I got a summons yesterday that I have to appear before a judge over my grass again. We had gotten a notice to have it cut by June 21. We did get it cut by then. Of course, the inspector for the Community Development office came by almost a week later and determined that we didn’t. It’s odd that it took him a week after the deadline to determine our grass was overgrown, especially since the week before he sent a notice that we needed to clean off our porch. There were 2 dining room chairs on the porch (listed as “indoor furniture”), some pieces of wood (listed as “scrap”, I think), and a portable ramp (so when my mom has been in a wheelchair, she can get in the house), which was listed as an automobile ramp. It seems odd that he decided to wait that extra week to write the criminal complaint, especially when I know he’d come by before then.
My mom went to the hospital on the 26th of June. The guy came by to check the grass on the 27th. She said that the day she went to the hospital, the grass wasn’t even over 6 inches. That would mean that in a 24-hour time period, when I don’t think there was any major rainfall, the grass grew more than 2″, developed “wingy and downy” seeds, and became unsightly. That seems odd.
It also seems weird that we’ve gotten this message after 1.) having the lawn mowed and 2.) after my father had made a phone call to their office to question why we were being written up for things that had been on the porch for over a year and (with the ramp) were being used to help a disabled person get into her home. It seems like maybe this was there way of giving us a hard time over him protesting the ramp’s write-up. It also frustrates me that they do this to us every year. I don’t know of anyone else who gets reported for their tall grass, and other people do have tall grass (sometimes taller than ours) in this neighborhood.
When I went to court last year, even knowing that others in the neighborhood had grass that was high, I saw no one from our neighborhood that was in court over their yards. This whole thing is frustrating and pisses me off. I do not want to have to plea guilty to something I know that I am not guilty of. I also do not want to have to pay hundreds of dollars to the city, because I know that if I go to trial over it that they will still end up getting the money, because they don’t think our yard looks right.
Last night, Aidan and Stacey recommended that we have some middle school age kids cut the yard. We’ve tried that before. It’s too big for them. Hell, I’ve seen some full grown adults who couldn’t do it. I don’t think of it as being a big yard, but it is at least twice as big as any other yard in the neighborhood. It’s a corner lot, at the edge of the subdivision that it is in (next to a different one), and built before any other house in the neighborhood (and way before the other subdivision), so I think all of that factored into the yard being big. And technically, the yard is supposed to be a little bit bigger because our house was built past “too close to the road” on 2 sides and “too close to the property boundary” on 1. (It is inches away from the backyard’s boundary, too.)
The person that mows our lawn gets about $30 or $40 to do it. (Some people would charge & have charged more.) He owns a yard care company and also happens to be our next door neighbor. He’s really good about it, though I think one or two times he missed part of the grass in the backyard. And he’s understanding about our situation.
Unfortunately, the city is not so understanding. They don’t understand that $40 takes 10% of my disability or that the fine and court costs takes pretty much the whole disability check. They don’t get how this fining plus the lawn mowing charge end up cutting down on the amount of money that can go to groceries and medicine. Apparently, it isn’t rocket science (borrowing the judge from last year’s phrase to me) to get the yard mowed, but somehow it is rocket science to understand how a family living below the poverty line is negatively impacted by the amount that has to be paid to mow the lawn and appease the city when we go before the court. Either that or they just don’t care. It’s probably the latter.
I’m going to try to contact Legal Aid sometime this week or early next week to see if they can help me out. I guess I could also call CASA and see if they can add my house to their lawn care list, since they help the elderly and home-bound. (My mom has told me that she thinks that I would qualify under the home-bound category because I’m unable to leave the house for very long at a time because of my physical health.)
In other news, another person who has known me since I was a kid is getting huffy over a political disagreement. She posted this:
SICK AND TIRED of being told that I’m wrong ALL the time, whether that be my opinion or what I like or don’t like. This does not JUST include certain family members, its my opinion of things being sent across the “burning bridge”. Its MY opinion, I don’t ream you a new one when you express your’s so back off of mine!!
