HATE our neighbors. Even when I am INSIDE my own house WEARING EARPLUGS I can hear them talking to each other at the top of their lungs.

Have often thought about spraying them with the hose–I think I could reach from our yard! But my husband tells me they would know it was me. Darn.

At my parent’s house: I only know the people I went to school with, and I was only friends with a few of them. My parents know random neighbours here and there.

At my apartment: hell no. They’re all the “loud party having types” while we’re the “really quiet and studious grad students who just want to sleep types”

on our left is a 90 year old lady who is very nice and we exchange pleasantries across the fence. On our left is a B&B and while we know the neighbours we don’t see a lot of them – only when they are there to clean. Across the road is the school. BUT I do live in a town of population 500 (including the farmers on properties) so I pretty much know everyone.

We are lucky where we live now – it truly is a Fannie Flagg novel. We’ve had some hellacious neighbors in the past…so it’s really great to have people around us who are actually friendly to each other.
My in-laws have lived in the same house for 35 years and they don’t know ANY of their neighbors…they don’t even wave to each other – which is just sad.
I gotta tell you – getting a dog was probably the best thing we’ve ever done when it comes to meeting neighbors…walking around the neighborhood, it gives people something to talk to you about – makes us more approachable I guess.

I know them in a friendly, borrow my power tools sort of way.

We hate our neighbors so much (we’re in an apt townhouse) that we’re breaking our lease on Tuesday and moving 10 miles north. Hah! Seriously, they are bad. They abuse their dog (a sweet yellow lab like Dog)… nuff said about them.

We’re going to be renting a 3 bedroom house now, and we are impossibly excited. Our landlords have offered to introduce us to the neighbors and some of their friends in the area, and we’re taking them up on it.

In the neighborhood where my mom is, I know all the neighbors on the street. I even met the newest neighbors on the day of my wedding, because they found my mom’s dog who wandered out of the house when no one was looking. I guess I don’t know how it happens, really, but I’m glad we’ll have people to talk to and see in our new neighborhood. :)

I’ve had a hard time finding friends here. I joined several clubs in my neighborhood and FINALLY have been doing some stuff socially with people who live near me! Even better, one recently had a baby and another is pregnant. After living here for 4 years it’s nice.

I only actually speak to one neighbor on a semi-regular basis and I can’t stand the woman. Here is a sample of our most recent run in with her:

Her: There have been snakes seen in the area….copperheads
Hubs: Oh?
Her: Yeah, so….you might want to think about cutting your grass, because as tall as it is, you might not see them before it’s too late.

(Our lawn had been mowed the previous weekend, and sue us, but with an 18-month old and a three week old that came 5 weeks earlier than we were expecting, we’ve had our hands full)

Hubs: oh, okay, thanks.
Her: And do you have an edger?
Hubs: (not getting it) Yes.
Her: Oh…I don’t know how to use one and my husband is out of town…
Hubs: Oh, uh, did you need me to edge your lawn?
Her: Oh, no, he’s back today, so he’ll take care of it, but…
Hubs: ….
Her: Well, I’ll talk to you guys later!

What a whore.

It’s Seattle. Even though we pretend, we’re not a particularly friendly lot. And it’s a damn shame.

Yep, it’s Seattle. Sorry about that. I’ve lived here most of my life, and the people here are more reserved than anywhere else I’ve been. Not unfriendly, necessarily. Just reserved. It doesn’t help that we have to stay inside eight months of the year. I have more friends in other parts of the world than I have here. My friend in Texas talks about how her whole street gets together on Friday nights to barbecue and drink wine. That would NEVER happen here.

it’s likely that my upstairs neighbors are a cleverly disguised herd of elephants with awful taste in music. and i think i hate them.

If it weren’t for the sweet little old ladies on our block we wouldn’t know anyone. As it is, we’ve become pretty good friends with a few of our neighbors because of getting to know each other at neighborhood gatherings put on by the two sweet grandmotherly types I can’t refuse. Potluck taco salad party was the latest to welcome a new neighbor. It was awesome.

