“Calm down. If you can’t handle a community you need to get a place like what you had,” big sis said in regards to the few choice words I left about yesterday’s latest water outage on Facebook.

While it was certainly quieter in the country, we could never afford land here, and we’re still not sure we would ever again want the hassles of rural living in the first place. But yeah, they did it again. Yesterday the water was off for a couple of hours without warning, which means they probably had a surprise and unexpected leak somewhere. No one heard my little swearing spree, though. I was home alone.

Yes, the piping/water situation here sucks, and yes, there is more daytime noise than I would like, but I realize there’s no perfect place on earth. Every place has its pros and cons and some kind of trade-off. The main source of noise back in Auburn was Jesse’s mutts, and while there may only be one or two noise sources out in the country as opposed to dozens in the city, you have the hassles of dealing with wells, limited to no mail services, positively shitty Internet service, and then you have to haul your trash or burn it in a metal drum.

So it’s either a quieter place that comes with lots of inconveniences or a noisier place that comes with more convenience. It’s like with climates. We don’t get snow here but we still get cold. Hurricanes can’t get us but an earthquake could. So everything has its positives and negatives.

The latest source of noise was hammering and sawing just beyond Bob & Virginia’s place. Someone was getting new doors or windows. Our 34-year-old windows let sound in beautifully, and the noisiest room is definitely the living room because there are so many huge windows in there and the room itself is huge and very open. Therefore when I’m on days I work down the hall in the back bedroom where there are only two windows, one of which has soundproofing material hanging in it. It’s annoying and it’s inconvenient, but I do like the snappy Internet service, trash service, having access to a pool a few months a year, and the fact that I could get an ambulance out here in a few minutes if God forbid we ever needed one instead of a half-hour or longer.

I briefly chatted with Bob yesterday who had a touch of humor unlike in the past when he seemed more on the serious side. The more you get to know people the more they usually loosen up. I asked him if he got a notice about the water being turned off (in case ours was blown away or something), and not surprisingly he said he didn’t. Virginia was out somewhere at the time and he was out front pruning trees, so he didn’t know the water was out until I told him. He said he would ask them what was going on if they came by again and that they had just been by (the park maintenance people travel around on golf carts), and that he hoped it would be back on soon so he could rinse some crap he needed to rinse.

So we got to talking about the trees and shrubs on our properties and I was saying how I didn’t think we’d ever have the time to do all we wanted to do or the money to hire someone to haul away the stuff we didn’t want (though we might be able to get an extra dumpster from the office so we can get rid of more stuff at once) because we’ve been having financial setbacks lately with unexpected expenses coming up like the AC’s capacitor, car issues, and we still have to do the roof.

He then mentioned that he noticed Tom was having trouble with the car when he was out walking a couple of mornings ago. Yeah, he left something plugged in that drained the battery so he had to jump it. He said that he said to himself he would make one more round around the circle and then offer to help if he was still there, but he was gone.

Then I said something about the next people having to deal with and decide what to do with all the plants, but that we should be here for another five years or so and he said, “Good. We don’t want you to move.”

Aw, that’s the nicest thing he said and as I told him, we don’t want them to move either because they’re awesome neighbors. Yeah, I feel guilty about wishing his hands would fall off (and worse) every time he would annoy me with his power tools, LOL.

So then he goes, “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. We’ll be here till we croak.”

He said it in such a funny way that I couldn’t help but laugh.

The guy is in fantastic shape for just turning 88. He walks every morning, he rides his bike, he climbs on his roof to blow leaves out of the gutter, he takes beautiful care of his lot, he goes out golfing, etc.