I'll huff, and I'll puff....and I'll blow your siding right off.

Brendan and I know that our house is not perfect. It leans a little. The back needs tuckpointing and painting. We probably need to continue our fence along the side, and put on a deck. Trim could use a coat of paint.

But, the house to the left of ours makes ours look practically perfect.

The house adjacent to ours has been abandoned for five years this February, and was boarded up by the Chicago police because of the activity there when we first moved in. It is so annoying to me that an abandoned building in a city neighborhood can just be left sitting there, rotting away before our very eyes, with no consequences.

And, apparently the developer is actually following the law. As long as he has someone cut down the weeds once a year, and he puts up a fence to keep people out (using our house as a brace of course) apparently he can keep it that way forever. Shouldn't there be a timeframe attached to it? Having an abandoned house 2-1/2 feet from mine for almost five years seems like a hazard. Maybe that's just me.

I don't care if the guy ever builds on it. I just want it torn down. But, here's the thing...the developer apparently can't tear it down because he needs to keep the building width intact until he is ready to start building so he can "grandfather in" the width of the house to city code. Only, he can't apparently start building because the plans he has for the house are too big for the land that he bought (because why bother measuring?) so he would need to get a zoning exemption. What a maroon.

So, the house has been sitting "empty" for over four and half years now...empty, except of course when it was filled with poop from the homeless people who were living in it. But, after contacting our alderman and getting basically nowhere, writing e-mails, making phone calls, trying to figure out what the heck can be done, being told basically nothing can be done...there's been some activity.

At first, when Brendan called me last Friday, his voice full of glee, I thought...maybe. Maybe this jackass developer was finally cashing in his chips. But, this morning, I find that not to be the case.

The men working on the house pulled up in a pickup truck, pried the chain-link fencing away with pliers and began bringing in plywood. Large sheets of plywood.

I ran into one of them in my backyard this morning, and he smiled and said, "No worry. We clean it all up."

What do you mean, you'll clean it all up?

Hmm....now I don't actually know what bringing plywood is going to do, and I'm no construction expert...but it didn't strike me as the first thing you do when tearing a house down. And then, as I drove away this morning, I noticed the stairs. They were re-built. The stairs in the front of the house that the Chicago police cut off and removed to keep the homeless people from breaking in and living in the building have been re-built.

This might seem like a good sign, but with the plywood and the stairs combo, it looks like they are going to "cute up" the house by nailing sheets of plywood all over it, and putting the stairs back.

Is that their long-term solution?

I've had it. First, we had homeless people in and out of there, and the place had an unbelievable stench that would leak out of it. Then, we put up with an infestation of black flies from the people pooping in buckets that apparently was causing the stench to begin with. Then, once the police boarded it up, we had people "camping" in the backyard and using our yard as a toilet, which also lead to me finding condoms, and cigarettes, beer bottles...and condoms. Yeah, I'll say that one twice.

We had styrofoam/insulation piled all over our yard that blew over when random people began climbing ladders along the the side of our house at night to "harvest" the house's aluminum siding. Strange people scaling ladders on the side of your house under dark of night is pretty creepy, and you can imagine how great a half-sided house without its siding that's been boarded up looks like.

Those actions, and the other neighbors' complaints about "campers," finally led to the developer fencing the yard in--by nailing boards into OUR house...which completely blocked our ability to access our garbage cans, and we were forced to go around our block to take out our trash...and then we've been staring at a disgusting wall of nastiness for four years.

But, then again, why would you spend money building stairs that no one is going to use? I don't get it. All I do get is that we now have the privilege of living next to a giant plywood house indefinitely.

Excellent.