, who still has the chicken in his mouth. The neighbor’s wife then holds the chicken, my wife holds the dog, and they each tug, and eventually the dog lets go.
The neighbors took the chicken to the vet and it over time got better. Here’s the rub – I offered to pay the vet bill, since our dog had gone into their yard. We were not close with this family but I wanted to restore good will. But others who heard this story say I should not have paid, since the chickens had been in our yard and it is natural for a dog to chase them out. So I displayed neighborly etiquette, though friends thought I was crazy.
Epilogue: after this incident the wife next door insisted on building a fence, and the husband thought it was crazy to build a fence around the entire house just for a few chickens. The fence went up, but then they got divorced, and they both moved out. The new family next door is wonderful and we are thrilled to have them as neighbors. So for us, this chicken story proved to be a good thing.
Sorry for the digression. Neighbor relations can be… interesting.
I’ve heard that pet dogs are the most lethal predator for backyard chickens. Everyone gets these predator-proof coops and runs, but it’s not the foxes and the hawks. It’s your neighbor’s dog who either wanders into your yard (because he’s not afraid of people) or the chicken who wanders into your yard. They should have just put up a temporary fence with some stakes and chicken wire. The worst thing is giving chickens the run of the backyard. No matter how large your yard, they hang out right by the door to the house. And where they hang out is where they poop. So if you have a big enough flock, you’re in for a rough ride. Better to just limit them to some portion of the yard with a nice big run.
Chickens are kind of awesome though, I would love to have chickens roaming my “yard”. So would my cats.
I did some time at Diego Garcia and I had a chicken that would hang out with me as I drank my beer on my tent’s deck. It would sit on my lap and I would scratch its neck.
They are pretty cool. We’ve had a flock for about the last ten years. We’re down to one old hen, who is going on 13 and no longer lays eggs and is half blind, but keeps on clucking.
Surely you mean to say that chickens are clucking awesome?
Great punsters think alike!