phosfate

Our neighbor across the street who has been replacing the midcentury asbestos shingle on his house with new wooden clapboard at the rate of one face of the house per summer also has a lockdown baby who is a toddler now. We aren't very well acquainted like other people seem to be to their neighbors towards whom they have positive attitudes - waxjism and I wave hi at them but otherwise only talk about practical issues, like our shared mailbox stand and when their outdoor cat stayed away a few days; though they gave us a bottle of their homemade apple juice a few years ago. But since he has built a scaffolding on the side of the house across the street from our diningroom window and spent a lot of time all summer working there with power tools while our window was open just opposite and a small human was often in the yard demanding his attention, I've frequently heard him speaking to it, and he's definitely a Swedish-speaking finn like Wax. (Today he was teaching it to ride a tiny bike with training wheels outside our window.) (Due to cat divorce, the diningroom is a bedroom; Wax sleeps there with Sipuli and I babysit her there during the day, and before that I slept there with Snookums and Tristana while she was in the bedroom with Anubis.)

The weird part is that when we first moved here, my MIL's ex-boss, a retired high school English teacher and principal who also taught one of my BILs, lived on the other side (they downsized to an apartment last year), and his wife told us that she thought the constructing neighbor's family was Finnish! It's hard to imagine how that misunderstanding could come to be, unless his wife is a finn perhaps; I don't think I've overheard her speaking with the children. The new neighbors who bought the English teacher's house are also Swedish-speaking and have two toddlers and a small dog (possibly two small dogs?). This is a relief to me because sudden use of Finnish can make my language center stall out, unlike Swedish.

The other two houses on this block of our street are abandoned eyesores and public health menaces owned by the city, which has done nothing in the last couple decades of its ownership to demolish them or secure the property. (The rooves and trees AND POWERLINES in the yard are falling down and the guy who they finally hired to do an asbestos assessment last year told us it was appallingly bad, actually risky even to collect the samples that told them it's full of asbestos.)

We got a notice that they are going to build a new fire station there and close the end of the street off from the highway, which is exciting news, but experience with the city government suggests it's not likely to happen this decade.