Slow adults crossing

Our parking lot has long been an issue for my husband. We live in the back of a condo complex and people generally drive pretty quickly through there, which he generally finds to be dangerous and irresponsible. (Side note – I think he would honestly like to do an open forum driving class for the entire state of Virginia – or at least Northern Virginia and DC area.) This is part of his inherent natural “old man”-ness as he tended to yell at people to slow down in the street where he lived previously too.

This tendency to yell at the cars does on occasion tick off some of our … less patient neighbors. My favorite story about this is from a year or two ago. We’d gone to visit my Mom on the weekend and had come back with tons more of my old crap and things she didn’t want anymore as always (my Mom is in a perpetual state of readying her house to sell it. Really. It’s been years. My parents started spending the winter in FL in 2001 and were thinking they needed to sell their house in NJ but wanted to spend one season there first to decide what smaller thing should they buy to replace it based on how much time they wanted to spend in NJ long term (what their split for the year was). But then my Dad got sick that winter and all plans were scrapped. He passed away in the spring of 2003 and by the next year she decided she needed to prepare the house to sell. But she’s lived there more than 40 years now. So she’s been cleaning it and getting it ready to sell for about 5 years. She might be about halfway there now… Anyway, the point is, I will periodically get things from her that she’s decided to clean out.). On this particular trip, my Mom had decided to ask my husband to look at my Dad’s workbench and tools to see what could be kept, what should just be thrown out, etc. Now my husband has long made the argument that my brother should get first dibs on my Dad’s tools. Now before you agree whole heartedly with him, you have to know that my brother might not be able to tell you the difference between a Phillips head and a flat head screwdriver. I was the one who helped my Dad on projects. (That said – now that we try to do “real” projects as my husband is skilled, I realize that I know nothing because my Dad didn’t really do any “real” projects.) So I can see the argument that the tools should follow the family line – even over an in-law – but I think I have at least as much claim to them as my brother. But my husband will still generally only take things of which there are spares (and, truth be told, he generally already has most of what my Dad had because it was pretty basic.). He made an exception on the machete though – he thought it was pretty cool and didn’t have one. It’s missing a screw in the handle, but that’s easy enough to fix. I pointed out to my Mom that she should really let us have this, as my brother would most definitely take his arm off with it and she agreed. So, being organized as we always are, the machete was still in the car a few days later.

Anyway, it’s a few days later and my husband yells at one of the neighbors who is driving too fast through the parking lot (with a blind hill ahead of the cul-de-sac where kids play) and this apparently ticked the guy off. He parks and gets out of his car to come talk to my husband, who is oblivious to this action as he’s pulling his stuff out of the car. His back is still turned as he pulls the machete out to take a look at it. He’s holding it up to check the handle about when the other guy gets to him. That guy takes one look at the machete, stops dead in his tracks and decides he doesn’t need to argue parking lot speed with the crazy man! (It wasn’t even till that point that my husband noticed the guy was coming to talk to him.)

Alright, so history established. Today’s story… My husband was just headed out to the car with the baby, the dog, and the 34 bags of stuff needed to move those two entities anywhere… Someone else was walking their 2 dogs, one of which was off leash and running around (one of those hot dog dogs) when someone comes flying through the parking lot again. As always, my husband yelled at the guy to slow down. He stopped to ask – what? Rather than just say “slow down” again, our protagonist says – “Slow down! You just hit that dog!” The driver responds with – “Oh my God, no!” To which my husband says – no, you’re right, you didn’t. But you could have. You need to drive slower. The other dog owner gives him a look that says – wow - you are truly evil. … I think she might have a point…