just throwing some words out there

**Correction: the one chair is actually green, not pink. If I could retrieve the picture off my friggin' camera, I'd prove it.

For a few years now, some people have suggested I start a blog. Mostly, this subject comes up when I talk about an article I've written for a less-than-edgy business publication, and I have to leave the best parts out of the printed story. Like the elk farm story.It was never enough to get me to start a blog, though. What was? The neighbors' "outdoor living area."

Now, I've been reading a lot of articles about the latest trends in outdoor furnishings, outdoor kitchens, bringing the indoors to the outdoors, blah blah blah. I am certain that two upholstered chairs--one pink and one homemade patchwork denim--on an unsheltered brick patio, with a tiki torch that's missing the stick that makes it a torch, does not qualify as an "outdoor living area."

Unless you're my neighbor. Some guy has adopted the patio, along with furnishings listed above, as his house, or perhaps room. Today, he rearranged the furniture. I guess he needed a new view.

This house was built in 1910 or thereabouts. From my big kitchen window--the best window in the house, incidentally--it looks a little like the house from Amityville Horror, which, if you don't associate horror with it, is a pretty darn cool-looking house. You know, the quarter-moon windows on either side of the big chimney and all. My neighbor Miss D. just got it painted a real purty creamy pale yellow color, and the house sits on a double lot, so there's probably 50 feet or so of lawn between our houses. An original brick patio runs the length of the house on the side facing my house.

Enter into this lovely tableau some guy sitting in a freaking stuffed armchair. He seems to prefer the pink one. The patchwork denim one, he reserves for guests. I don't even know who this guy is. He is not the owner of the house. He is not the owner's ex-husband, or boyfriend, or brother. He may be connected with one of the owner's siblings--Skinny Crazy Sister, Fat Crazy Sister, or Short Crazy Sister--but no one's sure. All I know is that when I look out my kitchen window, be it morning, noon, or night, there is a man smoking cigarettes and drinking Bud Light, sitting in a pink armchair, doing nothing.

If I wanted to look at that all day, I would have stayed married.