I guess we are the living in an exceptionally friendly part of Seattle. We know quite a few of our neighbors and are lucky enough to have a bunch of kids our son’s age on our block as well. It is great this time of year because we actually get together for neighborhood functions since during the winter we all hide in our little caves. That isn’t saying that there aren’t the problem neighbors on the block, two of whom happen to be on either side of our house. Overall we lucked out, but we definitely aren’t the norm for this area.

There was some sort of community block party last year sponsored by the city of Lynnwood. That was our main interaction. We are lucky in that we live in a cul-de-sac and we are all on friendly waving terms. 3 out of 8 houses have a bunch of kids and they all play together in the street. We are friendlist with the newest neighbors right next door to us – but mostly because they have a dog that gets out and we have kept him in our garage until they got home. The 5 houses without kids (we are one of them) are friendly but quiet.

Sort of love one set of our neighbors, wish the neighbors on the other side would leave one of the cigarettes they are constantly smoking upwind of our open windows burning and burn their damn house down.

Neighbors are for waving at, not for socializing with, imho.

We had a housewarming party and I impulsively invited all the neighbors on our street (there are only 5 houses total). Ten minutes before the party, I panicked, cursing at myself for attempting to mix my real friends with these strangers. Turned out most of them were nice, but our next door neighbors are strange. The husband is a stay-at-home dad who has three girls aged 5, 10 and 12 – all are in school full-time. So he’s really an unemployed dad who we’re pretty sure is an alcoholic who downloads porn all day. Afterwards, the girls got too familiar and started playing in our backyard even when we weren’t home. I had to call the drunk pervert and tell him to watch his kids more. That ended the friendliness – thank god.

Of course all of this means nothing since we’re moving again, 7 months after getting back to Seattle. We have to go back to Cali – work stuff. I’m sure the neglectful deviant assumes we’re moving because of his kids, which is just a bonus.

I think when Riley starts preschool and such, you will meet people. People with kids automatically gravitate toward the parents of their kids’ friends. At least that’s what I’m hoping – I know no one in San Diego.

Hey, I live in Seattle too. I have my whole life. The neighborhood I live in now nobody even makes eye contact. I’m the idiot smiling and waving at everyone. I grew up in West Seattle which is a basically like a small town. Everyone knows everyone. We are moving back there so our kids acutally know what it’s like to live in a “neighborhood”.

I recently moved so I am only at the waving or brief chit-chat stage with my neighbors. Lots of my friends live close by, though. For the first time since I was a kid I am walking to friends houses. And I live in L.A., which makes that even weirder. When I lived in Austin I became good friends with my neighbors, but we were all the same age and had similiar circumstances. I don’t really expect that to happen again.

I know OF my neighbors, when I heard from my landlord (and then the building owner!), who reported that we’d had multiple complaints that they could hear us “walking and banking” according to the official letter telling us to stfu. Of course anyone who knows us laughed because my husband and I spend our evenings watching t.v. and sitting on the computer. We are NOT loud people. We even make an effort to walk softly, and one time, we both walked as softly as we could manage across the floor to our bedroom to go to sleep, and they banged LOUDLY on their ceiling/our floor, much to my rage and hatred of them. Bastards.

My next door neighbor is a seemingly 90 year old lady who introduces herself and asks if I’ve just moved in every time she sees me.

My neighbors down the hall talk really slowly and seem to be married to each other and have a crazy cat. At first I thought they weren’t friendly, because they spoke in monotone or not at all. Then I saw someone else looking in on them a lot, and after putting two and two together, I’m pretty sure they’re both developmentally disabled in some way, though it’s clear they’re well enough off to be living alone, so. Weird.

And then there’s the other next door neighbor, a very old man who likes to stand in his doorway and glare at people every so often.

Perhaps I should have made an effort to meet the neighbors BEFORE we moved in, eh? I would have chosen a different apartment complex, I think! Instead of inadvertently moving into some sort of weird halfway house for the crazy!

Haha! This morning the power went out in our tents — meaning, no AC, and it’s about 110 degrees here by 9 AM — so everyone sat outside (because it was actually cooler out in the sun) whining together for a few hours till it went back on. It was like a block party, only surlier! So, yes, I know my neighbors. Sometimes a bit too well. Also, I totally think you need to crash your neighbor’s party. Bring Dog.

