When Snow White Gets Old (and Crotchety...and probably demented)

Townhome Twits
Episode 2: The Demented Disney Princess

This post is fairly rambly, but in my defense I did amuse the hell out of myself by creating a new creature word. You're welcome, and I'm not one bit sorry.

Kitty corner from our house there lives an early-retired woman who's last (patient) son moved out to California two years ago. And so she now lives alone. We'll call her Snow for purposes of this story.

Snow earned her moniker by perpetually leaving birdseed, bread, and other inappropriate offerings for the small wildlife in her backyard, which happens to face the woods (and therefore no one sees what she's doing).

She has charming landscaping and is actually a fairly decent neighbor in that she doesn't seem to care about my dogs barking, who's parking where, or whether renters are running a brothel out of their unit (more on that in another post).

However, while I served on the board she was a perpetual pain in my patoot. No landscaping/snow removal company was good enough (a complaint which was generally accompanied with racist remarks about the workers). She came to the one All Association picnic we attempted to have a few years ago (yeah, EPIC fail: our complex is mostly apathetic and/or unsocial) for the sole purpose of bitching out the property manager because squirrels and chipmunks were getting through the dryer vent grate, chewing through the dryer vent itself, and getting trapped in the crawlspace under her house.

I'm still creeped out by the idea of opening my dryer and finding ANY sort of creature looking out at me, cute rodent-ish critter or otherwise. It doesn't help that Husband EVER so kindly told me snakes would be in our crawlspace (because it's warm there) during the colder months. Asshole. This is why I still don't have an outside water source this spring..NO WAY IN HELL am I going into the first circle of hell to turn on the spigots if the potential is spiders, centipedes AND snakes. I watch too many creature features...the monster-mashup (SNAKIPEDER!!)...ugh.

So...yeah...she FEEDS THE SQUIRRELS. In eight years I can't honestly tell you how often she's bitched about creatures in her house/crawlspace, but she will NOT stop feeding them.

Did you know the phrase "bang like bunnies" is not really an exaggeration? Bunnies are ridiculously prolific, much to my dismay. Thor may be an old man, but he'll enthusiastically chase squirrels up at full speed up the hill to the big cottonwood in our yard, at which point the squirrel shimmies up the tree and chitters down disapprovingly (or tauntingly, if that's a word. It is today!) at his panting self. Of course, now that he's old and out of shape, if he repeats the performance more than once he either pukes, limps for two days afterward, or both. Sigh.

Bunnies, on the other hand, DON'T CLIMB TREES. Therefore, if he manages to get off the leash or away to chase them, he'll just keep going. I don't believe he can actually catch the little bastards, but I don't want a repeat of the bird incident, so I'd prefer NOT having 17,000 bunnies hanging around. I have no sympathy for her rodent problem.

This, by the way, was the same woman who marveled at my next door neighbor's tulips and lamented that all of her bulbs are eaten by the squirrels.

AHEM.

Before we went to Mexico I had a moment of pity for her: she found out we were going out of the country and responded in an...unadventurous way. Her advice can be summarized as: "they'll (she's not a fan of Mexicans, except when they grow gorgeous tulips in the house next door to me, apparently) all rip you off/don't eat ANYTHING because it'll make you sick/Don't drink even the bottled water because you know they just fill it from the tap" commentary. Sigh.

She also thinks the people who bring veggies/fruits/etc to our local Farmers Markets are both cheating (by not growing the food but buying it at a grocery store and repackaging it) AND contaminating it by using human waste as fertilizer. In this case "those people" refers to the Hmong families who are at many of the farmers markets around the Twin Cities area. Oh she's an equal-opportunity racist, indeedy.

I didn't bother to get clarification why they'd need to fertilize produce bought at the grocery store...I didn't want to encourage her.

I think it'd be sad, wrong, and frankly pretty pathetic to see a paradise like Mexican beaches through her prejudices.

Maybe I could get her to go into the crawlspace to check for Snakipeders and squirrels...and turn on my spigots while she's down there. Preferably before she's eaten by the SyFy-esq critters lurking under my house.