I didn’t ream her a new one over her opinion or what she likes or doesn’t like. I disagreed with her over the Casey Anthony trial. I stated this and about the only negative thing I said to her about it was that I found her opinion regarding it to be alarming. (She and some of her friends and family were advocating a position that I felt undermined the way the justice system was set up.) I also was accused in the post (about the trial) of telling her she couldn’t have an opinion, which I never said. Saying that her opinion is alarming and saying she doesn’t have a right to one is not the same thing.
In the post that she made, I was one of two people who had a differing opinion. That differing opinion earned me the “being brainwashed by Hollywood” and “sick” labels that I complained about last night on this tumblr post. I don’t see how saying that I thought her opinion was alarming was reaming her a new one. I don’t see how expressing my opinion infringed on hers. If anything, I felt like I was the one who was being told to keep quiet, which isn’t altogether shocking since many of the people are from my church. (People from my church have often encouraged me to shut up about any sort of opinion that I have.)
About the only time I said anything to her about her likes and dislikes was when she was going on and on about being an Alabama fan. I was surprised at the time because, when I was a kid, she was an Auburn fan. She claimed at the time that she had never really liked Auburn and was only rooting for them for a while because her husband (and his family) liked Auburn. That seemed odd because she had an Auburn decorative license plate on the front of her van for the longest time. Why would she have that if she wasn’t the fan? Anyway, after she told me that she was an Alabama fan and had always been one, which was her response to my question (1 post to her; 1 post back), the issue was dropped. That was it. I didn’t push it. I didn’t give her a hard time over it. That was all that was said, so this status that she posted is bugging me.
I know that it doesn’t name me specifically as being the person that she is talking about, but from what has gone on over the past few days, I don’t think that it is only my paranoia leading me to think that the post is about me. I think it is likely that she really is talking about me, which I don’t really understand. Is she really going to unfriend me because I disagreed about 1 opinion and about 1 like/dislike? The only opinion that I’ve ever felt the need to unfriend someone over is one where their opinion advocated hate or promoted some kind of ignorance or violent behavior, which I think is reasonable to unfriend someone over. Other than that, opinions aren’t generally involved in my termination of friendships. Feelings are generally what leads to them. And if this has hurt her feelings, then I’m sorry, but I don’t feel that I have said or done anything that would require an apology. If she thinks differently and is wanting to end a friendship that has been going on for 20 years, since my mom and her were practically best friends at that time, then she can do it. I just think that it is probably a mistake, and I would hope that at a later time she might regret the haste in which she made the decision.
I told my mother what was going on between the friend and me, and she started laughing. According to her, this is the kind of thing that happens when the friend gets upset. She said that when she gets upset, this particular friend begins to act like a spoiled little kid, which is what the whole thing sounds like. Even if it is normal for her, it is frustrating for me. I don’t like that she got coddled for being challenged on her opinion, but it was somehow okay for women twice my age to tell me that there was something mentally or morally deficient in me. I didn’t want the coddling, but I thought it was ridiculous that people have to soothe her ego when someone has a differing opinion. If a person can’t handle that other people have differing thoughts on an issue, then they shouldn’t post their opinions on the internet or talk about them to anyone. (I know some people are probably thinking something along the lines of “well, that’s the pot calling the kettle black” because of my history of tantrums on the internet.)
And in completely unrelated news, my legs are doing the same pain to cramping to weakness thing that my mom’s legs did. My mom told me that I need to eat more protein because my body may be malnourished and my muscles may be wasting away. She also said I needed to get some kind of physical therapy-related exercise for my legs, which I agree with. I don’t want what happened with her last week to happen to me. I don’t want to spend any time in the hospital or in the middle of the living room floor because my muscles have gone to shit. So, I need to get this stopped before it really gets started.
Oh, and oddly, since I made the post threatening to unfriend anyone who supports David Duke running for President, I have lost 6 friends on Facebook and 2 on Twitter, while gaining 3 on Tumblr. Of course, the loss of friends on Facebook might be related to my opinions on immigration, Casey Anthony, and anything else that I may have ranted about over the past few weeks. See, the friend should feel lucky that posting her opinions doesn’t continuously cost her actual friendships.
