There Goes The Neighbourhood...

My husband and I recently moved to a new house. It's in a great location for my husband's job, I'm near my family, and it's further away from a convenience store that sells chocolate than our last home was. Doesn't sound like much of a plus, but I've lost ten pounds. Win.

The one issue was our next door neighbour. Now, she seems nice enough, if a bit nosy. She's the kind of person that knows everyone else's business, and that in itself doesn't bother me. It's the decline of close knit neighbourhood's that has lead to a lot of social problems after all, such as increased crime and depression. However, she seems to take an inordinate amount of interest in our household waste.

Every time I go outside the house when she's there, she reminds me that the council will collect my bin on a certain date. I've explained to her that I don't find the council good, and, as in Ireland you have to pay every time your bin is lifted anyway, I've decided to go to with a private company. Despite this, she sent her son around to remind us about the bin situation a couple of weeks ago. I politely explained our arrangement again. During the week I saw her lifting the lids of our bins to look at what was inside them. How strange is that?

Last night, she called around to make her case at 10.50 pm. Who does that? I'm sorry, if you're calling unannounced to my house at almost eleven, then it needs to be urgent. You need to have seen someone vandalising our car, need help in some immediate way, or be a card carrying member of  An Garda Síochána (the Irish Police Force). Our refuse is collected, it's not piling up on the pavement posing a health risk to the neighbourhood, so what's the problem?


It would seem that by not conforming to the bin collection system of the community, that we are bringing down the neighbourhood. Which is quite ironic coming from people who have a Third Reich-esque eagle on top of their property and hang the Irish tricolour. In other countries, I know it is perfectly normal to hang a flag from your property, in Ireland it is connected with strong nationalist political views and sympathy with the IRA. Now, I'm not saying for one minute that my neighbourfolk hold any of these extreme political ideas, but that their questionable taste in house adornments doesn't exactly reflect well on the rest of us. People in glass houses and all that.  

Check-In-Tuesday: Always Money In The Strawberry Stand

I'm back from holiday! It was lovely, I needed a break and I definitely got it. I wouldn't say I did no writing, I scribbled down some thoughts as they came to me and thought about my plans for certain story lines, but that was the height of it.

I had planned to bring my netbook with me but, me being me, I left it at home. I thought it was in the car, but it wasn't in the car when I arrived at the holiday house. I had a mini panic attack, when I went to the Freakerton city limits and worried that I may have left it in my driveway where it would get stolen by my friendly yet opportunistic neighbour boys. I once lost my iPhone in the snow, me and electronics do not have the best relationship. However, when I got home I found the bag was in the kitchen, so all was well. I'm now behind in finishing a crit of my friend's MS and was unable to send my MS to my crit group, but I'll catch up.

So, now that I'm back and refreshed I'll do my round-up.

Words written: 3,000 (all on Monday, I didn't write for the week I was on holiday).

Rejections: 3 (Still not too upset. For the moment anyway. I'm sure I'll start wringing my hands and wailing any time now)

Agent requests: 1 partial request. Yay!

Current favourite book: I read lots of books on holiday, but Divergent stood out for me. It's nice when a book lives up to the hype (As factions go I think I'm Amity or Erudite. Whatever else, I'm not Dauntless. I'm afraid of my own shadow, banjos, wrists and my friendly yet opportunistic neighbour boys).

High point of the week: Wexford is the strawberry capital of Ireland. Well, at the very least it grows a lot of them and there's lots of stand along the roads where you can pull in and buy some. My husband and I recently discovered the joys of Arrested Development, so imagine our delight when we found a stand shaped like a strawberry! It's not a banana stand (there's always money in the banana stand, after all) but it's fairly cool nonetheless.

Low point of the week: Thinking that I'd lost my netbook. Panic was not helped by the fact I couldn't remember if I'd backed-up my work.

How about everyone else? How is your writing going?