Painting and Mowing

I'm taking a break from painting and remodeling to rest my tired, old bones for a bit.  Painting two rooms with a 2-mile run in between is no easy task.  I'm feeling every one of my 37 years.

I actually just finished up the second coat in the girls' room, waiting til it dries to check for missed spots.  I'm very unsure about the color.  Taking a photo of it will not help because it looks a totally color in pictures.  I was aiming for a Tiffany blue, but it's much bolder than I planned.  I should have gone one shade lighter on the paint card.  But when I was making this decision alone, with 3 kids running through the hardware store, the shade lighter looked barely more colored than white.  Even in this photo, the paint looks barely blue.

I wanted pink.  The girls did not.  They don't like pink any more.  It's all about blue now.  I dislike blue, yet I can live with Tiffany blue.  It has just a speck of green to make it interesting.  I am not repainting because I'm tired.  My hands and shoulders are crampy.  We'll have to live with it.  Maybe I'll hang a lot of stuff on the walls to mask the boldness.

A funny thing happened to a friend of mine the other day and I wanted to get an outsider's opinion about the ridiculousness of it all.  He's a hard-working man with a full time job.  He lives in the nice area of town with the manicured lawns and brick homes of the local doctors.  Some of the people up there are very hoity-toity.  They act like they are paying thousands in association fees, which they are not.  Anyhow, my friend was mowing one evening when his neighbor came over.
The guy nicely said, "OK, let's wrap it up...I'm ready to relax for the evening."
My confused friend answered, "What???"
"It's 8:30 at night and I'm ready to relax.  Shut the mower down."
"Ha ha...yeah right," my friend thought he was kidding.
"No, I'm serious.  It's 8:30.  Time to turn that off."

My friend is not shy in any way and nearly got into a fist fight with the man.  My cousin recently purchased a house in the same development, a mere 1/4 mile away.  His neighbor tromped through the yard, not as calmly, and started yelling at my cousin.  He informed my cousin that he's mowing all wrong.  He is not allowed to shoot any grass clippings into the neighbor's yard.  I'm not a landscaper, but I imagine that might be a difficult thing to do.  The man claimed that his entire yard is full of weeds because of how my cousin mows his grass.  He's never had weeds before and now his yard is covered in them.  Let me go ahead and mention that my cousin pays to have his grass treated and has no weeds himself.

I find is unreal that people think they can tell their neighbors when and how to mow their grass.  I've never really had "real" neighbors, since everyone I live by is related.  We have strangers across the street, but they've only caused such problems as barking dogs and a loud argument here and there.  Are most neighbors this picky?

My other cousin, who lives in between these other two men got yelled at by his neighbor for planting the wrong kind of grass when he built his house.  Let me state again that this is not a gated community full of $10 million homes.  It's an mid-upper scale allotment with teachers, policemen, and bankers.

I'd rather live in a less desirable neighborhood and be able to manage my grass however I want.