Neighbor Threatening My Life Over Cats?

Let me just preface this by saying: THIS is one of the reasons I would LOVE to be OUT of this neighborhood!

The extra-large "man" living 2 houses down that spent 9 years in prison for selling drugs has now threatened my life, apparently.

I wasn't home when this happened, earlier today.

Mark (trailer tenant) was out talking with my next door neighbor - the one that just had his house burn down - when this idiot comes barging out of his house, beelining across my neighbor's yard to get to Mark.  I wasn't there, so I'm just giving the story as I heard it.  This guy starts in on Mark:  You should leave the property now and all the other tenants should leave, too.

Why?  Because "if another cat that I care for or like disappears, I am going to call my friends that are out of prison and they will come over and take care of him" - referring to me.  So, it's worth killing or mauling a person because of ferral, stray cats?  Lol.  You probably can't tell, but I am not shaking in my boots.  The man HAS no friends.  The ONLY person I have ever seen go over to his house is his mother.

His mother is paying his way through what you would call his life.  He doesn't work, he doesn't do anything.  He sits around all day long, snooping.  He is bored, I am sure, looking for and starting trouble is in his DNA. I have already had a couple of encounters with this idiot, but nothing with this kind of stated intention.  I do not, however, believe him.  He is the of the bully nature.  I have seen this over and over again since he appeared seemingly out of nowhere, a new house was placed on that property and he started "living" in it.  He wants people to fear him.  Unfortunately for him, I have absolutely no fear, whatsoever, of this moron and further, I intend on pursing a course of action - all legal, yes - against him that will put a stop to this nonsense, at least coming towards me.

He is directing his bullying energies towards the wrong person.  I don't care what else I have going on in my life, I will go out of my way to make sure that legal misery comes his way if he continues to pursue this course of action.  A restraining order is the first thought that comes to my mind.

Anyway, Mark wasn't falling for this guy's BS, either.  "If a cat comes onto my property, it doesn't belong there.  If it is shitting and pissing all over the place and destroying property while it's at it....."  on and on.

It never ceases to amaze me the crap that goes on in this neighborhood.  If these people think I am going to sit around while their cats SHIT on my plants and destroy them, they have another thing coming.  I don't give a rat's ASS about their free-roaming cats that go destroying other people's property, whose owners don't give a damn, one way or the other.  I KNOW this because I have spoken with my next door neighbor about his cats - the guy whose house burned down.

He's living in a motorhome on the property.  His 2 cats are with him.  They come over to my front yard and crap and piss on my flowering, ground covering plants.  A huge portion of those plants have been trampled and are dead.  He joked about it 2 days ago: they're givers! They leave you a present when they visit!  He was laughing, I was NOT.  He then said something about my dogs - which is when I stated in somewhat harsh tones that "My dogs do not come over to your property and SHIT all over it".  Maybe I should start taking bags of dog crap over there and dumping it in his pile of dirt and see how HE likes it.

Yes, the cats are the core issue here, or are they?  No, in the case of the idiot.  His issues go far beyond cats.
I have modus operandi to get him into trouble if I have to.  Not just restraining orders.  This guy has a short fuse, it doesn't take much to get him going.

I don't know, but after I got over my initial anger - the thoughts that came into my head of what to do with a person that is threatening me I won't print here or speak anywhere, frankly - and yes I just stayed in the house until calm, cool and collected returned - I came up with a plan.  Of course, I have to wonder where this guy got his information from, because as far as catching cats goes, I haven't spoken it to anyone outside of my house.

This guy is also starting trouble with the people across the street.  The guy across the street comes home, sometimes, in a city vehicle, doing whatever he's doing.  So, this idiot says he shouldn't be doing that and that he is going to get him into trouble.  Actually, his stupidity is going across the neighborhood, but, now that he has threatened both me and potentially my tenants, he has flipped the switch and now?  I don't wish him good luck, I wish him good riddance as I am going to do everything in my power that is legal to either get him to leave the area or to shut the freak up, stay in his house and keep his junk to himself.

Thursday 3/31/2011

Thursday

I received something in the mail yesterday from Sierra Vista, where my dad lives. I opened it up and found a newspaper clipping with a picture of my dad in it. I about died: I thought it was an obituary! What did I miss?!! I started reading it and it quickly became evident that it was a write-up about him, what he has done in that community and the fact that he is moving out of that community to go live in an assisted living center in Tucson - a pretty good drive away from there. 

It was a great article and a fitting farewell to a man that has poured out his life in terms of ministry to all kinds of people, from the homeless to the rich and wealthy and everything in between. It was cool to read this article, it was pretty long and it covered a lot of ground. I finally got an email back from him this morning: he is in the middle of moving and it is pretty much consuming him and his time. 