I don’t like my neighbors (apartment). The ones to my right are always tweaked out and they are weird and they have tried to swindle me on a couple occasions. They are also liars. My downstairs neighbor is a DJ and while he generally observes courteous hours (no music between 10/11pm and 9am, sometimes I want to sleep in. But he’s pretty good so I don’t complain. He’s also got my back on account of I live alone so he keeps an eye on things.

I know all of my neighbors. They are all nuts (like us) so we all get along. We mind our own business but we go to each others graduation/thanksgiving/christmas parties and when we were really little we all played together. It’s sort of cookie cutter and gross but also kind of awesome.

We really only have one neighbor that we even wave to, but what we know about him/them is this: he LURVES his lawn. Way too much. He’s this >

(oops) this close to being out there on his knees with scissors. So, in the interests of ecological balance, I don’t do yardwork. At All. People come in and mow my “yard” every other week. We’ve basically let everything else go au naturel. He, on the other hand, not only is obsessive about his lawn, but also about his driveway. It glistens. And I am NOT making that up. (

I live on my own (apartment) and like my peace and quiet a wee bit much and have actively kept to myself.

But I’ve met the neighbours above me and next to me and they are just awesome. Next door lady I chat with and swap books with and we’ve got each others numbers in case of any problems (we both live alone). The one above me is great, she comes down and picks the herbs I grow and she gives me wine in exchange (a deal I like.)

Even then I think it’s the perfect mix, someone to chat with when you see them or to go and knock on the door if there’s any scary shit going on, but we don’t actively socialise or come around all the time.

Hello from Sydney, Australia!

My husband and I have just moved from a fairly mixed area – both socially, financially and ethnically speaking to somewhere a lot “posher” and I am quite sure that everyone is dead in our new neighbourhood!

In our previous complex, we knew everyone and had a great friendly relationship – even extending to social gatherings. I loved it, I still had my privacy but also had a friendly chat and a sense of community that felt just right. And, as my husband travels a lot for work I always felt safe knowing I could have called on any one of them if I had needed to.

Now?? Not so much…. in fact the only contact I have had was on the day we moved in. As it is a private road, access is minimal and one of our new neighbours yelled at the removalists because she couldn’t get her car in the garage. After she had finished yelling at the hapless removalists, she then came and yelled at me, telling me that I had “some nerve”!!! A truly heartwarming welcome…

To be honest, I am the type that does like my privacy, but neither do I want to feel so isolated and cut off from human contact in my own street.

You know…. I have considered the idea that I may have accidently moved into Zombie central, and that they are actually all coming out and earting flesh while I am alseep….. hmmmmmm :)

The neighbor on the right: a guy I graduated high school with and his recovering girlfriend. On the left: a widowed, retired schoolteacher. Across the street: House #1, one of the guidance counselors at the elementary school and his wife (who I attended jr.college with), House #2, a newly remarried widow and her husband, more of the wave-only type of neighbors. House #3, Alabama’s Biggest Fans, very friendly. House #4, Hellion and her harried parents. I know most of my neighbors by name and we’re all on speaking terms but we don’t usually have parties or anything. If I ever catch the fucker from down the hill who refuses to drive the speed limit though I may be reading your blog in prison.

Side neighbors are cool, they have a little girl though, and the rest of the neighborhood kids come to play with her and they are little pukes. Our dogs fight thru the fence with their dogs, but thats ok cuz that’s the most exercise they get all day. Their dogs too. I feed them milkbones thru the fence.
The people that live in front of me though, I live at the end of the street, the whole end of the street is my front yard. So my mom and dad come in town in their motorhome, park in my front driveway/yard, (it’s all gravel we live in the sw), and they call zoning because they think my mom and dad are spying on them hot tubbing in the nude, which they shouldn’t have been screwing in because their kids were watching from the upper floor windows. So zoning comes out and gives me a notice that my mom and dad have to move.
So, about a month later, I’m hooking up the 4 wheeler trailer to my motorhome, (I keep in at a storage yard, don’t think I have shit parked everywhere in my yard, I don’t), and pull out onto the main street, behind their house, check the straps and mr dead squished kitty is in the gutter. Maggots, eyeball hanging out, nasty. Mr. Kitty took a flying leap into a neighbors hot tub over the fence, it was early morning, and mr kitty was probably pretty well cooked by the time they got home. Hubby who didn’t go with me camping, said that their weekend was spent draining and cleaning hot tub which overflows into the main pool. Pool had to be cleaned too.
Now, a couple years later, they have two rotting vehicles, a car and a truck in their front yard, literally up on blocks. Think I ought to call zoning?

