Suburban drama

Well, I wrote a long post, but who has time to read about some stupid suburband kid nuisance. Upshot: Ignatz and (names changed to protect the guilty) his friend Tommy (age 10), Tommy's little brother and the boy next door (Dil and Chuckie, both 4) threw plums at the row of houses across the footpath. Chuckie told on the others while leaving his own part of the story out. I hope it's because he's four, and he'll grow some honor later.

We glared at Ignatz until he gave us the story, which is that he and Tommy found Dil and Chuckie throwing the plums and decided to join in. "You take behavior cues from four-year-olds?" I said. We went to tell Tommy and Dil's parents about it, and Mrs Pickles immediately sidled up to me and says, "did anyone see them? Maybe the people who own the houses don't know yet. We can say it was some other kids." Jeeeez. Mr Pickles made reference to the kinds of things we did at that age, and DrBob pointed out that when we did, the 'rents walloped us, didn't they?

So the big kids had to help clean it up the next day, and Dil's got no computer time for a week (because we can't have him scampering around on a ladder). While they were cleaning, Mrs Pickles was going door-to-door giving everyone her "I can't watch them every minute" speech. JEEEEeeeez. We sent Ignatz over to help, but since they didn't tell us when they were going to do it, he came in at the end and got off pretty lightly. Lesson learned? I hope so, but I doubt it. Also, the soap and the scrubbing and the steam-blaster-thingy um... didn't do the job, not really. There are still blotches on the houses. There are still three sets of parents who now have some serious social ammo, should I ever try to cross them in any way.

There is a possibility that the house we buy will be the one we live in now - in some ways, it would be the sensible choice. But at the moment, I'm not too keen on staying in this neighborhood.

Song du jour of the day: Alphaville. Forever Young.