We got peace, love, and monkey business

So, at the end of last year, we lost one of our set of neighbors. This was disappointing to me and crushing to bunny_hugger because they were great neighbors and this after she'd had a decade of a neighbor relationship that ranged from ``difficult'' to ``at least it's not difficult right now'' and she feared what might come next.

What has come in the three months since has been not so good or warm as our relations with the previous neighbors, but on the other hand, it's been too cold to go out and chat casually much. Our biggest interactions have come while we happened to be shovelling the driveway at the same time --- they liked my joke that the Michigan groundhog and come out, looked around, burst into tears, and told her sister in Florida that she was moving down there --- or while we stepped outside as they warmed their cars. They're taxi drivers, so they're only rarely hanging out around home, as best we can tell.

Our biggest fears haven't been realized: they're not loud and they haven't got animals left out to make a racket or interfere with our pond or whatnot (for a while bunny_hugger had to put up an electric fence to keep the old neighbor's dog out of the yard). There's been more debris in the area than usual --- abandoned soda cans or the like --- but that might just be the normal emergence of junk as snow gives up its volume, and it may be stuff come loose from their taxi. But that doesn't explain their leaving a month's worth of the weekly Community News, a leading free pile of coupons with four pages of articles incompetently culled from the Lansing State Journal attached, on their lawn.

Meanwhile the other neighbors seem to be up to something. They've had a trailer outside the house with a mattress and a cat carrier and other house stuff on it; maybe they're moving out, maybe someone else is moving in. There's several in the house so it might be the rotation of one or two roommates, but then, bunny_hugger noticed recently a serious-sounding conversation about their water pipes. We haven't gotten any warnings about major house reconstruction, though, at least not yet.

Trivia: 171 newspapers were founded in France between February and June of 1848, with a circulation of 400,000 copies a month at their peak. Source: 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe, Peter N Stearns.

Currently Reading: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life Of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, Graham Farmelo.