Somebody, I think it might have been Dr. Phil said on one of his shows that “living with neighbors is like being married to them, for better or for worse you are stuck with each other. We live in a pretty quiet building, in comparison to our last two places we lived in Florida it is almost paradise! There is only one other apartment on this floor, thank goodness and the lady that lives there is okay. Not the friendliest, but not unpleasant by any means. She has some noisy male friends though, they drink a lot ( I’m not quite sure how much is ‘a lot’ here in Europe), and on occasion are up until 1 in the morning. The other day they must have been practicing for New Years because they were up all night. Every time I got up to use the bathroom, I could hear them talking. They must  have talked until 7 am the next day. The nice thing about it was that they didn’t have loud music and were not crashing into the walls. I call her flasche frau (bottle woman) because on Monday mornings I can hear her out in the hall carrying all the empty beer bottles down the stairs, clink, clinkitty, clink. On Fridays, I can hear the bottles coming in the opposite direction into the apartment.  The guy upstairs is pretty quiet, thought I can hear him doing #1 in the toilet when it is quiet, and I can tell when he has a certain person there with a child because the person steps really hard (some people walk quietly, others sound like they are trying to put their feet through the floor), and the kiddie footsteps are easily recognizable.  The woman underneath us has a dog I don’t trust, it doesn’t seem too friendly but the woman herself is very friendly.  And of course there is out landlords, who live on the 1st floor, they are really nice folks, all in all not a bad collection of people to have to live next to.

I have pretty good hearing, just about anything wakes me up, our neighbors clock chiming on the hour at night, the guy upstairs opening or closing his curtains (I can hear the curtain holder upers move in the runners on the ceiling), moths landing on the light outside. It is fun to have great hearing, but it can be a bitch when I am trying to sleep. If something is humming louder than normal, I wake up and have to go find out what it is and why it is doing what it is doing. It is a relief to have better neighbors now. When we lived in Coral Springs, in Florida, we lived in a newly converted condo complex. At first it was great, there was hardly anybody living it and it was fairly quiet. That didn’t last long, as more people moved in it got progressively worse. We were on the ground floor, (50 ft. from the pool!) and the people that moved in next to us let teenagers flop there. She must have had 10 people living in a 2 br condo apt. The kids would smoke pot on the stairs next to our room, so we couldn’t have the window open. Others would hang out at the pool at night and in the morning I would see all sorts of crap in it. The last straw was when apartments were  being broken into in the middle of the day. The thieves must had drank 2 packs red bull one day because they hit 4 apts. one afternoon, all on the 2nd floor! The boom boom cars were making their nightly rounds, usually at 1 or 2 in the morning. You know the cars, the ones with the huge speakers and sub woofers and ratteling bumpers. It sounds like the car is going to fall into pieces at any minute because they are rattling so hard. The drivers that think that EVERYONE should hear their music whether they want to or not. I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep there. I was glad when we moved to the Oakland Park area.  I though our troubles were over. But noooooooooooo. Enter Ick and Mop.

