New House Blog: Episode XIII - The 'Hood

Welcome to Episode XIII - The 'Hood.  Those of you who are up-to-date on today's slang will immediately recognize that we will be discussing our neighborhood today.  Those of you who are not up-to-date on today's slang might not realize that 'hood = neighborhood.  We, like so many city dwellers, live in a neighborhood.  We have neighbors, but we don't actually know if any of them are hoods (hoods = hoodlums in this case), or if any of them wear hoods (hoods = hoods here).  And while we have not actually moved in yet, and we have only met about three of our neighbors in-person, we have started to get a feel for the 'hood (hood = you figure it out this time).

One of our neighbors is Michelle.  She live a few houses away and she sometimes walks her dog past our house.  One of our next-door neighbors is Peter.  He and his family have a pool, and we have been invited over to a barbeque already (we had to decline due to our busy schedule).  One of our neighbors down the street has surrounded his house with a fancy gold and white metal fence with a large gate in front of the driveway.  Often parked in said driveway is a heavy-duty tow truck (yellow).  We refer to another house down the street as the house of the blue cars: there are three vehicles (two cars and one pickup truck) parked there that are all a very similar (possibly equal) shade of blue.  Someone in the 'hood owns a brownish trailer - the kind of trailer that looks like someone hacked off the back end of a pickup and attached a trailer hitch - that was parked in front of our house in a very inconvenient spot for a couple of weeks.  The people we talked to don't seem to know who owns it, but it has apparently been in the area for a long time.  It finally moved after we called the city's vehicle abatement department, and it now seems to move to different parking spots from time to time.

Then there are the unknown neighbors who parked on top of our yard waste pile several days in a row.  In San Jose, with certain exceptions, such as mobile home parks and apartment complexes, there is a yard waste pickup program, in which residents can put out yard waste - lawn trimmings, branches, leaves, basically organic yard waste - out by the curb on the street on garbage day and the city will pick it up.  That's right, we can just make a pile of yard waste right on the street.  We think that it all goes somewhere to be composted, but we're not really sure what the city does with it.  We hope it's not just going into the landfill.  Our first pile of yard waste was pretty big and it got picked up with no issues.  The next week, however, we ran into some difficulties.  When we showed up to our house that evening we discovered that our pile was still there, and it was a bit spread out.  We also noticed tire tracks on some of our pile, which led us to believe that someone had actually parked on top of it, which prevented the city from being able to remove it.  It's true that this pile was not a big as the first pile the previous week, but still we have to wonder who would want to park a vehicle, with a hot exhaust pipe, on top of a pile of potentially flammable branches, leaves, and oranges (okay, the oranges may not be quite so flammable)?  We thought that piling on more branches would help, but no, someone parked on top of it again.  When that car was gone we piled on a bit more (our back yard has a lot of potential for yard waste piles) and someone in a Toyota Forerunner parked on top of it anyway!  One more addition of branches was enough to prevent any further mal-parkage.  What other surprises will the neighborhood (neighborhood = 'hood) reveal as time goes by?

We don't have any pictures of the neighbors above, but we do have some pictures of a couple of locals who are pretty close to where we live.  The first is Biscuit, the bear.  He lives at a nearby restaurant.

The backside of Biscuit the bear

Another local is the Big Crow.  We don't know his name, but this colorful character can be seen at a local intersection advertising auto insurance.

The Big Crow

He looks happy.

Housework

There is only one item of actual housework in this Episode, but it has several pictures associated with it.  We replaced the dryer exhaust hose.  While this may not seem like a big deal, it turned out to be a bit involved.  You see, the place that is now the laundry room used to be outside the house.  The big room and laundry room were added on sometime after the house was built.  We believe that the washer and dryer used to live in the garage, and their move inside made the exhaust hose longer and more complex that it was originally.  The old hose was white plastic, stretched across the floor and held together with duct tape.  When we removed it we discovered that it was quite full of lint and dust.  The vent cap on the outside was so deteriorated that we covered up the hole with our own duct tape.  We also had to relocate the hole leading from the laundry room to the exhaust hose.  Our new dryer exhaust hose is a thing of functionality.  Some might even call it beautiful.  It is all metal, and all joints are sealed with metal tape.  We also replaced the outside vent cap with a louvered unit (to keep the small critters out) and a protective cage (to keep the larger critters out).  On to the pictures!

Hose section 1.  Notice the duct tape.

Hose section 2. Notice the nice step that was built over the hose.

The old vent cap with new duct tape

The new vent cap with cage

The relocated hole.  Can you find where the original hole was?

The new, all metal dryer exhaust hose

That wraps it up for this exciting Episode.  We'll have more stuff to say soon.

Out with the old, in with the

   bIsh