Quality neighbors

I have mentioned elsewhere that I have a major farmer as a neighbor.  We have both sought to understand one another and have a positive relationship.  I mention in another thread his gift of pallets and dock tanks.  He also came by with another gift.  His farm subsidy requires him not to plant X number of his acres.  He is taking a different approach than he has in the past.  Of course , usually this is rotated. It still will be to a point. BUT he is perminately not planting a strip of land adjoining my property. I have no idea how wide, but the gesture is impressive.

Good neighbors are a rare, and valuable, commodity!

John, you are right, good neighbors are golden.  

My wife’s car was recently down one headlight.  My neighbor saw it and wanted to know if I wanted him to change it (he is a retired mechanic with an impressive array of tools and is itching for a project).

I drove the car over to his heated garage—that he already cleared out in anticipation of this project—and we got to work.  In my first car, replacing a headlight was a pain, but the light was accessible from under the hood.  In my wife’s car—a Subaru if you are curious—replacing the headlight required partial disassembly of the front grille in addition to disassembly of some under-the-hood components.  He told me that at his dealership, one particular common, mid-sized and mid-priced sedan charged $500 to replace one headlight bulb (adding in the other 3 bulbs added $12) as the entire front of the car had to be disassembled and reassembled and took one mechanic hours to do!  

With my neighbor’s help, this project cost me all of $25 and about 3 hours of time.  I would say this particular neighbor had passed good neighbor and is in fact a really great neighbor.

Eric

Hey Eric;
That Subaru headlight change can be accomplished thru the wheel well. I have done it numerous times now. Who ever heard of removing the front clip to change a headlight bulb!
Especially when the low beam is also the daytime running light and burns out early.  The designer should be made to change that bulb a few times and maybe his next design will be a bit more user friendly.
Great to have good neighbors!

Hi Eric,

Great story. When I lived in MN I had 3 households that lived near me.  2 out of 3 were aggressively seeking trouble. Where I am now, I have 3 households near me. 3 out of 3 are exceptional.  My wife and I discussed moving once ... we decided we would never find neighbors this good again.

Thomas,

Actually we found the wheel well access after the front grill was taken apart!  What a weird way to change a headlight—by going through a wheel well?!

Eric

Now that the weather is more normal, I have picked up the dock tanks and the pallets mentioned in the first post.  There are more pallets to come.  I suspect, by time the winter wheat goes in, I will have 100 pallets. That should address all my projects and leave me with 25 in reserve.

Interesting language issue, in my current area dock tanks/IBC tanks are known as cage tanks.

John F Dean wrote:
Interesting language issue, in my current area dock tanks/IBC tanks are known as cage tanks.

They are pallet tanks here.

As to headlight bulbs that have to be changed from the wheel wells, Our car has them, it's a renault megan 3 of the four bulbs can be changed that way the fourth (sidelight) cannot and requires half the front end to be taken apart. We had to have it done because the connector broke as well. luckily we have a local mechanic who does things well and cheaply. I do not like the system at all it's very tedious to have to lie down next to a car stick your hand into a small hole undo two different caps then try to fight with the wire clip all while you cannot see what you are doing. the bruises are quite impressive each time as well. I have also had a Ford mondeo that needed the front trim off to change the bulbs OR borrow a 10 year old, they could get their hands down inside and do it while still assembled.

We have amazing neighbors as well. Not only are they totally okay with our unconventional ways of doing things, they have really helped us out of some bad situations. We run our house on rainwater. A few times, we have had issues with our system and ran out. Luckily, our neighbor was willing to let us run a hose across the alley and fill up our tank! He has basically offered to let us do this all the time, if we want or need to. I think he worries about us.
Another neighbor saved us this winter when our new masonry heater (our only heat source) burned through our firewood stock faster than we anticipated and all our unchopped wood was buried under snow. He had stacks of dry ash wood for bonfires and told us we could take as much as we needed. Plus he is cool with our crazy composting endeavors.
After having had some truly awful neighbors in the past, I feel incredibly blessed to have these folks around. It feels like Mr. Roger's neighborhood.

Hi Heather,

Gee, there is something nice to say about having bad neighbors, you really appreciate the good ones more.