Pissy neighbors, emotional mothers, and irritating reviewers

Here’s a few nuggest of news in the world that is me.

My mom’s cottage down in Pointe Du Chene needed to be demolished and rebuilt. Well, the reconstruction has begun and the foundation folks were down there. Now, the neighbors beside moms are brand new. This is the first year they have had the cottage. Well, as it turns out, the trucks used to bring in the blocks and cement didn’t know that we didn’t own that property and assumed that they could park anywhere on the lawn. This included what was our neighbors lawn. This of course pissed the neighbors off and set a fire within them to come after us for using what they claimed was their land.

The real issue was not so much them, but my mom’s unfortunate emotional uproar and the neighbors inability to articulate what he was talking about correctly. So, from mom’s perspective, the neighbors were going to deny her access to a driveway she has used for 20 years. This driveway is in fact her ONLY access to HER property. Whether it’s on their property or not, it still is her only means to the cottage so she was quite upset. Me and Tamara told her we would dig and find out what our rights are and what we needed to do and that WE would talk to the neighbors face to face.

We went down there today and talked to both her and him as it is a husband and wife. Mom had given us the impression that she was easy to deal with and he was the asshole. Turns out, it’s the complete opposite. She tried to claim that the trucks destroyed her grass and created giant ruts that were never there in the first place. Any idiot could take one look at the driveway and the grass and know that it’s been that way for a LONG time. It’s plain as day to anyone else but she started telling us that we weren’t listening to her and that the spot on her lawn where it was worn down was bright green previously and so on and so on. Completely and totally unreasonable. If it had been her we had to deal with, lawyers and other legal types would have come into the picture.

Thankfully, HE was much better. Turns out the real issue was the trucks parking on their lawn. He said he could care less if mom used the driveway and even said he’d work with us to make it work well. He was fine with the situation we had come up with and we shook hands, and all was well. Luckily, SHE said we would be dealing with HIM if anything came up. Thank God. It royally irritated to see this woman who only bought the place this year, try and tell me what the property looked like before when we’ve been there for 20 years. Uhm, excuse me? I’m not that f*cking stupid and I’m not paying to re-seed lawn that was already damaged. Even the foundation guys who were there laughed at her ridiculous accusations. Regardless, it’s settled and if anything else comes up, I’ll deal with the husband.

So the next thing that’s been a thorn in my side is that I submitted an event cache to Geocaching.com for my 2009 Moncton’s Race for Cache (check out the website here if you’re interested). Now last year, the reviewer refused to publish the listing because it was “an organized hunt” which apparently is against the listing rules. Fine. I created a post-race party which had a link to the race’s website and removed the “race” stuff from the official listing. This seemed to work very well. I decided that I would do the same thing this year to avoid the hassle.

However it got rejected again. This time he rejected it because he said that the listing was linked to a charitable event and that was not allowed unless I had previous permission from Groundspeak. The only “charity” portion of this event was that I wanted to have every racer bring one non-perishable food item that could be donated to a local food bank. That apparently is not allowed to be connected in any way with a geocache listing. The fact that they don’t want the listings associated with charities seems a bit weird but when you come to think of how they have handled other issues, I am positive it has to do with an overly paranoid CEO of the website who thinks that somehow it makes them liable. In a case like this, I would think that it would give cachers a good name knowing that they are doing an event with some sort of charitable benefit in mind. But, no go.

So, I have removed all of the food donation stuff from the event and I plan to simply request the food items through team emails and other communication. It’s really ridiculous when you come to think of it but whatever. I need the event published on their site so I have to follow these rules even if they don’t make much sense sometimes.

In other geocaching news, I am off to PEI this Sunday for a full day of caching with 3 other locals. It’s the longest day of the year and we’re going to hit the island at 7am. Ya, that means I leave the house around 5am. Originally it was 4am but I managed to convince them otherwise. Frig sakes. It’s still too damn early but it should be a pretty awesome day. Hoping to get pretty close to, if not break my 1000 find milestone. Here’s to hoping.