ENRAGE THE NEIGHBOURS 2008 - We're the Neighbours

Each Spring in Minnesota, the First Lady and I would have an official Johnadian Presidential Ball that was playfully titled Enrage the Neighbors (US spelling because it took place in the US). In four years of parties, I think we only enraged one neighbor, and she was never very nice to us prior to that party. (We later got back in her good graces when the Minister of Defence chased a bat out of her apartment in the middle of the night.) Sadly, due to the smallness of the current Presidential Palace, I don't think there will be a 2008 Canadian version of the Enrage Your Neighbours Ball. We live on the main floor of a small house, with an apartment upstairs and a tiny apartment in the basement, so there's not enough of a dance floor for my mad DJ skills. Plus on Wednesday night our downstairs neighbours - a couple that one might refer to as the whitest of trash - took care of all the enraging our area can probably use this year.

It all started at about 11:30 p.m. when the back door slammed and loud voices started to come up through our bedroom register. Our bedroom is located over the main room in the basement apartment, and the set up makes it so we hear everything as if we were in the same room. For the next 8 hours, we we're privy to the conversations of at least eight people who apparently have fun by jovially yelling at each other at the top of their lungs - mostly by describing how awesome they all are. Since I could hear every word, I discovered that this was a party in honour of a fellow who had just posted bail earlier in the day. Good for him.

At about 4:30 in the morning they started playing music, which they justified because they live in the basement -- no one would be able to hear Eminimem. The irony was that we could only barely hear the music because of the yelling. Honestly, music that drowned them out would have been a welcome distraction.

Then at 7 in the morning, as the First Lady was getting ready for work (after sleeping about fifteen minutes all night), things took a bad turn. Someone broke Mr. Bail's precious bottle of vodka, and apparently he wasn't drunk enough after at least 8 hours of boozing (among other activities). As far as I could tell from the screaming, the bottle was about a quarter full at the time of its demise. Because of this, Mr. B started screaming like a child and ranted on about how he was going to kick someone's ass. He literally screamed about his lost booze for about 45 minutes. Then to top it all off, he started yelling racial slurs about someone who had left the party, accusing him of being the one who had broken the bottle. Our party-throwing neighbours seemed quite afraid of Mr. Bail and tried very hard to calm him down. (He must be out on bail for something good.) The loud yelling continued on and off until at least 10 a.m., when I left for work.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the first instance of poor behaviour from our downstairs neighbours. In Johnada's six months of residency, there have been several examples of their lack of respect for us and everyone else in the neighbourhood. These include, but are not not limited to, screaming (and I mean screaming) at each other at four in the morning on at least 20 different occasions (usually on week nights); never taking out their garbage (even after raccoons have gotten into it); smoking inside the building right by our bathroom (despite the fact it is forbidden in their lease); having really bad taste in music; wearing a really bad blonde wig; leaving thongs in the washing machine; and, worst of all, thinking of me as old.

They also leave the back gate open all the time - even while Balki is IN the back yard! This has led to so many near death experiences for our dog -- we live on a major road that has big street cars -- that I finally had to give in and get him a chain. One of the main reasons we settled on our apartment was that the dog would have free run of the back yard.

Through all of this, we never called the police, although we were often encouraged to. (Apparently the people that lived in our apartment before us called the police on them several times.) We never even said anything to our landlord until prompted by him after several other neighbours in surrounding houses complained. But yesterday we could take no more. So we gave in and complained (as did our upstairs neighbour and probably anyone else in a four block radius). Apparently, this was the final strike -- they are being evicted in early April. So it's going to be an awkward couple of weeks at the Johnadian Palace. I just hope Mr. Bail doesn't read blogs . . .