Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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My neighbor and his car

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One of my neighbors has this old car that he keeps parked on the street in front of his house. I’m not sure what kind of car it is, but it looks like a car from the 50’s and for the most part it’s in nice shape or it was until recently.

We’ve talked to the neighbor about his car in the past. It’s a fantastic looking car and it’s obvious that he’s put time into caring for it … but it seems like he’s not taking care of it as well as he used to in the last few months.

The car is parked on a street that I can see from my front door and every time I look out I see this green car that looks like it’s slowly sinking into the ground on it’s passenger side. I don’t know if it’s tires on the passenger side are flat or what’s going on but it looks odd. It just seems a shame. It’s such a nice car and he was always out side taking care of it like he was putting in Ferrari parts and now it looks like the car is falling into a sinkhole or something. Weird.

Do you have any neighbors with old collector cars that are getting run down due to neglect?





Winter is coming soon!

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I can’t believe that it’s already November. It seems like the last couple of months have just flown by.

It’s getting colder here too. Our furnace has been on several times each day over the last week or so. I guess it won’t be long before I’ll be pulling out our winter coats, hats and gloves.

I was looking out my kitchen window at my backyard and some of my neighbors backyards and I realized that we still have a lot of work to do to prepare for winter. We’ve done some yard work such as putting away the patio table and gathering up the solar lights and so on, but we still have to tidy up the garden beds and empty the pots and planters that held all of the annuals.

My neighbors are much further ahead then we are. One of our neighbors plant their whole backyard with veggies in early summer and they just cleared everything out a week or so ago so their yard is just soil now. Another neighbor was working in his backyard today, putting away his plant pots and other gardening tools and making sure the hot tub cover is secure and he moved his BBQ right outside his patio door for easy winter barbecuing.

Hopefully it’s not too cold this coming weekend, because we’re going to have to get out there and get all of the work done that needs to be done before winter arrives.

Oh and on Saturday I saw my first snow! How sad. My husband and I were standing in the kitchen and we both saw what we at first thought was rain, but then we realized that it was snow falling. It actually snowed hard enough that the ground was wet for a while afterwords. Thankfully it melted right away!

Is it getting colder in your area too? Have you seen any snow yet?

The view outside my door was pretty nice today

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I had some nice entertainment, or maybe I should rephrase that and say eye candy, right outside my door earlier today.

My neighbors were getting some work done on their walkway – having some interlocking brickwork put in and the crew that came to do the work, well, they certainly weren’t hard on the eyes!

Hey, women do look too. We just don’t talk about it as much as guys. LOL

I brought my dog out a few times for her little walks so she could do her business and so I could uhm … browse. I mean … I wanted to see what work they were doing – maybe my husband and I might want to have interlocking brick installed in our front walkway too? Uh huh.

I know hefting bricks and that kind of work is heavy manual labor, but at least two of the guys must lift weights and or must take muscle building supplements because they were HUGE! I don’t know how guys can do anything with muscles that big .. I mean, how do you buy clothes?

Anyway, it was nice to have such a nice view right outside my front door – on the first day of Fall. I’m sure I won’t get many more views like that until next year!

Have to complain about the letter carrier

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I don’t know what’s going on with our mail delivery service this summer. We’ve lived in this neighborhood for almost ten years and for most of that time we had the same mailman.


Actually our mailman ended up being a friend of ours as he was seeing (and living with) a close friend of mine from work (they even helped us put in our skylight) so it was always nice when I’d see him delivering our mail.

I haven’t talked to him lately, and I haven’t seen him delivering our mail either. Perhaps he got a better route or a big promotion? It seems that over the last few months we’ve had a series of temporary mail carriers.

The lady that’s been delivering the mail the last couple of weeks is the worst. I hope she doesn’t turn out to be our permanent carrier! I think she’s afraid of our dog barking. Yes, even when the door is closed and there’s no way our dog can even see her or you know … get to her. Of course if our dog could make contact with the mail carrier it would only be to say hi and probably give her a lick since she’s the absolutely friendliest dog in the world. She just likes to bark when she hears someone at the door.

It doesn’t help that this woman who delivers the mail has big heavy mail bags on both sides of her body and she bangs into our screen door every time she enters our front porch.

Anyway I guess she’s afraid of the sound of a barking dog because she certainly never even sees our dog. So now, when she hears Midnight barking she just drops the mail and runs!

The mail doesn’t even get into our mailbox. It’s often left scattered all over our inner front porch and sometimes it doesn’t even make it to the inner front porch – sometimes it’s outside on the steps! That’s not good.

I’m picturing soggy, ruined mail in the winter if this keeps up.

Oh and yesterday I found not only our mail but our elderly neighbors mail in my rose bush! It was our neighbors social security disability check! Imagine if I hadn’t found that mail or if it had blown away? Then my neighbor wouldn’t have received the money she probably needs to make it through the month.

I think on Monday I’d better remember to call the Post Office and make a complaint about this letter carrier. I hate to do it, but this kind of poor mail delivery has been going on for weeks. It’s not right.

The new neighbors are busy pounding and painting

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Our new neighbors haven’t moved in yet but they’re sure making a lot of noise!

I guess we first saw them about two weeks ago or so and since that time they’ve been to their new house only four or five times. It seems like they’re cleaning up the interior of the house and doing some painting before they move in.

I still have no idea when they might move in or what the heck they are doing in the virtually empty house that makes so much noise. We keep hearing hammering and pounding noises from the basement. The odd thing is that unless we missed it they haven’t brought in any supplies other than a few items that could easily be carried by hand … so we don’t know what they are up to basement wise … maybe they’re getting ready to make the basement into a spare room or a rec room. Yet .. no drywall or anything else like that has come in. Odd.

They’re here this evening doing something. It seems they found the little storage area that our old neighbor had under the front porch. A friend or relative of theirs was busy pulling everything out of the small storage area and piled it on their front lawn.

He then drove by the house three times with a van – once attempting to back in to the driveway. Finally on his last round he drove into the driveway front first. I was getting a little worried about his driving if he had to drive around so much to aim the van at the driveway. LOL

He’s piling all the stuff that they found in the small storage area into the van. I guess they’re going to throw most of it out, Hmmm maybe I should hall out some of my old fitness equipment and ask him to take it away for me?

We’ve tried to talk to the new neighbors a few times when we’ve seen them. So far they seem to be friendly enough – but not overly friendly. My husband is very friendly and talkative … I wonder if that’s put them off a bit?

The last time we saw them we brought up the idea of sharing the driveway. As in they’d get to use it for a month and then we’d use it the next month and so on. The guy said “you guys don’t drive you car very much do you?” and we said “no .. it parked most of the time”, Then he suggested that we just pull our car up as far as we could into the driveway and that way we both could use the driveway.

Uh … the driveway is only 9 or 10 feet wide. I’m not even sure we could pull our car into the driveway between the two houses without losing at least one side mirror … let alone, how would we get out of the car once it was parked between the houses? And if we could get out of the car the lane way would be totally blocked. It would make it really hard to water the front lawn and garden as we’d have to throw the hose over the car – probably scratching the cars finish.

I guess he thought that since our car isn’t that big and we don’t use it all that much that his idea might work, but I don’t think he thought it through. As I said I if we could get the car in the driveway between the houses I don’t think we’d be able to get out of the car or if we could we’d only be able to open the car door a few inches … I imagine one of the doors would be all scraped after a while.

Oh well, I guess we’ll work something out with them at some point.

Do you share a driveway with your neighbors? If so, how do you work out who gets to use it and when?

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