I’ve mentioned the performative gardening next door. Actually, I’m just going to take photos. Be right back.

Exhibit 1: The stoop

I’ve mentioned the flags. They blow about. There’s also a lot of junk. Calvin is particularly incensed by this food container stuck between the fence and the stoop, built by Alley Guy Who Smokes While Gardening, to ward off the evil eye of the Ditmarstons. Calvin had a memorable rant about food waste left in the aluminum container attracting rats and who could we call and blah blah blah.

Rants are only interesting to the ranter. Everyone else just waits for it to end.

Exhibit #2: Stoop closeup, white paint (?) dripping down the wall at us

You can see the drippings and the flag getting all grody and some wind chimes. It’s a noisy place.

Exhibit #3: The puzzling wreath

It’s a circle made of a dead plant with tape around it and there were words on the tape, but they are no longer legible. On either side of the wreath are 2 Christmas stockings. When you could read the words they said something about rosemary being killed too soon. We think the plant is rosemary because that’s what the sign said. I didn’t think rosemary grew that long. To me, it looks like lavender.

I did put lavender into lamb for 2 years because I thought the plant on the deck was rosemary and it as lavender, so I tried to sympathize with her, but failed. No sympathy.

Exhibit #4: My lilac bush, blooming for the first time (since the nursery, probably, but I don’t remember if it was flowering when we bought it deep in the first spring of the pandemic).

Calvin put it in 3 years ago and it finally bloomed! I’m so proud of it! Hello, friend!

And there’s an entire Facebook saga today that I thought was upsetting enough to screenshot. Let me post those.

Disclaimer: I feel that it’s necessary to document the ongoing crap once in a while, even though I am sighing and gnashing my teeth and resenting it as I type and screenshoot. I’m listening to a podcast about what crap mammograms are. I have to go in for a third mammogram (dense breasts, what can you say?) next week and I wish I had the faith in data to say fuck it Lenox Hill, I am not coming in. I did it last year, just refused to go back in for a followup sonogram. This year they did the mammogram and the sonogram and I STILL have to go back. I better not have cancer. I will blame this damn blog.

Facebook exhibit #1: post May 10, 2023 (sigh, groan)

As you see, I have stopped protecting her identity. I just don’t want to do it. Sorry.

Facebook exhibit #2: Comments are where she gets into the good stuff.

So many things to point out. Kripalu has some sort of order of protection against her. I don’t know who she is offering food and shelter to–maybe the moving guys who come round every few days. And the bat. Always the bat.

Facebook exhibit 3: The gross photos from her post.

Yeah, so gross. She’s been walking around with tissues stuck in her nose for the past week or so. If you go back to the comments, you can see she’s trying to pin this bloody nose injury on Calvin, who she has been accusing of beating her with a bat for the last 3 years now.

There is one more exhibit I just can’t get to today

I will try to document tomorrow. It’s the dirt square on the sidewalk in front of her house that once held a tree but now, no more. Now there is something else, and sometimes bloody rags are near it.