How Cold Can You Be?

I got home from work yesterday about 3:30..it was 82 degrees outside.

My next door neighbors are well into their eighties...they had a fire going in their fireplace. my son got off the school bus and remarked "the neighbors are burning down more of our forest on a day that feels like August".

They are a quirky couple. He is as nice as can be, his name is Lee. I tend to call him "slow" Lee. I asked him to help me fix my weed eater one day, and spent two hours with him trying to do something that I could have done in ten minutes, but it made him happy to help, so I let him.

I have a riding lawn mower so I cut their grass for them once a week.He leans over the back of his big diesel truck the entire time just watching me cut...kinda weird but I've gotten used to it.

The fireplace issue just rubs my 16 year old the wrong way...this morning he got up to announce they had another fire going (a balmy 72 degrees outside).

He has a contraption in his back yard that he melts his beer cans with... a cage type device that he burns them in. It smells like he is burning cadavers. We wondered for about a week what the smell was, so one day when he wasn't home to peer at me while I cut his yard I peeked through the fence to see what smelled so awful and spotted his Budweiser cans smoldering away. I'll have to remember to tell him about the recycling station right down the road from us.

The only neighbors quirkier than them are the "vampires" up the street. My daughter announced they were vampires the second day after they moved in. I attributed it to the fact that she was reading the "Twilight" series. The mother"Vampire" called me to ask if I would feed her cats while they went home to Chicago for a weekend. I am NOT a big cat person, but I was the only person she knew in the neighborhood and I thought it would be "neighborly" to help her out. I went to their house the evening before they left to pick up their key. The son answered the door without so much as a "hello" and handed me a key. I said maybe I should come inside to see where they kept the cat food and how to take care of them.

He motioned me inside...not ONE light on anywhere. In the dim fading light I saw the husband on the couch, he didn't even look up at me. The mother "Vampire" came skulking out of a bedroom to show me where to find the food and told me where she kept the dishes so that they could eat out of a fresh bowl every day (that didn't happen...my dogs eat out of the same dishes every day and I don't hear them complaining).

I went back the next day to feed the kitties.

When I opened the door a cat was sitting right by the door. I went up the stairs and saw the other kitty staring at me like it was fixing to attack. I went to the kitchen to get the food and another cat was sitting on the counter. As I opened the cans another cat strode into the kitchen. When I was putting the food in the "clean" dishes yet another cat pounced into view from a side room. A little freaked out by now, I filled the water bowls as ANOTHER cat raced in from another bedroom like it had to be somewhere in a big hurry. I quit counting cats, just tried to get out of there as fast as I could. The next day I saw two more cats I hadn't seen the first day and by the smell, there may have been a couple more lurking about.

Thank the Lord they came back the next day. I tried to get Massey to go feed them that day, but she said she was all out of wooden stakes and didn't want to risk it.

She has since retracted her "vampire" theory, as vampires are all supposed to be really beautiful... and now just thinks they are "weirdos".

I tend to agree with her...at the last feeding I counted eight cats, about seven too many for my liking.

It reminds me of the old Tom Hanks movie "The Burbs". Great movie if you haven't seen it...go rent it at Blockbuster. Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher, Bruce Dern and Corey Feldman to name just a few.

It reminds me somewhat of my own neighborhood...you never know what goes on behind the doors of the houses surrounding yours...and sometimes it is better NOT to know!

Til next time...COTTON