Getting on with the neighbours?

The nickname for my house for several years was the neighborhood Home Depot, because of all the tools I own. I used to have a neighbor who moved to Scottsdale who was a good cook, too. He (and his wife) would invite me over for dinner, and I would always ask him, "What tools will I need to bring?" He couldn't do home repairs to save his life. I visit them whenever I am in Phoenix/Scottsdale on business.

CD
We might run into each other at Fry's some time. Pre-pandemic we visited cousins in Phoenix every other year. We are due for a visit.
 
Not at Fry's, but maybe in Old Town Scottsdale. There are a lot of good restaurants there.

CD
There were a lot of good restaurants everywhere in that area. Not sure if they are all still open, hopefully they stayed afloat.
 
Ya know, maybe it's generational for me with trying to be friendly/neighborly, I don't know, or maybe it's because of where I'm from ... folks for the most part in Hawaii are generally kind towards one another, "Live Aloha" is a huge thing!
I try to pass that on here now that we've moved to the Continental United States.
With all that has been happening in the World in the last, what? almost 3 years now? Wouldn't it be great if for no reason what so ever you did something randomly kind for someone?
Just sayin' 🤷‍♀️
 
Ya know, maybe it's generational for me with trying to be friendly/neighborly, I don't know, or maybe it's because of where I'm from ... folks for the most part in Hawaii are generally kind towards one another, "Live Aloha" is a huge thing!
I try to pass that on here now that we've moved to the Continental United States.
With all that has been happening in the World in the last, what? almost 3 years now? Wouldn't it be great if for no reason what so ever you did something randomly kind for someone?
Just sayin' 🤷‍♀️
Don't get me wrong. If my neighbors weren't such a-holes it might be different. We've always given our extra produce to our neighbors, but only the Mexican people across the street were truly thankful for it (and our friends who moved away of course). I like your mindset for sure. I do nice things for people all the time, just not the buttheads who live in my neighborhood.

Ok so one woman who lives in my neighborhood pops pills and her then 3 year old kid used to wander around in our backyard unsupervised because the mom was passed out. This same neighbor cussed out my two youngest girls once when they were 8 and 10 years old. They came home bawling. They used to play with her 8 year old daughter and I don't remember why she unleashed foul language on them, it was almost 20 years ago, but that was it for me. I confronted her and she proudly and unapologetically admitted it, then insulted them and me further.

And then there's the creepy guy who lives down the hill who had the gall to tell my husband a few years back that he used to watch our girls jumping on the trampoline with his binoculars when they were teenagers and commented that the girls were stunningly beautiful. I thought my husband was going to kill him. And the guy is married with a boy and a girl. We don't talk to them anymore.

And there's more...
 
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We´re not "Love Thy Neighbour" people, but we all get on well; very important in a crazy place like Caracas. We´ve got a retired Lt Colonel, a civil engineer, an Electrical engineer and an Ahole , but we´re all polite and chat from time to time.
We also watch out for each other if we´re going out, travelling, whatever.
 
My neighborhood is very international, as is most of South Florida. We have Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, and Iran represented. Sadly my Iranian neighbor passed away, he was the most hospitable, even gave me a ton of photo gear when he was clearing home to move into hospice.

Before the Coronapocalypse I had envisioned doing a backyard bbq to invite the immediate neighbors over and foster better relationships. Chalk that one up for youthful optimism. My enthusiasm didn't survive quarantine...
 
My neighborhood is very international, as is most of South Florida. We have Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, and Iran represented. Sadly my Iranian neighbor passed away, he was the most hospitable, even gave me a ton of photo gear when he was clearing home to move into hospice.

Before the Coronapocalypse I had envisioned doing a backyard bbq to invite the immediate neighbors over and foster better relationships. Chalk that one up for youthful optimism. My enthusiasm didn't survive quarantine...

What a coincidence, I also had a Persian (Iranian) next door neighbor, who also passed away -- cancer got him. He was also a very nice person.

CD
 
, a new family moved in across the street, so I made a pie and brought it over and they looked at me like I had just landed from Mars. I actually got the long stare, raised eyebrow "ok...?" look!
Oh too bad for them, their loss. you did a wonderful thing.

this with the pie and how are you or coffee at the house is the neighbours' level I remember from my childhood in Bulgaria. And I loved it, and I though that was the normal, however it was not here in Croatia. Well, it depends.