Ick and Mop were the people who moved in to the house on the right of our duplex. We had 6 blissful months of peace and quiet and then Ick and Mop moved in. Ick and Mop were the proverbial “Neighbors From Hell”. They were night people ( I think they had a bit of chemical help to achieve this night person status), Mop worked in a bar and Ick ( a landscaper by day) just stayed up all night drinking and moving very heavy things around in his garage. Very heavy things. I have no idea what it was that he was moving or why in heavens name he had  to rearrange whatever it was nightly but it sounded like an industrial plant in his garage. Around 3am, Mop would come home and fight night would begin. Sometimes Ick would have been out and he would come home and have the great idea of turning his stereo on full volume. Nothing like coming out of a deep sleep to some country singer talking about getting drunk on his own tv show.  YEE HAW! The fighting was the worst though, screaming, I could hear Ick hitting the walls, knocking things over, and I could hear the words. Ick and Mop made me feel really, really happy that I gave up drinking and other assorted things. I could see myself in Ick at times, he was lost and the alcohol made it 10 times worse. The fighting got worse after Ick crashed his truck up and had no vehicle and no job. Susanne and I would send lots of loving energy over to them. We didn’t want to make enemies by calling the cops, no telling what Ick would have done afterwards. He and one of his biker buddies built this target (they thought a good time to build it was at 1am in the morning), hammering away on this mysterious thing until 3am. I stood on my bed and looked out the window, I could see over the fence slightly and there was Ick and this huge bearded guy, and I thought it best to mind my own business and not go over and ask if they would please SHUT THE F&^K  UP!  Come to find out, the next day was Ick’s birthday and the thing they built was a large target wall for throwing hatchets at. The picture they put up for a target was a large picture of some woman. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, all evening long -thunk, the sound of the hatchets hitting the wood. I did not get much sleep for a while at the new place either. Ick and Mop finally got evicted a couple of months before we moved. There was some peace but all was not quiet. Enter the neighbor on the other side of our duplex, Crackhead.

Now we were not really aware of Crackhead right away, she started becoming an issue well after Ick and Mop had moved in. Crackhead (sadly) had her kid taken away from her and her mother seemed to look the other way when it came to her owning up to her daughter having a big problem. I know it is probably not nice to call her Crackhead, it also isn’t nice to take things that aren’t yours either (obviously I haven’t fully forgiven her yet, I will). I would see Crackhead from time to time, usually on the street walking with her boyfriend, fighting, her boyfriend carrying a gas can. The people that came to her house must have been on something too. I was standing behind my car one day, in our little parking lot in front of the house, when this white pick up truck came down the street, weaving and lurching. I got out of the way, I didn’t know if this guy would hit me. The truck passed me and (luckily the guy had slowed down), ran into the fire hydrant at the edge of the parking spaces. He put in in reverse and back up enough to get around the hydrant and then pulled into Crackheads place. She must have not been there because he looked like he was mad as he got back into the truck and sped off. He apperently didn’t even notice me standing there watcing him. Strange. I called the police and gave them his license plate number and told them what happened. It was one day last summer that we got to experience Crackhead up close and personal. I say we, actually it was the unfortunate guy who lived on the side of the duplex facing Crackheads house. She and her boyfriend came through the fence and broke into his apt. through the bathroom window and took his big screen tv, an old broken laptop, a bottle of wine and a glass for the wine, I guess they didn’t want to drink out of the bottle. We knew it was her because #1, the guy who lived there for a few months told Bob (the guy who got broken into), that Crackhead and her boyfriend had the stuff and were trying to get rid of it, #2 her own mother knew her daughter was a thief and admitted it to Bob and #3, one of the pillows that was on an outdoor chair got dragged through the fence where the broken boards were and was sitting on the other side. Plus Crackhead had been in the apartment in the past, wanting to use the phone. She has used our phone once, (we figure thats how she sizes up places she might want to steal from), but we had nothing worth stealing apperently at the time she was there. But after the break in I would hide my laptop I had just bought and all my external hard drives, we hid all our cards and bank books and important papers. I started locking the front gate. I wanted to put bars on the windows but Susanne said she didn’t want to live in someplace that felt like jail. I thought about it and agreed with her. It sucks having neighbors who steal. Ick amd Mop seemed like angels in comparision. Crackhead would not look Susanne and I in the eye after that. She moved out shortly thereafter. But I would see her there every now and again visiting the guys who had moved in after her. I hope she gets help beacuse Florida, one can shoot someone breaking into ones home and not get in trouble for it. They passed a law stating so. So the neighborhood I thought was a quiet residential neighborhood had its own flavor of drunks and druggies. I am really happy to have traded in the old neighbors for the current ones. I have sent Ick, Mop and Crackhead lots of love and I know there is something to be learned from my having crossed paths with them. With that said, I also hope I never see these people again, once was definately enough!