At Thanksgiving I made a pumpkin pie for one of the security officers at work. He and Nick work for the same agency, he’s super nice, and is Duke’s honorary uncle. His Thanksgiving dinner menu didn’t originally include pumpkin pie. He wasn’t happy about it, and it sounded like sacrilege to me, so I told him I’d make him a pie and he could pick it up on the way home from work. It’s not a big deal to make one more pie when you’re already doing lots of baking. And we live close to work, so it wasn’t a big deal for him to come get it. He came over to pick up his pie after work the day before Thanksgiving, so he was in uniform, and driving a work car.
Later on I started to wonder what the neighbors might think if they had seen him come by. The kids next door are the best neighborhood watch you can possibly imagine. Seriously, if anyone is ever tasked with investigating anyone or anything from our neighborhood, they need to talk to the kids next door to us. Because of that I was pretty sure they had seen. So when they came over on Thanksgiving I made sure to tell them that it had been a co-worker of ours picking up a pie. They had seen, and told their parents that the police were at our house. Fortunately, the kids thought it was pretty cool that we got a visit from a uniformed officer, and the family knows where we work, so they realized that it wasn’t for anything bad. I’m not sure what the neighbors we don’t know thought if they saw.
I’m also wondering about some of the people from the fire department Nick volunteers at. We live too far outside of the district for them to come here for any of the holidays, but it’s not uncommon for the department to go to someone’s house for a holiday meal, with the understanding that they may have to leave in a hurry. Now I kind of wonder what their neighbors think when the fire department shows up at their house every Thanksgiving or Christmas.
So what about you? Are there any goings on or visitors to your house that might make the neighbors wonder? Or are you re-evaluating anything you’ve seen going on at your neighbor’s house?
I do not watch the neighbourhood much but my husband does. He is curious and reports on the happenings anyway so I’d find out about visitors in the neighbourhod through him. I would hope it wasn’t a break-in since I would feel unsafe here. Neighbours here look after each other, without being best friends. If it was a matter which could be important to us, we would find out from the neighbours fir sure.
ReplyDeleteI got the neighbours talking big time when I was driven home in a police car once. They wondered what I'd done to be brought home by the police. What actually happened was my Dad's breaks failed while he was driving me home, and although he managed to stop his car without doing more than lightly touching the back of the car in front of us, the guy called the police. They dismissed the man's attempt to have my Dad arrested as soon as they saw he was completely sober and rational, and had seen the lack of damage to the guy and his car (Dad had a bit of a scratch on his where the front end had hit the other guy's tow hitch, but that's it) but obviously weren't about to let my Dad drive his car with breaks that didn't work, so they offered to give me a lift home so Dad could just get his car towed to his own home. I never did explain to the neighbours why I was riding in that policecar though...
ReplyDeleteHahaha! Well, let's see... before I got lazy and signed up for municipal composting, I used to have a revolving compost pit in the backyard. Basically, you bury the kitchen waste & other stuff in a hole, when it's full you move to a new hole, and after a year or two the full holes are completely composted and make great spots for gardening.
ReplyDeleteBut I tend to be a bit of a night owl, and there were times when I'd be up late cooking and realize that the kitchen compost bin was full and needed to be emptied. More than once I found myself in the backyard at midnight with a shovel burying the compost. I did wonder if the neighbors thought I was burying bodies or something! :-)
We are pretty boring, but I like to watch my neighbors and assume notorious goings on just to break the boredom.
ReplyDeleteI too used to make an extra pie for my neighbors back in the day. None with uniforms on though.
ReplyDeleteI say who cares?! In fact, it gives them something to talk about and maybe ask you about. The only time I thought of what the neighbors might think (actually, I was worried they would call the police) was when Rick was away and new tenants moved into the duplex he rents on the other side of his house. I was working with them on their keys and they locked themselves out without a key (which I didn't have either) at 10:30 at night. So we were trying to break in (and did successfully) -- three people with NO i.d. saying we lived there breaking a chain lock with a brick! Yes, I wondered a little about the neighbors then!
ReplyDeleteYou do realize that most people are so in their own heads and worried about their own worries that they rarely pay much attention to the goings on around them. I find that when I'm thinking I've done something someone might think odd, I look around and find no one was paying me any mind.
ReplyDeleteLOL this is funny, I am always noticing strange vehicles and odd things happening on my street. I report it to my hubby who is out of town and tell him it's Neighbourhood Watch.
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