Oh, and the couple fight all the time, and then he starts bringing some girl home for lunch, they bring in mcdonalds bags, and then the upstairs a/c comes on, and two hours later they leave all snuggly. I laughed my ass off. She musta caught him though, cuz he was all whipped looking for awhile, and she lost a shitload of weight. They still fight all the time.

I sort of know one of my neighbors. They’re alright. But all the others are boring and uncool. Actually we have some mexicans who live across the street, and they seem pretty cool. I don’t think ya’ll get a lot of mexicans up there in Canada, but they don’t care about much and spend most of their time partying. (I’m kidding, I know where Seatle is) We even have one crotchety old bastard who made enemies with us when my family first moved here. A real get-out-of-my-yard, home owners nazi type of jerk.

But I’m moving today, waaaaay out into the country. So now I have a whole new set of neighbors that I can start ignoring with a clean slate. And their trailers are going to be way far away from ours. So noise isn’t a problem. And even if it was, we are out in the county, so the laws are different. We can have fires and parties and blow things up, and the fuzz can’t do Jack about it. Ha, I win.

But I did grow up in this appartment complex with a bazillion other kids around. And we always ran around outside and had fun together, so I can feel you on the neighbor thing. Even though I don’t want any.

I had no idea you were from Virginia! Me too! Pretty sure that makes us twins.

I just moved to a new apartment in Knoxville, TN and frankly I don’t want to know my neighbors. My dad sorta pushed them on my when I first got here. I guess he figured since I just got out of the military and my husband wasn’t moving for a few weeks, I could use some people my age. But honestly, they party to much. I would rather live next to the old people. I mean (the really old people.) Unfortunately, spending 5 years in the military makes you inept at making friends and getting to know your neighbors because you know that in a few years you will be leaving anyway so what’s the point?

Hubby and I are hoping now we can learn to be normal. Haha.

Know them? How about “been involved in litigation that cumulated in a visit to the state supreme court with them for the last six years”? Does that count?

(actually, that’s only our “bad” neighbor – everyone else is a peach around here, and we adore them)

To get to know them, we had an open house when we moved in and just randomly stuffed invites into their mailboxes. We now get together on a semi-regular basis, especailly around the holidays. Maybe you should have a party when your addition is done and get to know The People?

We are surrounded by people who could be Fuller’s grandparents and possibly one meth house. We know them, smile, and wave. Two of them (the ones behind us and the one right next door) we are comfortable telling when we go out of town. We make a point to let them know if we will be gone and if our dogs are with us or not. It worked out well when we traveled for the 4th and my sister, who stayed there a day after we left, didn’t shut our door very well. A big storm blew the door open for anyone to walk right in. Our neighbor called the cops, who did a walk through and nicely shut and locked our door.

The rest of our neighborhood really came together when we built a community playground. That was a great time to meet other parents and now we see a lot of the kids that we normally wouldn’t see.

We also have a very active neigborhood listserv, so there are a few neighbors who I could never tell you what they look like, but I can tell you where they stand on renaming of streets, the possible gang situation, the reopening of a convenience store, who recently had a couch to sell, and who they recommend as a vet/ pediatrician/ or dentist.

