Thank you for my drunk neighbor....

Let me tell you how my Friday night went last week. And let me link it up to one of my favorite girl MiMi's Friday feature of things that make you go "bleep" !

So my kids are asleep, my husband's at work, and it's pretty near right smack in the middle of the night. I hear a loud thump from the outside. Being alone nights has bothered me over the years, and I've had to learn to ignore most every little bump and thump I hear in the neighborhood, in order to hold onto my sanity. I was conscious of the noise, but quickly filed it away under "some idiot went too fast through the stop sign and bottomed out in the dip." Happens a lot.

By this time I have ditched the clothes (clothes are so annoying!) and am in my favorite purple fluffy robe. I decide to snuggle up on the couch and watch a movie. Fools Rush In - it's a gem! ANYWAY...a few minutes into my show I get a call from Hubby. Here's how it went:

Hubby: Hey, just got a call from Mike (we'll introduce him later on in the story).

Me: Oh, did he call because I texted him? (turns out one of Cowgirl's friend's mothers used to date Mike and I texted him cuz I thought it was funny).

Hubby: Nope...wait, why did you text him?

Brief explanation of the girlfriend/mother coincidence.

Hubby: Someone just hit our trailer and took off. Mike called the cops, they'll probably be wanting to talk to you...you should get your clothes back on.

Cuss Words! I'm gonna have to interrupt my movie, get my clothes on, and try to make my living room look half-way presentable, in the 3 or 4 minutes it will take for the police to arrive.

Mike is our across the street neighbor. He is a 33 year old bachelor that is part party boy, with a family man hidden inside who was never really taught any responsibility, but has grown remarkably over the years since we've moved into this neighborhood. He's a good guy, but without necessarily the highest moral standards when it comes to women and booze, ya know? But I've loved having him across the street, partying and all. You see, I know when he's out in his front yard in the summer, smokin' and drinkin' with his buddies all night, no one's gonna mess with my house, while I'm home alone with the kids. And although he doesn't practice our faith (YET!), he is very respectful of the things that might offend us. He tries hard to use clean language around us, and even took down the girlie posters in his garage that were in plain sight to my kids since he has his garage open roughly 98% of the time between March and September. We just love Mike.

Our neighborhood is located directly across a 6 lane highway from a huge shopping/ restaurant/movie theatre complex. The county decided that the skywalk that crosses the highway should have an opening into our neighborhood so that kids walking to school could cut through our neighborhood to get to the elementary school instead of using the sidewalk that's next to the busier road. This has been a nightmare for us. We have a pretty good neighborhood community. But there is an element of people that cut through our neighborhood from the shopping plaza that have no respect whatsoever. And these kids/young adults think it's hilarious to throw garbage into our yards, kick off our sprinkler heads, pull the tops off our flowers...you get the idea. Another common occurence is people stealing shopping carts from the stores, then ditching them in people's yards. This was the root of Friday's events.

According to the "eye witness" (Mike) there were some kids in a car driving through the neighborhood, hanging out the window and dragging a shopping cart alongside their car. Apparently they thought it would be awesome to speed past our house and ram the cart into our brand new cargo trailer (seriously less than 2 months old). The speed caused the cart to totally smash the driver side fender into the wheel. Then they sped off.

Lucky for me I have a neighbor that was up drinkin with his buddy, who saw out the window and came roaring out of his house and chased them down! Mike's a "tough guy" like that. He got in their face, and took their license plate info, and called the cops.

I got to spend the wee hours of the morning talking to the police and freezing my butt off outside while they took all our insurance info. It was 3 a.m. by the time we turned in for the night. But at least I got to be entertained by Mike, who was bragging about how he was about to pound the guys and had to be talked down by his buddy. He informed me of how lucky I am to have a neighbor who stays up drinking, and then he proceeded to ask the officer if he had a breathalizer in his car, because he wanted to try it out and see how drunk he was! That Mike is a character...

I guess I'm thankful for my drunk neighbor!