Nebulous Mooch

The weed situation in our driveway is completely out of control. Seeing it everyday brings me such shame. The other day I got a ride home from church and I wanted to ask them to drop me off a few houses away from my house so they wouldn’t see me walk up my weed infested driveway.

Imagine me walking up it with my head down in shame. To make matters worse our neighbors’ parents have been out in their driveway for two days now weeding and mulching and planting. If I were my father I’d say something like, “When you’re finished there you can come over and take care of mine.” Then I’d laugh a big hearty laugh, but I’m not my father. Instead, I say nothing as I walk embarrassed to the door. I wish my parents would come weed my driveway, but that would be an expensive trip and I could only afford to offer them a free meal in exchange for their labor. Normally if they come to my house I make them pay for their food.

I could weed the driveway. I’ve tried but there are just too many weeds. England is way too lush. The weeds just keep growing and growing. What do they think this is fertile soil with a few random stones scattered about or something?

I don’t want to buy weed killer because it seems dangerous to me. Our upstairs neighbors’ young children are in our driveway sometimes and lots of dogs come sniffing around our driveway daily. My natural weed killing attempts last year left me filling annoyed and frustrated. My husbands thinks we should just buy a weed wacker. I guess that’s an idea.

Until we buy that weed wacker, we’ll just have to be the Sanford and Son of the neighborhood.  I know they had a junkyard and not a weedy driveway, but every time I look outside the living room window the Sanford and Son theme song goes through my head.

We have these hideous green curtains in our living room. They came with the flat and despite having renewed the lease yet again, I like pretending I’m not going to be staying in this flat for long so I never changed them. Anyway, when you pull them back there’s a piece of fabric to hook around them. I guess it’s just decorative because the curtains don’t really need any help staying pulled back. Honestly, the fabric that “holds them back” is too ugly to be decorative.

I’m telling you all of this because my husband opened the curtains the other day and this is his attempt at dealing with the dingy decorative piece of  fabric that holds the curtains back.

I have to give him credit for trying. He could’ve just left it hanging to the side of the curtain like I often do, but he neatly pulled it across the curtain and rested it on the window sill. I was watching when he did this. When I started laughing and taking pictures he accused me of being mean.

Today we renewed our lease. That wouldn’t be a big deal if our lease was through a company other than Coopers Estate Agents. When I think of real estate agents, I usually think of someone a bit older. That’s been my experience in the States. They’re usually retired people who figured out they don’t have enough money to retire, but here it seem like most estate agents are just out of high school. They’re like glorified  gophers or something.

Anyway, the gophers estate agents at Coopers don’t seem to know what they’re doing, or at least one particular agent doesn’t. Last time we had to renew, we went down to sign the lease and they had completely messed up. They had to fix it and that took a few days. By the time it was all fixed it was overdue for us to sign and the landlord was mad. They, of course, tried to blame the fiasco on us–the sleazy tenants.

This time, I wanted to make sure none of that happened again.  After I sent them the renewal letter, I called them on the first of the month to remind them that my renewal was coming up on the 11th. I was told that they would call me when the contract was ready so we could come down and sign it.

At the beginning of this week, I decided to call them to see what was happening.  I spoke to Steve on the phone. He said that the contract still wasn’t ready, but he would call me personally as soon as it was. Time passed. No call.

Me: Why hasn’t Coopers called me back yet?

My Husband: What do you expect? They’re all a bunch of teenagers over there.

Me: They’re not teenagers. They’re in their twenties.

My Husband: Close enough.

Today, I decided to call again just to check up on them. I talked to Steve, again.

Me: Hi. This is (insert name) at (insert address). I was just calling to see if my lease is ready yet.

Steve: Oh that’s been ready. We’ve been waiting for you to sign it.

Me: (shocked) Okay, I’ll be there today.

They’ve been waiting for me? I’ve been waiting for my personal call from Steve.

So we went to the office and Steve was there–he’s always there–talking to a customer. That’s fine. I have no problem with waiting, but we waited and waited and waited. He never once even acknowledged that we were there. Then a woman finally came out of the back office and asked if we needed help. We told her who we were and why we were there. She then takes our lease off Steve’s desk and hands it to use to sign and initial. Steve knows who we are. He’s seen us many times. If he had the lease sitting right in front of him why not take a minute, excuse himself from his customer and just hand us the lease. All he had to do was hand it to us so we could sign it. That’s all. We didn’t have to sit there for a half hour listening to him gossip and suck up.

Steve, Steve, Steve. When will you ever get your act together?