Thursday afternoon was gorgeous in Chicago -- high 60's, not a cloud in the sky, the first major deliverable of our massive CDW redesign project presented and accepted earlier in the morning. So I get the sharp idea to drive some co-workers out to Hala Kahiki in River Grove, en route to catching their evening flights back to New York, and I decide to head out Grand Avenue, assuming the Kennedy will be all monkeyed up at that hour. Turns out, Grand wasn't much better. Bumper to bumper most of the way. Gave the "out-of-towners" a chance to appreciate the city. The restaurants of the near West Side. The Radio Flyer factory a few blocks futher west. The collapsing Chicago Northwestern line a few blocks further on. And a little past that, some sort of bizarre standoff between a man wielding an orange plastic milk crate, a second man swinging a 2x4, and a third man with a stocking cap casually strolling into the fray with a large woodsman's axe. I didn't get to see the initial altercation, though the dude in my passenger seat shouted "There goes the milk crate!" as we approached "ground zero" for the incident, the item apparently having been thrown at one of the alleged antagonists. The guy with the 2x4 then apparently scampered off into the dark spaces between two auto repair shops. The man with the axe just kept on strutting towards them both. He was shifting his grip on the axe handle a bit as we drove past, looking into the shadows.
Ah, but he was not the only maniac the neighborhoods of Chicagoland would see Thursday evening. Emboldened by the good weather, and fueled by the frustrationi resulting from the recent flooding of our basement (which we traced back to the poor drainage on the front side of the 1219 property and the way the land is graded back towards the foundation, sending heavy rain water down into our basement) Cindy and I decided it was high time we did something about the state of the front garden. Or rather, Cindy was speculating about what could be done, when I began pulling up the ugly ass shrubs that have languished there for years. The rain-softened ground gave way easily, and having removed the evergreens, I went after the rose bushes next. Prickly, but also easily removed. By this point, Cindy and the girls had strolled across the street to Tom and Lori's to play with their girls, and I looked up from my work about 15 minutes later to see Cindy and Lori gawking back across the street at me, seemingly a man possessed, hacking at the shrubbery and re-grading the soil with half-sized winter snow shovel, the only actual gardening appropriate implement currently found at the property. Tom came out of their house, looked at the mania across the street, gave me that knowing "guy look" (the one that says "oh yes, I've been you many times, and feel your pain") and shouted "Hey, I've got an actual shovel, if you'd like one..."
So I sauntered across the street, muddy snow shovel on my shoulder, to borrow tools from my neighbor. It's nice to be in a neighborhood like that. Hell, it was nice to momentarily be "the crazy neighbor." It's probably what the guy with the axe thought too, ducking that milk crate.
