Won't you be my neighbor?

The doorbell rings. I jump over a box, slip between two pieces of furniture, and past the toddling tot all while trying not to touch anything with my paint covered hands and ball of blue tape. The doorbell rings again. There's nobody at the front door which is the door one would expect to have visitors at. So I lean to peek out the window and spy my lovely neighbor lady at the back door. But buy the time I get the gate open and get to the backdoor, there's no one there. Heaving a sigh of relief I turn to step out of the doorway and she pops back into view. Shit.

She asks me to step outside and I tell her that it's too chilly and I'm in the middle of something and I have the baby in here. All of which seemed like common sense but alas, maybe my sense of sense is skewed. TinyP doesn't seem to agree with what I think is common sense either. Neighbor lady tells me she's just trying to help me and that I should put the downspout back up in my backyard. By this statement she has made it obvious that she knows I purposely took it down and thinks that I made the wrong choice. She tells me that it's dripping dripping by the side of the house.

I tell her that I took it down for the winter because I don't want it there when it freezes because that's bad for your gutters and your roof. When neighbor lady objected to this I told that I knew what I was doing and that I used to manage multi-million dollar properties and I'm not worried about it. She told me "Well so did the Germans", refering to the people who we purchased our home from. She either doesn't remember their names because she's old or she never bothered to learn them because she's racist and rude. I have long believed it's the second. Then she said "Well it sounds like you're a very smart girl." I said that I knew a lot because my dad builds houses and I have experience in a lot of things and can do a lot around the house. And my lovely neighbor said "Well it just sounds like you can teach us all a lot around here".

I've tried very hard to have patience with this woman and to just smile and nod and then do what I want anyways. She has asked me several times to unscrew the panel in front of the door that links our basements. She has tried treating me like an idiot and telling me what that door is for. She then asked in front of my dad and tried guilting me into it by saying I might save a life. She then knocked on my door and told me I had to do it because they had to have the fire escape there when the house was built. That was when I informed her that it was only required to have a second method of egress if you had a bedroom down there, which we do not, and that we were looking into the options for putting a bedroom down there and that we didn't want to do anything with it until we had explored that option. This was all bullshit but it got her off my back for that day at least.

I want to be a good neighbor. I shoveled the walk up to her front door the other day. I sweep off the walk when I mow the lawn so she doesn't have to shuffle through the grass and drag it into her house. I had Tiny bring her a plate of brownies once. I just want her to leave me alone. I take pride in my home and my ability to take care of it and she ruins it for me.

What's for dinner?: I'm baking a chocolate caramel candy thing today and dinner is pork chops in an onion celery brown sauce.