One of things I never had in Boston, and always wanted, were awesome neighbors. My apartment on Woodstock Avenue in Brighton (where I was living when I met Peter) was a one-bedroom on the first floor of a multi-unit building, and there was afamily of FIVE living in the one-bedroom directly above me. And the kids played fucking cricket over my head all day and all night. Suffice to say that I hated them. The condo that Peter and I bought when we got engaged was also a one-bedroom, in the much-nicer Brookline zipcode, but we had these assholes living below us who would call the police on us when I vacumned. They lived in the basement, in a room that was never meant to be an apartment in the first place, and was not sound-proofed as such, and I know what it was like to live above noisy people (see cricket-playing children above) but they were ridiculous. At one point, I had to go to Brookline court to deal with these people (they were a psychotic brother and sister team) to defend myself against my noisy vacuming and the occasional dinner party we threw and random TV show I would watch or CD I would listen to. Finally, it all got to be too much and we bailed for a condo in South Boston. We were on the second floor of a triple-decker and the neighbors were nice enough but then I had Will and things changed overnight. It was suddenly not as charming to have to park 5 or 6 blocks away because there was no parking in front of the house. And the upstairs neighbor's fun gatherings were no longer okay, because if I had to listen to another random 20-something scream "I'm so drunk" of the balcony into the night air, I thought I would die. So we moved to Lockport. And we have awesome neighbors.
My next-door neighbor lady threw a surprise 50th birthday party for her husband on Saturday. I helped with the planning and ordered the invites and received the RSVP calls for her. There was a delicious catered dinner, a band, tents, a bounce-house and lots of fun.
There were about 10 little boys running around at one point, playing in the yards, chasing each other with sticks. And I did yell at them to stop. Here's Will and a friend checking out the sad state of the patio.
Once it got dark, Peter lit a bonfire in the stone fire pit in our backyard. We had a lot of tree limbs to burn from last week's storm.
And Will passed out in my arms, outside, at about 10:30pm. I carried him inside, woke him up enough to make him go pee, and snuggled with him in our bed.
It was a great party!
socializing