Reasons we're the worst neighbours ever

Anyone that followed my blog a year or two ago can remember the awful neighbours we had in Regina, who shared their music, their fights, their dirty dishwater, and who can forget, their bedbugs with us.

As we crawled into bed last night for a relatively early Saturday night, Scott commented: "I think this is the first time that we've heard our neighbours." Sure enough, there was a faint sound of laughter and an acoustic guitar coming through the wall. "Oh ya, I hear that every Saturday night" I commented, "until 11. Then all will fall silent." With a nod Scott added: "Considerate neighbours." I believe we both drifted off to sleep undeterred by the music and voices.

An early Saturday night always leads to a busy and productive Sunday, so the quiet, considerate neighbours were appreciated. By 1:00, I had finished stripping a second bookshelf and was moving onto sanding them.

It didn't occur to me until the sander started up with a loud whir that a derivative of the whole "if everyone in the room seems normal, you must be the crazy one" might be true here... if everyone else is a great neighbour, maybe we're the terrible ones. After these last two weekends, I just might have to agree.

• We spent last Sunday re-arranging furniture, moving it from one side to another and back again, until two hours later when we ended up with the first configuration we had tried that day. 
• We decided to strip our bookshelves on our new, freshly painted balcony (in my defense, there were only two or three itty bitty spots where the colour lifted, and that might not make us bad neighbours as much as bad tenants). 
• On quite likely one of the last nice summer Sundays of the year, the likes of which enjoyed by many of our senior citizen neighbours who entertain with tea on their balconies, taking in the soft breeze and the chip of birds, we pull out our power tools and let their motors rev and echo between the apartment buildings. 

 Of course, all of these reasons  only account for our behaviour over the last two weeks. There is, naturally, the issue of the remaining rust and oil slick snaking toward the storm drain from my now dead-car (which sat, after its death, in its parking spot for over a month), the screaming toddler who comes to visit, the 11pm nightly smoothie making racket, the 6am alarm clock that gets ignored until 7am... I could go on, but I fear I'm incriminating myself.

So dear neighbours, if you're tired of sawdust falling into your barbecue from the balcony above you, being awakened earlier than your retired life demands, or the mad dashes across the courtyard every weekday morning as I run late for the bus, again, please be kind. Don't report us to the on site management, the leasing agency down the street, or what have you. Instead, for a measly 20% down payment, we will gratefully leave your apartment building in quiet calmness and set up our own workshop in our first single-family dwelling place.