A tale of two neighbors.

Soon after we rented the Calgary house (a couple months ago), but before we had moved in (a week ago), I was there with my daughter, and I happened to see the neighbor on the left outside her house.  I introduced us, and tried to be nice and friendly.  I've never really had any serious interactions with neighbors at other houses -- we tend to keep to ourselves entirely -- but I figured no harm in trying to start off on a good note. 

In fact we ran into to her a couple more times, and said hello, and introduced D.

So D was there with the the dogs for the first time last week (before that they'd been in Edmonton with me at beta house).  They were noisy and up early in the morning.  The house is close to the neighboring houses, and close to the street, and there are lots of unfamiliar sounds.  Normally we leave them alone in the house during the workday, and it isn't an issue, but when he did this on the second workday there, he came home at lunch to find a nasty anonymous note in the mailbox, complaining about the dogs, and threatening to call the city on us.  Apparently the dogs had been barking during the day, which is not something that they have done before, at least as far as we're aware.

Of course, the dogs are our responsibility, and we can't let them bother the neighbors.  But to send anonymous threats the first week?  Come on!  Also D was in the shower when they knocked on the door (before seven in the morning) and presumably at work when they came back later.  He came back at lunch to check on the dogs both days, and didn't know there was any issue.  "Rarely home"?  This happened on the morning of the SECOND DAY they were left alone at home!!!

Well, we didn't know who sent the note.  I couldn't believe it was the person we had already met several times.  Surely she would have tried to talk in person, or done some other civilized thing.  But I felt a response was needed, so I wrote a note to be left in the mailboxes of the neighbors on both sides.

Dear Neighbor,

Hopefully whoever left the anonymous note for us will receive this response. 

Thank you for letting us know our dogs were making a racket.  We are very sorry and embarrassed that they were disturbing you.   They have not previously been so obnoxious, but they seem to be highly agitated due to our move this past week.  Our former house was on a much larger lot, and I suppose the dogs are not yet used to the higher activity level surrounding the house (passersby, vehicles, and neighboring dogs etc). 

Our plan is to kennel them during the day if nobody is home, which should keep them settled down.  In fact, more often than not there will be somebody home, once the dust settles on our move from Edmonton, since one of us works from home. 

If that does not resolve the issue, then we will send them to doggie daycare during the day. 

We haven’t previously experienced this problem with these dogs, so please bear with us for a little while as we try to solve it.  Don’t hesitate to contact us (again) if you notice that the dogs are noisy during the day, so that we can take appropriate actions. 

Our letter had full contact information and everything.  It really annoyed me that the original letter was anonymous.

Anyway, we've gone full out on keeping the dogs quiet.  We've been crating them if they are alone in the house, which they don't like, but that doesn't keep them perfectly quiet, so mostly we're avoiding having to leave them alone.  We're also making arrangements for doggie daycare next week when D will have them in Calgary on his own most likely (I am working in Edmonton half the time at the moment).   But it's all been very stressful.  There's nothing like being in a new neighborhood (due to a pretty much totally unwanted move) leaving all the things, and then your neighbor turns out to be a total asshole, but you don't even know which one, or the exact specifics, so you just get to be paranoid all the time.  It was making me totally hate Calgary.

But last night, D found a note in the mailbox:

Omg it was such a relief!  We both cried.  How nice to experience a tiny bit of kindness.  The writer signed her name and gave her address, so we know she's the right-side neighbor.  

I guess we don't know for an absolute fact that the letter writer was the left-side neighbor.  In theory it could be someone across the street or something.  But chances are pretty good that it is.  So much for trying to get things started on the right foot!

Selling a house.

We've never sold a house before.   Technically this one's not for sale yet, but it's getting closer to being the point of no return.

Ironically, we'd done lots of renos over the past couple years, but not with an eye to selling it, because we had no reason to think that we were.   It was all stuff that we really should have done in the first few years of living here, but it's hard to get started.  For one thing, it's expensive to do anything, and it's also a big pain.  You have to move everything out the room in question, and then the work itself takes forever.  We spent many months with all the living room furniture in a heap in the family room, and many months with a non-functional fridge in the dining room.

