I've always lived in the same house, all my life. It's got three separate apartments. When I was very small, my parents and I lived in the basement apartment, my great-grandmother, who owned the house, lived in one of the upstairs apartments, and her daughter, my grandmother, lived in the other. My great-grandmother always babysat all of her great-grandchildren all the time so I grew up living with my cousins all the time. It was awesome.
Our house is on the corner, on a double lot. We've got a decent backyard by our neighborhood's standards. Next door to us lived a pair of old people, the Millers. Mr. and Mrs. Miller were old as hell. They had one daughter, I don't remember her name, and a giant pile of grandchildren. The Millers' house was on a triple lot and they had an awesome backyard just adjacent to ours, with a lot of awesome trees, where my cousins and I would play with their grandchildren. It was totally awesome.
Then Mrs. Miller got old and died.
There's another long substory about how my grandmother and my great-grandmother died, but they're irrelevant. In short, my grandmother's brain developed a supersaturation of gin and was shipped off to a nursing home, and my family moved into her apartment, (grandma died somewhere thereafter) then my great-grandmother got sick and died and after a lot of infighting and drama, my parents bought everyone else's share of the house. They fixed up the second upstairs apartment and now it's rented out. I've now got the basement apartment. Woo.
Mr. Miller had always been crazy, but after his wife died he got crazier. Not dangerous-crazy, just silly-crazy where he'd tell you about the spacewomen that he saw conspiring in the street, that kind of thing.
I guess the Millers' daughter decided that Mr. Miller was too crazy to live by himself, so he got shipped off to a nursing home, and their house was sold.
Anyway, everything's been downhill since everyone started dying. A couple of yuppies moved in to the Millers' house, they were reasonably okay people at first and they had a beautiful dog.
Then they had all the trees cut down and I wished death upon them. There were so many trees in their yard, and they were such beautiful, old trees, they were healthy, happy trees and they were not an impediment to playing with the dog in the yard, they were beautiful. After they cut down all the trees I hated them and I didn't bring my dog over to play with their dog anymore.
Then the stupid tree-removing yuppies decided to move to Las Vegas, after they cut down the trees. So they moved to Las Vegas and sold the house and I hate them.
We couldn't tell for a while who had bought the house - the for sale sign was gone but the house was empty. Wondered for a while, never saw anyone over there.
'Til one day in the mail there was a notice that the owner of the property in question was seeking a zoning variance to knock down the old house, divide the lot into two lot-and-a-half pieces, and build two new houses. I'm not sure why this needed a variance, but it did. Several of our neighbors went to the hearing and in the end he was denied that variance. So he tried to get another one - now he wanted to leave the house that's there, and build a new house on each side of it for a total of three houses. At that hearing, I guess they decided that he couldn't build two new houses, but he could build one new house on our side.
Also may I note that this assbag lives in basically the wealthiest part of Cranston, and he does not now and never has had plans to live in this neighborhood. It's just money to him.
My father came back from the hearing with copies of their plans. He'd protested because, not only is that density inappropriate in our neighborhood, the proposed house is going to stand four feet from the property line, and their driveway is going to butt right up against our property, which means that when they excavate for it, there's no way for them to avoid wacking up our front garden. But the assbag got the variance. And we knew it was coming, but we didn't know when, and sure enough this week they've started digging the foundation.
I am going to cause trouble on that construction site. I'm not sure precisely what I'm going to do, nothing too terrible, but I'm open to suggestions.