The neighbors

I realized I've never really written about the excitment of our neighborhood. First, we live in the ghetto, which for our town isn't saying as much as, say, a big city like New York on Chicago. Still, it's the part of town that when you say the street name, you get the "oh, yeah" response from people who may be vaguely familiar with the town. So far we've given many nicknames to our neighbors. We'll start with the closest ones first.
We live next door to a young man with developmental delays who has 24-hour caregivers. He's a great kid, but some of the people who take care of him are interesting, to say the least. My current two favorites are catboy and thumper. Thumper is the easiest to describe. She's the night worker who takes her time backing into the driveway while the bass in her car rattles the windows, walls and floorboards of our house, thus her name . Catboy is definitely the more interesting of the two. Catboy is the nickname we gave to the rather hippy-ish guy who seems to be there all the time. He earned the name when he drove to "work" one day with a cat head mounted on the roof of his car. This cat head isn't fake, mind you, and has proceeded to decay for the past several months. It's freaky, very freaky! After the cat head, I don't think he really cared too much any more because then he added spray paint followed by random things glued on the hood and roof including but not limited to: bobble-head dolls, army men, action figures, plastic snakes, a plastic lion's head, pennies,a Jesus figure, a magnet that asked "If you died tonight where will you be going: Heaven or Hell?" and a cow/dog/goat skull. I know I'm forgetting some but it's an extensive list. The newest addition is some sort of Barbie doll bust, the kind little girls do hair and make-up on, over and over again. It's always interesting to see what "modifications" he's going to make each day.








Because there's no real way to describe his vehicle (other than pictures) I decided to take a few.
Plus, once we're in the new neighborhood and I complain about something ridiculously trivial, I'll remember these pictures. Looking at the picture on the right, you'll see the cat head--mouth open, eyes staring straight like a black cat on Halloween (or a cat about to be hit by a car)--notice that Homer and a gorilla are hanging with it, along with at least 7 cents.