somebody get my shovel...

it is becoming abundantly clear that my neighbors landscaper is not well. they have apparently hired him to prune some shrubbery, make some brick borders, and fill in their rock beds. no big deal, right? that's what i thought when he started this job more than 2 weeks ago.

being that i live on what i call an inverted cul-de-sac, our neighbors backyards blend with ours in the way that slices of pie blend to make the whole. we each have our own wedge and they all meet in the middle. this landscaper guy is working in the wedge next to ours.

he shows up at random times, on any of the seven days in a week. he's been there at noon on a tuesday and 6pm on a sunday, and every other possible time in between. sometimes he stays and works for 30 minutes, other times a few hours. he always brings his enormous chocolate lab, and he always leaves his shovels and whathaveyou strewn about their yard when he makes his hasty exits. he wears large radio earphones and shouts greetings to my dogs as they bark furiously at his lab while he marks the yard. it would appear that he is unable to fully complete one task in one area at a time. he fills in a little rock on one side, and before finishing moves to the other side to work there for a while. he doesn't appear to be planting anything, just pruning old shrubs and laying rock. this whole thing is maybe a 2 day job, at most. did i mention he's been working on it for more than 2 weeks?

each day he returns (maybe) and my dogs go crazy, barking wildly at him and his dog . as an at-home parent i am forced to be a witness to this madness, held hostage by his noisy whims. some of you may know that i provide childcare for a 5 month old baby. it's like he's got some sort of radar and shows up to make a bunch of noise at all of the worst times. the baby just fell asleep? let me get out my weed wapper (or is it weed whacker?) and just trim up this grass along the fence. another perfect example came this morning at 6:30. my husky, steve, wanted to go outside. i let him out and he instantly began to howl. i thought to myself, "it can't be. that maniac can't actually be out there at this time of morning! it's still dark out for chrissakes". steve is not typically a barker, in fact this visiting dog and his unstable owner are the only thing that really makes him howl out in the yard. so i squinted my eyes to see if i could make anything out in the darkness and sure enough, loony landscaper was moving piles of dirt around in the dark. piles of dirt! what's loonier, if you need something to be loonier than that, is that he was gone by 7:30, leaving behind random piles of dirt throughout their yard.

this situation is vexing me! i can't figure him out. at first i thought he had adhd or something because of his random task swapping and sudden comings and goings, but now i am beginning to think that he might actually be mentally ill and having some sort of episode. the questions plague me. i wonder what he's listening to on those headphones? why are my neighbors allowing this strangeness in their yard? are they paying this nut-job by the hour? is he ever going to be done? i have actually contemplated going over there and finishing the job myself, just to make it stop. now who's crazy? (yea, it's me.) based on what he's accomplished so far i can safely say that i could have completed the same work in one afternoon with my 5 year playing next to me, and my baby friend strapped to me in the bjorn. i have considered it, believe me.

the other thing i have considered? sneaking up behind him when he's wearing those headphones and hitting him over the head with one of the many shovels laying around. i could bury the body under all that rock, and it wouldn't take me 2 weeks to do it.