I lived in a small town growing up very much like the town I live in now. There were kids all over the place and my house was “safe” for our games of chase and hide and seek and TV tag and freeze tag. In the winter we would build huge snow forts between the trees in the front with the snow dad had piled up from the driveway. We had neighborhood parties that lasted for DAYS- they were legendary. When I was 15 we moved to the country so we could have more room for our horses. We then had distant neighbors who were so nice. My mom still lives in the same farm house and is known far and wide as the purple door lady.
As a parent and adult I live in town, there are kids on the street behind us and kids across the street. I encourage neighborhood play, “go see if Garrett wants to play.” The kids are great but the adults seem so standoffish. I think we just do too much, go too much and at the end of the day we don’t want to deal with our neighbors or other folks- we are just wore out! I miss my old neighborhood, the fun, the games, the hijinks. It was good to be a kid. I think it’s much tougher now to be a kid- too much pressure.

Oh, I guess it helps too that we go to church five blocks from our house and most of our church family lives in the neighborhood as well. And our neighborhood is populated with lots of alumni from our college which looms over us on the mountain where our neighborhood sits at the bottom.

I also grew up in Virginia + loved my neighbors, had a blast. Now I live in Ft Hood, TX + I cannot say the same thing. We are the lowest ranking in our cul-de-sac so no one really takes the extra time to get to know us. Plus, people move in + out so frequently, by the time you remember someone’s name, they are gone. Oh + we have the opposite problem: we’re the ONLY neighbors without kids so we also get left out of get togethers b/c of that.

I once heard that the taller your fence, the better the neighbors.

;)

Usually somewhat of a lurker, I had to comment on this one. I have the absolute BEST neighbors ever! To one side, we have a couple of empty nesters who as sweet as they could be. Across the street, we have a couple with kids relatively close to our older kids ages and, though the boy is a handfull, our kids play pretty well together. Then there is the family on the other side, their kids stairstep in just the same ways that ours do but a little older. Our kids play wonderfully together. My DH works from home most days, and keeping the kids quiet is difficult, so almost every day, the doorbell rings and my kids are invited next door. We do dinners together and have become great friends. I could go on and on, but that’s what my own blog is for.

We know most of their names, but honestly we’re the weird people at the end of the street. There’s a sheriff, a minister, a couple that are nice enough but really into the minister and his jazz, and a fun couple that work for a photography company and have cool kids. Aside from the last couple, we’re not really down with our neighbors. Call it deep suspicion of both “The Man” and organized religion, or call it anti-social vegan punks, but either way, despite the fact that our neighbors are really nice people, we’re never invited to the cook-outs. I know all the kids around, though. (They cut through my backyard to get to the woods.) The kids are awesome.

What is this strange thing called neighbors? I hear of them not! If you are referring to the people whom co-habitate in the surrounding area though, I am more and more sure that there must be more intelligent life elsewhere.
The ones across the street are old… like 50’s old and one is on crack, the other is a insane alcholic. There is a nice field next to us. Personally I like the field. On the other side is a single man with two teenage boys that he has sole custody of, only he is in bed by 8 p.m and they run amuck till about 2 a.m.
I try to ignore the people and truly neighbors is a strange word in my household.

The last neighbor I knew lived in the condo above us, and used to piss off the balcony when he was drunk. Knowing the neighbors isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

we know our neighbors but we’re not really social with them as we having nothing in common. the only ones who have tried to get to know us are the ones who live behind us and two houses over. and by getting to know, i mean they thought it was acceptable to leave an anonymous threatening letter in my mailbox on two different occasions because, heaven forbid, i was talking on my deck with friends after 10 p.m. let’s just say, they know me quite well now. they know they can expect me to come banging on their door to tell them to leave me the eff alone. won’t YOU be my neighbor? :)

We have wonderful neighbors. I think it helps we all moved into our house at the same time (it was a new development) so we had a block party to get to know every one and now we have one the last saturday in aug. every year. The couple right next door have kids our age, but they are spread out all over the place (they moved here from Australia) and they have no grandkids so they have adopted our girl as their own. The husband even called from Dubi (he is an over seas pilot) on her 1st birthday since he couldn’t be here for it. The other neighbors across the street have a little boy who is 6 years older than our girl but she just loves him and he is wonderful to her, they play so well together. It’s like he is a big brother to her. We all go out to dinner together or have each other over all the time. It’s great. Now if it was just me I would know none of the neighbors because I am a social dufus, but my husband is the complete oposite he makes friends every where he goes. I hope the girl inherited that from him!

