Bandwidth and Feuds

OK, this is absolutely driving me nutters. I am consistently having bandwidth issues at my house and it sucks. I know it’s not the laptop because anywhere else I use it things are fine. My iPhone is slower than crap when it’s on the home WiFi as well. It’s only marginally faster than the EDGE connection I get from AT&T at the house. If I have to live in a shed so I can afford a dedicated T-1 (those are costly enough, not even gonna contemplate a T-3) then I’m sorely tempted. It’ll be a fairly nice shed, I do like my comforts, but still.

OK, on to the feud. I’m not involved directly, but it’s Neighbor E (upstairs) and Neighbor B (behind me). He’s been out of work for some time now, and is up a good portion of the night working on the driftwood furniture he makes. Of course, he’s using power tools, so that’s an issue with her since her bedroom backs up to/looks out over his driveway/work area. He’s also been banging around in the crawl space above my apartment and beside hers, and he really has no reason to be in there but to piss off Neighbor B. It seems he’s escalated to threatening her (keeping in mind she’s a little off herself, but I believe her) and she’s parking her car at the next house over so he doesn’t know where it is or when she’s home. She’s afraid he’ll vandalize it or something. She’s asked me to keep my deck lights on at night now, and I told her I would, so I’ve got two 100 watt (equivalent) CFL’s blazing into the night so he can’t lurk in the darkness. I’ve also started locking my truck and my doors, and I hate doing that, but he’s nuts anyway and if he gets it in his head that I’ve sided with her then who knows what he’ll do. I found a cigarette butt on the hood of my truck a few hours ago when I left to run to Taco Bell, and he’s the only one who smokes. And it wasn’t thrown there, it was placed there, I could tell.

Anyway, he’s been evicted, the cops came out and served him papers and all, but I don’t know if he’ll actually go. We thought the downstairs neighbors were helping him move his stuff, but it might have been their own: the septic has backed up again for the second time in as many months. That doesn’t really bother me much since I’m so high above the tank. The two basement apartments are getting the worst of it. The sad thing is I noticed the cover popped off the riser and the spill around it Friday night when I got home and I’ve yet to see either the landlord or a septic system contractor out here to do anything about it.

I think my mail situation is about sorted out. I checked it yesterday and my mail was in the box, but so was some of the dorkwad couple’s who screwed it up in the first place. After much soul searching and consulting with my conscience debating if I should reach over and put it in the right box I decided to do the only fair thing I could think of: I wrote "NOT AT THIS ADDRESS" in black magic marker and took it to the post office this morning. I hope it was something important…

There’s some other stuff going on, but I’ll probably just talk to Ember and maybe Critter about that in person, I’m not sure how the OD community would respond, and I’m truthfully not even sure how I’m going to react if things proceed to the conclusion I’m (oddly enough) hoping for.

Later!