Diary of the Future... 11/29/06

I don't know what I'm going to do about Betty and John next door... especially Betty - she's on the civic association, and causes so many headaches for me - and Avani and every other "different" family in the neighborhood...

Take Sukkot... every year she complains to the association that my Sukkah in the backyard is too much of a distraction, and takes away from the peacefulness of the neighborhood... especially when we have guests over and spend time in it.... we're "too noisy" or detract from the "peaceful setting" of our area.... luckily a few folks on the association ask her to compare what we are doing to anyone else's backyard pool parties or barbeques.... she doesn't generally have an answer to that other than to say that the Sukkah is over the top compared to just a "regular" party....

A few years back, she confronted me directly about it, and asked if it was possible for me to build the Sukkah inside our house, so it wouldn't be such a distraction.... I responded that the holiday specifically instructs the Sukkah to be built in the out-of-doors, and that I would never ask her to remove her Christmas lights indoors to keep down the light pollution.... I don't think she's properly spoken to me since....

Well - John's been suddenly active at Marcus' school, spending the afternoons putting together an after school bible study group.... and one of the things he did is order student study bibles from some internet Christian group that developed this curriculum for the after school groups...

So - what's this got to do with Betty? Avani told me that Betty got the idea from the same website that she should order family bibles for everyone in the neighborhood and give them out as holiday gifts! Of course, Avani, Cori from down the street, and even Mrs Gardner were shocked to hear about the plan to use our public funds for such a purpose, and tried to discourage her... but Pat thought the idea was great... so they're going to talk about the costs and decide at a "sub-committee meeting"...

Avani said that Mrs Gardner threatened to go to the ACLU about it - but that Pat threatened to throw her off the board if she did it...

Besides the bible issue - we're still trying to figure out what to do about the "godly neighborhood ordinance" as we're now calling it. Folks in our group are trying to lobby to delay (or perhaps even kill, we hope) plans to institute ordinances that would "guide behavior" on Sundays... right now, I'm more focused on our civic associations actions as well - since they are going ahead with pushing their own version of these ordinances as neighborhood guidelines for homeowners.

It's overwhelming...