grrr.

So we moved into our house this past February. One of the major draws of it was the privacy all the surrounding trees offered. We could only see our two neighbors across the street, and no one to the north or south of us. Well, the landlord decided to pull up some of the overgrown brush and old nursery trees run wild in order to clean up the property. We were okay with that because he promised to leave a buffer of trees between us and the row of houses to the south of our property.

The brush clearing guy showed up about two weeks early and got down to business. I'll have to post a before picture, but for now, here are two pictures of the present damage he's done. You can see our house from the road now (it used to be that you'd have to be right in front of our place before you noticed it). Oh, and the guy ripped up all the trees. He didn't leave a buffer. The neighbors are ticked. The city has actually sent out a couple representatives to take pictures of what's being done, so who knows where this is going to go.

All I know is that the changes being made are ugly. Now the neighbors can see everything we do. We have absolutely zero privacy. Our entire house is exposed.



There's nothing we can do about any of this, of course. We're only renters. Today I actually had to leave the house with Hazel, though - the brush clearing guy decided to burn the piles he'd made (without forewarning us) and my house started to smell strongly of smoke. I had a throbbing headache by the time we cleared out.

All that to say I'm very sad by the changes being made. I really hate it. It's hard to still like where we live when I compare the lack of privacy we have now to the incredible privacy we had before. Sheesh.