I’ve had a couple of off-journal inquiries about the situation regarding the exodus of the Elephant Family upstairs, so I thought I’d address them all at once here. Beware; this is rather a rant. It’s calmer that it would have been had I journaled it on the day, though.

They’ve gone.

But they have left a little bit of themselves in the form of about six weeks’ worth of annoyance.

The annoyance began last Thursday night — no. It began the Thursday before that, when their aquarium leaked yet again, causing twice as much damage to our ceiling as the first time. The only good thing about the event is that they’d moved the tank to another corner, so the ceiling leaked over our hallway, not a bookcase.

This past Thursday night, they started moving furniture at 9.30. They repeated this performance on Friday, when they woke Liam up by dropping things on the floor above his room. I was not impressed. First of all, noise is supposed to stop at 9 PM, and who the hell moves at night unless they’re doing a midnight flit? Being aware of this possibility, we called the landlord the first night who came over immediately (you may remember, gentle readers, that the tenants who lived in our flat before us did a midnight flit of their own, so he’s a wee bit sensitive to this sort of thing). They assured him that they were actually moving out on Sunday April 2.

Well, after three nights of moving (and we’re talking till midnight) and no sightings (or hearings) of them on Saturday, we thought they were gone for good.

Until we came back from a short trip out on Sunday afternoon to find a moving truck parked across our driveway, so we couldn’t pull in.

So HRH rolled down his window and told them to move the truck.

The language that issued from their mouths had nothing to do with civility. They screamed at him, threatened him, riled him up intentionally, and refused to move it. The neighbours were all watching, praying silently that HRH wouldn’t clock the guy even though he sorely deserved it, because the jail time’s not worth the trouble. All of this was of course exacerbated by the fact that when we moved in, we couldn’t use the driveway because these people had left their SUV in it when they went on vacation, even though they’d been told the driveway wasn’t theirs and that it had to be gone by a certain date. Both the man and the woman were abusing HRH verbally at the top of their lungs, and and all of this was in front of their kids, which just further confirms them as the classless people who think the world owes them something we had suspected them to be.

We eased the car into the drive by going in at a severe angle through the neighbour’s half, between their van and the nose of the moving truck. Then, on their next trip, they blocked the driveway again.

Whatever. Just get out, was the general mood in our house. HRH had some serious calming down to do over the rest of the afternoon. And frankly, I was afraid they’d physically attack the next one of us they saw. One of the things they screamed at HRH was an accusation that we got them kicked out. This is amusing because as much as we disliked them, and wished they’d leave, and commiserated with the landlord about the problems he had with them, we never did anything of the sort.

See, in my world, people are civil to one another; you treat other people as you wish to be treated. These people have no respect for anyone, not even themselves, because when HRH and the poor landlord went upstairs after they’d gone for good, they found damage far beyond what the landlord had originally seen. They’ve gone out of their way to be bastards. They broke lights. They took light fixtures with them. They left piles and piles of garbage on the floor instead of bagging it and taking it out.

On top of that, their kitchen sink was blocked. Well, fine; HRH and the landlord unblocked it last night. And all the sour disgusting swamp from their pipes just fell down and bubbled up into our sink instead, and nothing any of us did could unblock it. Turns out they emptied that damned aquarium down the kitchen sink, and all the sand and gravel plugged the pipes. The problem’s being worked on now.

But they’re gone, they’re gone, and the locks have all been changed. HRH is bartering renovation work for part of the rent payment, so he’s already cleaned the place top to bottom and it’s incredible how much of a difference it’s made. Over the next month there will be some major renovations done to bring it up to the standard of our place. And then we will have neighbours we can trust, neighbours whose presence we actually enjoy!

You get what you give, and the crap they’ve put our landlord through over the past few months is being handed back to them in the form of him taking them to court. They gave him ten days’ notice about their move, and the property damage is unreal. What you do comes back to you.