In my recent home, the first neighbours I met were the ones whose bed got wrongly deliverd to my flat instead of theirs, they are a nice, old couple, we do greet and talk, but never went or invited them home for eats or drinks. it is just not done. if i did it i think it would be accepted and reciprocated, but especially now with covid, no way.

i like the idea though.
 
My homes were always a gathering spot for friends and co-workers. At my first house, I had several parties where 50-plus people showed up. I think my record was about 110 people one New Year's Eve. That was the one where someone brought fireworks, and set my backyard on fire (the grass was dormant). It was a very large backyard, and they only burned about 20 percent of the grass. :laugh:

This has changed over the last ten years. When I moved into my current house, I had a lot of young couples with no kids as neighbors, and we gathered at each other's houses on a regular basis to eat and drink. The started having kids, and all of that changed. Although, for a while, some of the men would sneak out after the kids were in bed, and come to my house. We'd sit on the patio and drink beer for a while.

Now, I have a very friendly relationship with my neighbors, but we don't do anything together -- with the exception of one neighbor. He and I get out to lunch about once a month. He is a gay man with little fashion sense (go figure). We often go shopping after lunch, and he'll pick something out, and ask me what I think. :laugh: On the other hand, I like scented candles, and he once commented, "You buy more candles than any gay man I know." :roflmao:

CD
That is a lot of fun and stories, for sure.
 
Yeah, I felt the same way about our neighbors. She had a key to our house and still does. Her husband always mowed that patch of grass by the road for us a couple of times a month. He took us to the airport on a Saturday morning in a snowstorm at 5:30 a.m., his day off and one of the only days he got to sleep in. And it was a hairy snowstorm, the roads were terrible. They had to de-ice the plane twice and they had snow plows out clearing the tarmac continuously for flights to take off. But we were going to Mexico and he got us to the airport, and by golly our flight made it out! He was/is a super handy guy, he knew how to troubleshoot issues with the HVAC and helped us out when we were having trouble keeping the pilot light in the furnace lit one year, and so much more.

But I used to cook seafood and send some over to him (the rest of his family hated it) so he was always really happy to do stuff for us.
aww, so nice!
 
I imagine if I moved up north, I'd be amongst the most "international" of neighbors haha
You know, it all depends on location. TR and I both are in the midwest US, Ohio, but he is in a more rural area that is predominantly white (and I bet in his area he is one of the few non-Trump supporters living there). I am in the suburbs of a medium-sized city that is also predominantly white. But people can be just as bigoted about politics as they are about race and religion. It's sad.

Our Mexican neighbors across the street moved there in 2018. Whenever we gave them tomatoes, onions, etc. from our garden, the grandmother would make a huge plate of food with her homemade grilled corn tortillas and send them over with her grandson. It was unexpected for them to reciprocate but what a wonderful gesture! And those tortillas were the best I have ever had. We had another neighbor who we gave produce to who said, "Oh, I only like the little cherry tomatoes, not these (roma). And we like zucchini, do you have any of that?"

One time when my husband was out of town we had some field mice that were getting in. I could set a trap for them (I hated doing that) but I couldn't bring myself to dispose of the little mice bodies, so I called the neighbor (above) and asked if their son could help out. When he came over and I told him I felt bad for killing them, he told me that I could buy traps to catch them that didn't kill them...and then he said: "And you can release them across the street in those danged Mexican people's yard!" I couldn't pick my jaw up off the floor at that one. I informed him that Amato and his family were very nice people and I would never do something like that, and that was the last time he said anything negative to me about them. But I know where he got those ideas, obviously from his parents. And that's a shame because he was otherwise a pretty nice kid.

And then another neighbor who put up the Trump signs in their yard and tried to have a conversation with me starting out with, "So who are you voting for in the election?" Of course I just changed the subject and said I had something I had to go do, have a good day, errr...something like that. And another neighbor was sure we were heathens and asked if they could take our kids to church with them :laugh: Ummm...no!
 
In honor of all these neighbor stories:
80074
 
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