We have interacted more with our neighbors in the house we just moved into (4 weeks ago) than we ever did with the neighbors in the place where we lived for the six years prior. I suspect it helps that the people around the new place have actively come up and introduced themselves.

I live in a Queens, NY apartment building. All of our neighbors have small kids (ranging from a few months old to 10 years), which is really really weird after living in dorms or in fancy buildings with “young, working professionals”. But we’re all crazy loud and have that understanding that we can’t call the cops on each other for blasting music and stomping around at 3am because, well, someone else was doing that the other night.

Those children are going to grow up so odd…

I do love that my closest friends all live within a few blocks from here. It reminds me of being a kid and running down the street to knock on my friend’s door and ask their parents if they could come out to play. Only instead of asking, you show up with beer.

We don’t know our neighbors in our current apartment building…. Mostly b.c the guys next door are NEVER home (seriously, the mgmt company left a note on their two and it stayed there for three weeks), and the guy on the other side looks like a serial killer. But whatever.

We’re moving to a condo we just purchased in a month or so, and I’m already planning to bake cookies for the neighbors. I hope we meet people there.

We do know our neighbors! We like 94% of them very well. In fact, one of the neighbors is having a wedding at her house today, and our yard is the backup parking lot. To thank us, they sent down a bulldozer last week that they had doing work up at their place, to widen our driveway for us. We’d been talking about doing it for the last 4 years, and viola! I’ve spent the last week raking 22 yards of gravel. But it is DONE. Hmm…..tangential much?

ANYWAY.

All but a few of the inhabitants of the neighborhood will be attending the wedding today, and I’m looking forward to all of us being in the same place at the same time.

The only neighbors we really don’t care for, are the ones who’ve decided that since OUR dog is leaving dinosaur-sized piles of crap in our yard, SURELY we won’t mind if theirs do too. WE MIND! Especially because they look in our front windows to see if we’re home while their dog is humped up, taking a bronco in my yard!! Where my kid plays!!!) We even had the ‘it’s not my dog doing that’ conversation with two different sets of neighbors. So I took photos of them in action. Now, they bring them over to crap before we’re up in the morning. The thing that makes it even more frustrating, is that my 1+ acre is surrounded on 3 sides by vacant land. Where no one would CARE that a dog was crapping! ARGH!

All that whining aside, the REST of the neighbors are great. I always wanted the kids to be able to play outside all day too, but my kiddo has special needs and isn’t able to do that the way I could as a kid. We make up for it by spending almost every hot day in another neighbor’s inground pool. :-)

Aaaaaaand this brings to an end the longest comment I’ve ever left. You’re welcome. ;-)

We live in a townhouse complex with 28 units. I know the names of some of the neighbours, but that’s because my grandma lives here too, and she gets into everyone’s business. :) This isn’t that strange, as she lived up the street from my parents while I was growing up. I used to think that every street was like that, where you’re related to half the block in some way or another. Since some of those relatives were older and have started passing away, I don’t know the new people who are moving in. Still know the neighbours on both sides of my parent’s house, plus a couple more up the street. And I make sure to wave at my neighbours when I see them out.

The problem with neighbors is, if you don’t like them it’s harder to put them off. If it’s someone across town, you can say you already have plans, or that you’ll be out of town that week. Neighbors would know you were lying. Oh, but you WANT more friends. Then neighbor-friends would be convenient, although I think it’s the same way coworker-boyfriends are convenient: great while it lasts, but super-awful if it ends.

Well, since I move approximately every ten minutes, no, I do not currently know my neighbors, although I know *of* a neighbor–word on the street (heh) is that I now live next to a movie staaaah.

Once I settle my little tush down someday, I have grand plans of meeting my neighbors, and maybe bringing casseroles or something in a gesture of good will. And then I remember I don’t make casseroles, which clearly puts a wrinkle in my little plan.

Growing up, I knew the neighbors, kids and grown ups alike. And I know people these days who know *their* neighbors, so I know it still happens.

Cracked up at the Fannie Flagg reference–I hear you loud and clear on that one!