Still, it was a really great feeling to have finally made some things happen that I really liked.  We put in lovely hardwood in the main areas, and beautiful tile in the kitchen and halls.  The walls were painted lovely colors that I thought about for a long time.  We even had nice baseboards and ceiling moldings and window trim done, even window sills!  This is a very plain 1960's house, the kind where windows look like a hole cut in a sheet of cardboard, and adding trim and windowsills was night and day!

Anyway, now that we're moving, it's like all that work is wasted.  Although I guess it's not.  Actually it's a good thing we did it, because the carpets were really crummy before, and so on.  But it's sad, because for the first time I was really starting to like the house.  

Vista Heights

At first I thought we might live in Vista Heights, because it's the only residential neighborhood within walking distance to D's job, which is in the adjacent industrial area.  Vista Heights is an odd little neighborhood.  It's alongside Deerfoot Trail, but that's in a big valley, and the freeway is at the bottom of it.  There is actually a great view of the city and even the mountains from Vista Heights.  I was impressed.  That was before I heard that the "NE" was a bit suspect.   I haven't entirely figured out why.  It seems normal enough when we drive around.

We spent a weekend looking at condos in Vista Heights, and walking around.  Places weren't expensive.  It was a very pleasant 60's vintage district, all surrounded by green space of a sort really.  There were berms dividing it from the industrial areas, and if you just went over the hill, there were commercial yards and trucks and things.  I liked that.  We looked at a house that was for sale there, and talked to several people on the street who had lived there for decades.

But at that point we weren't sure if we were going to buy or rent, or indeed even move to Calgary at all.  But I kind of did like Vista Heights.

Quadrants and Universities

Getting into this, I really knew nothing about Calgary, and the different neighborhoods.  If you look online, you tend to get vague information to the effect that "SW" is best, probably followed by "NW", "SE" (so long as it's S enough), and then "NE."   It's funny what the quadrant system does.  I mean, in Edmonton, there are definitely better and worse neighborhoods, and even entire sections of the city that seem to have more poverty and crime than average, but there is none of this tarring of the whole quadrant with one brush business.

Anyway, D is working in the NE, so the NW seemed like the natural place to begin investigating, just across the Deerfoot from there.   Also I thought that living near the university might be good.  In Edmonton you can't go wrong living somewhere in the general vicinity of the university.   Even if the neighborhood is a little frayed around the edges, it's generally frayed in a good way.  And I thought it might be walkable and historical and things like that.

But the university area in Calgary is quite different to that in Edmonton.  In Edmonton, it's centrally located in what is essentially an old neighborhood, adjacent to Old Strathcona, on the riverbank, and directly across the river from downtown.   So it's a city-centre university in character.  But in Calgary, the university is newer and less centrally located.  It's more in a car-island, and less integrated with the surrounding neighborhoods, which are more 1960's vintage and newer.

So it was clear that the basic approach of "living near the university" would not produce the same end result in Calgary.

Moving to Calgary

There is a bit of catching up to do here, but basically the thing is, we're moving to Calgary, and it will be interesting to see how it goes.  I grew up in Edmonton, and we've spent the last eighteen years here.  It's not really a move I really want to make all that much, but I think it's the best option for our family, for reasons I may get into at some point.

Oddly enough, despite having lived in Edmonton for most of my life, I knew precious little about Calgary before starting in on the process of exploration a year ago.  I'd driven through it many times, but you don't often have reason to stay overnight in a place only three hours from home.

We have a place to live in Calgary.  It's a rented house in Parkhill.  How we settled on Parkhill is a long story, and I need to get into that too.

It's not like I don't know anyone there.  There are people I know from BC Swing Camp, for example.  That's good, because one of the things that saddens me most about leaving Edmonton is losing a lifetime of connections, and also the musical network I've built up over the past few years since I started learning jazz piano.  

And I'll be working from home mostly in Calgary, because for now I'm keeping my Edmonton job.  How will that work?  I'm thinking I will take the Red Arrow once a week or so.   Is that realistic?   In the best case, I'll get six hours of work done on the bus.

Yeah... there are a lot of things that I feel deeply ambivalent about.