My buddy Fin wrote an interesting comment to my last blog entry and it got me to thinking about this situation: whether to keep the house or short-sale it (or any of the other options available). What hit me is that I should get a big piece of paper, 11X15 anyway, write down pro's to moving on one side and con's on the other and start jotting it all down. In my mind, there is SO much to sort through in making such a decision. Writing it down in such fashion might help me to get a clearer picture of all of it. 

Taxes. Moving right along with that portion of it. I have house fire totals listed with my version of that fair market value is of each item, the contents of the house that is. I am going to print out pics of the burned out structure, proof that yes, my house burned down along with the fire report. It's more than just that, though, the pics will verify that the house was a total loss. Not just a small fire, it was a BAD fire that caused the destruction by one of 3 methods: the fire itself; the intense heat that spread throughout the house and the extreme smoke damage that finished everything off. 

I was thinking yesterday, though, what it would be like to still be in that house. Old, yes. Cheap - operative word. The mortgage payment was only $450 per month. No need for tenants and all that kind of aggravation. By now, I would have had the interior finished with a complete renovation, I had it about half done at the point of the fire. 

Not crying over spilt milk, I was musing things. Now I have tenants to make up the difference. I do think that to make the quality of my life a bit better, I need to focuse on keeping good tenants and getting rid of the bad. To that end, the kid needs to go. I believe he needs to have one of those rude awakenings in life: go live with kids his own age and find out how they deal with his junk. In his mind, I'm sure he has already HAD a rude awakening - such as when he was yelling at me on the phone and I spit it back right into his face. But there's the rest of it, not worth going into here, just to say that it's more than I want to deal with. 

Which reminds me, that old computer's monitor is kaput. Need to find a good used one somewhere. Lynnette uses it to try and find a job, plus doing surveys that actually do pay money to do them. I don't use it anymore, at all. It's an old behometh to me, but to everyone else that uses it, well, it's better than nothing.

Musing for today: over, work day is here.

G'day.

ben

Wednesday 3/30/2011

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Wednesday

Where does it end? I read and read and read all kinds of "expert" opinion on whether to keep a home, send in the keys, let them foreclose, short sale and now a "deed in lieu of foreclosure" action. The latest one I read was speaking about the last one, but then proclaimed going bankrupt may be a better option.

?!!!

It's all utter insanity. It doesn't matter which one of those you take, you are screwed, in terms of your credit rating and it's going to stay that way a long, long time.

I have struggled with this entire situation for some time now. What to do. At one point, I was settled to stay in the house and live with the loss of being underwater.

Yesterday, looking at the FMV published on the county's site, and seeing the house is now valued, by them anyway, at nearly HALF of what I actually owe on it? I'm pulling my hair out on this situation. I have no clear cut path to take here. It isn't a Y in the road, it's more like standing in the middle of an intersection with 8 roads leading out of it, none of the roads leading anywhere good.

In a case like this, when I don't know what to do - or more like can't decide what to do - I will do nothing. Stay in the house, eat the loss for now and see what comes down the road.

I just made the third payment of the 3-month trial in the HAMP modification. I don't know....what to do at this point.

I know what a lot of people are doing: stop making the payments and save the money. Stay in the house as long as possible until they come to boot you out. Minimum 6 months before that happens, a lot longer in many cases. In fact, I know a family that has not made a payment in over a year's time. Still in the house, but, they have been notified they have to be out by the end of next month.

That doesn't really answer the question, though, and I wonder about the ethics of staying in a house that you aren't paying for but enjoying the benefits of a free roof over your head, while you take that money and stuff it into savings. Perhaps that is a small piece of the puzzle as to why the economy is where it's at right now.

Of course, if you lose your job and you CAN'T make the payments, that might paint a different picture. What are you going to do, move out onto the streets? Desperation forces people to do things they normally would not.

I'm really quite clueless here as to what to do, going around in a large circle and coming back to the same point and question.

With that floating around in my head, I am still battling this tax situation. I am going to have to make a trip to downtown Phoenix to get a hard copy of the FMV for my old house before it burned down for tax purposes. The proof that the house burned down will take up to 45 DAYS to receive, but I can file the return without it, I may have to show that proof later on, but getting the return filed before the 15th is the goal. I may go to that department as well and see if I can get that expedited.

As for the contents of the house, I am supposed to put that as a separate loss, at least from what I am gathering. I don't know, but when I send in the tax return, I already have an itemized listing of the things I lost in that fire and how much I think it was worth at the time. I did that a long time ago and saved it in an email - which I am glad I did because the old computer has crashed several times since then and that information would have been lost. I would be racking my brains attempting to remember everything that was in that house at the time.

Now, proving that I had that stuff? Not possible. Maybe - now that I think about it - I might have pics on my Photobucket account - I think I took pics of everything and uploaded them. I'll have to go through the 1,000 photos I have on there and see. It would at least help. I do have pics on my Zillow account - just a few - that show the damage to the house from the outside, pretty bad stuff indeed.

Umm, work day is here and I am lost in a conundrum of thought concerning all of this.

ben