Thursday morning things

* Something weird last night: I was dinking around on the Internet and heard a loud lawnmower. Looked out and found the lawn service person  that the person to the north of me uses was mowing across my lawn. WHAT?!?! My best guess is that they had to get onto the lawn over there, and because of the incline (and my neighbor's "drive" is gated off and leads straight into a garage) they couldn't easily get the lawn tractor up onto the lawn, but they could go up my drive and up the shallower incline of my lawn to get there.

But still: they mowed nearly all of my front yard. My first thought was "oh heck no, if they think they are gonna bill me for this, I am totally pulling the 'I didn't order or authorize this and you have no right to charge me' card" but now I wonder if it was either:

a. A mistake ("Oh crud, this is not the lawn I was supposed to mow")
b. The lawnmower person just being "nice" ("I have to drive my lawn tractor across this yard so I might as well mow it for them") though I admit I would have vastly preferred them to knock on my door (I was home) and ask if they could use my yard as access to the neighbors. I would have said yes, of course, but it weirded me out to have them do it without asking.

I just get weirded out by random people in my yard because the last time that happened, it was a couple of burglars running from a house they broke into and I had to describe them to the cops.

* So most of my front yard was done. (I had planned on mowing today). But the "hard" parts - the steeper incline down to the sidewalk, the very edges, and the "devil strip" between the sidewalk and the street - were not done, so I had to do them. (And also, the mower didn't do my backyard, which tells me that they're not gonna try to charge me - because why do an incomplete job if you're gonna pull that stunt).

So I went out first thing today and mowed, and then cut three wheelbarrow-loads of weeds and shrubs, including aggressively cutting back the straggly nandina close to my phone box - figuring that it will be easier for the A T and T dude to find it if he ever comes out. (Eventually I will kill that nandina, I think, and be able to replace it with something I like better.)

* I don't think I'm going in today. I don't really need to, but I could clean house a little, and my piano lessons start again late this afternoon. And I might run to Mart of Wal - I am not planning on a Sherman run this weekend (though as I said, if Quixotic Fibers is having some kind of a "do" for WWKIP day, I might go down there). I have mostly enough food on hand but I will need more milk at some point. And more of the little cheese cubes I use as a snack/simple protein for small lunches.

* Flipping around after showering, I ran across a documentary on Hikikomori. Apparently this is a phenomenon in Japan: people in their 20s and 30s just withdraw, stay in their old childhood bedrooms and....I don't know. Apparently the suicide rate is fairly high in this group.

Some of it might be explainable as agoraphobia, but I don't know what the general-population rates of that are. (I have some tendencies that way, but it's mainly a strong dislike of crowds and noise: I love going out to bookstores or craft stores or the like but when things are crowded I don't really want to go, and I dislike traveling to really populous cities where there are crowds everywhere. But I'm not that avoidant; I would like to be avoidant but my sense of duty makes me get up out of bed and go to work or whatever even when I don't want to). Some might be explainable with Asperger's syndrome; I have no idea how Japanese society reacts to people with Asperger's; I've read Japan tends to be a bit more rigid and less-tolerant of "oddness" than the US is. (And even at that, the US isn't always all that tolerant)

But it does make me wonder, given the things we see in different cultures: is there something about the 21st century world that makes people act strangely and stresses a lot of people out? Is it the decline of meaningful work? Is it the decline of community in general? (I don't know any of my neighbors that well - I know them to nod to but I don't know their names and they never seem to be around when I am. This is totally different from my parents where they know all their neighbors and are good friends with several. And arguably, that's more important for my parents, with them aging - once, when my dad's knee gave out and he fell, and my mom wasn't strong enough to help him up, she was able to call their neighbors down the street and Larry came over and helped him get up)

There's an expert saying "If you don't fit into a society that has a ready-made path for you, you may decide to withdraw" and maybe that's part of it, but....I don't want to sound unsympathetic, but some of adult life is MAKING your own path. I don't really fit in to society perfectly here: people don't always know how to relate to me always as a never-married childless woman and someone who didn't grow up here and a northerner and someone working in academia, but sometimes....you just DEAL.

I don't know. It's strange and kind of sad. Even as I joke about being a hermit I would not really be able to be the kind of person who just stayed in their room; I need to go out and see different things and be around people. Part of the reason I spend so much money on stuff at Ulta and JoAnn's is that it's a way to be out of the house and do something....

* My new dehumidifier came last night. So now I have to figure out where I can dispose of the old one - will have to call the recycling center to see if they will take it (even for a fee: it has refrigerant in it). Gone are the days of just putting something to the curb and the city carting it off. They're supposed to haul away yard waste but they didn't even do that on the appointed day this month (so I have a giant brushpile on my front lawn, but I don't think the city can ding me, because it was out there before the day they were supposed to come and take it)