Moral Dilema

Is it wrong to hate thy neighbor? Especially if he's actually a really nice guy who just happens to make you feel really lame? I was out hauling my crap to the curb for dump day (seriously, hang on for a description of "dump day") and I started talking to my neighbor, Dave. He was doing something to his Chevy Suburban, but it wasn't anything that looked familiar to me, i.e., hosing the bird crap off the hood or emptying the Diet Coke cans out of the bed. Turns out he was removing the gas tank to replace the fuel pump. Crappers. I'm about 85% sure I could find the gas tank on my truck and 100% freakin' sure that I would never be able to remove it/fix it/replace it. Ever. And there's about a 75% chance that I'd blow myself, and the adjacent 5 houses, up in the process.

Back to "dump day". Orangevale is really still a small town with a large population. Once (or twice) a year, the county sends trucks around to all the neighborhoods to pick up any crap that wouldn't normally go in the trash, like appliances, tree stumps, lawn mowers, etc. It's actually a great time. Everybody hauls their crap to the curb and then sits around waiting for the scavengers. You literally can't turn your back before somebody's scoping out your stuff and picking out the "good" things. This year, I had a stack of rotted, mildewed, cracked landscaping timbers piled out front. They were there when I left for work, gone when I came home. I can't even begin to imagine what somebody would want with those, but they went pretty quick. Not as fast as my living room lamps, though. I finished hauling the rest of my crap to the street after work today. I get into the house and look out the window to see my neighbor (William, not Dave) grabbing two table lamps from my crap pile. Sweet. I keep checking the pile to see what's left. At last count, somebody had taken the broken floor fan, broken lawn mower and rusted trash can. I think I'll assign a point value to everything next year and make a game out of it. Maybe Rachelle and I can create brackets like the NCAA's to see who picks the order everything gets scavenged in. Might make it a drinking game. It's a thought.