Our neighbor is moving.
She moved in about six months ago. We saw a lot of her for five of those months, but this past month? Not so much.
Until today.
She caught us while we were out working in the yard after work. Told us to expect some more people working on her house the next couple weeks. Sorry about all the noise. Then she looked at our garage door.
"Hey," she said. "There's no rust on your garage door. How'd you do that?"
"Keep the rust off?" I asked. She nodded. We'd seen the workers sandblasting then painting her garage door earlier.
I looked over at my wife who said, "We wash it."
The neighbor turned to me.
"We wash it," I said, "along with the rest of the house every month or two."
"But who do you get to do it?" asked the neighbor.
"We do it," we said together.
"We don't hire people," said the wife.
"We're the poor side of the street," I said.
The neighbor giggled and looked back at her house, "The market's a little tight right now, but I'm hoping to get what I paid for it."
"Well, the work you're doing should help," my wife said.
The neighbor looked back at our yard. "Your grass is so green. How much were the automatic sprinklers?"
My wife responded, "We don't have sprinklers."
The neighbor looked at me.
"We water it."
"With a hose."
"Poor side of the street," I finished.
"You know how you're going to sell your house for low seven figures?" I asked. "One or two point something million dollars? Our side of the street is only to the right of that decimal point. We're point something."
The neighbor giggled again then talked about deciding which house she was going to move to, the one in Carmel or the one in San Francisco, then said, "I need deck work. Who does yours?"
We looked at each other. My wife raised her hand. "I do. I'll be doing ours in a week or so depending on the weather."
The neighbor giggled yet again. "And your mulch?"
We gave her a look.
She laughed.
And here's the thing. We've had this conversation with her before. Not the her selling her house stuff, but the doing the stuff ourselves because we can't afford an automatic sprinkler system stuff? Multiple times. It's like, when you say "Really?" over and over again because what you heard just doesn't compute. Our neighbor is sweet . . . smart . . . fun . . . but can't seem to wrap her head around the (relatively) poor folk whose property line lies about twenty-five feet across the street from hers.
They found me. I don't know how they found me, but found me they did.
Shit.
And I mean that literally.
I don't know why they're so mad at me, the little fuckers. It wasn't my fault . . . and no one got hurt . . . not really. They wear full-body camouflage year round. I mean, they're literally designed to not be seen. So in the early morning when the light's all funny and they're waddling up the side of a curvy, narrow road?
They're lucky I saw them at all.
So . . .
I went out to drag the trash bins to the curb for pickup around 11 o'clock last night. Something I do every week. But this time, when I opened the front door, I noticed the poo lying there in the driveway.
Those damned ducks.
Those little fuckers.
Look, so maybe I was driving a little too fast that morning. Maybe I was a little late for work. But you're wearing camouflage, for christ's sake! Anyway, I saw you in time. I saw you waddling your little butts quickly toward the side of the road.
It's not like I aimed for you. Or sped up to scare you.
You ungrateful little . . .
And just what were you doing in the middle of the road in the first place, my dear ducks? Huh?
I saw you and another adult and a bunch of littles waddling for all you were worth to the side of the road. Then I passed you.
I know I got a little close, but I slowed down and swerved, and, when I passed you by? I saw you looking back at me over whatever the duck's version of a shoulder is.
Eye contact.
I didn't know you were marking me for vengeful defecation.
But when I opened that front door last night and saw the poo? Yeah. I knew who'd done it. I knew when you eyeballed me on that curvy hill that you'd come seeking your anatic revenge.
It's my fault, really. I should have changed up my route to work for a week or two. I got complacent. Didn't even think that you'd be looking for me. Just what could a duck do, I thought to myself, revenge-wise, right?
Homo Sapiens smugness.
I should have realized when you pegged me with those wee beady eyes that you'd come gunning for me. Was it because of the ducklings? Were you in full protection mode and you'll brook no guff from a driving monkey?
Or are you just an asshole?
Anyway, the rain took care of the poo overnight, but are you satisfied, my dear duckling? Is your thirst for vengeance sated? Because I'll give you this one incident this one time. We all get scared and make mistakes. But let me warn you. If it's not over? If you come at me again? You'd better be prepared to go the mattresses, my winged friend.
My advice to you? Don't start nuthin, won't be nuthin.
Some housekeeping.
Hosting. I have two sites hosted on GitHub Pages - baki.cc and bryanbyun.org, so that was the obvious choice for this one, but, I wanted to see what the cool kids were using these days. Turns out it's Cloudfare.
Oh yeah. Did I mention I was only looking for free hosting?
I used to use Dreamhost all the time. Still like it, but free is extra neat.
So . . . Cloudfare. There's Cloudfare Pages which is completely free. Nifty. I set it up but discovered that every time I would update the site I'd have to delete the old site then re-upload the entire site - it's like Star Trek transporters, the original is completely destroyed and replaced with a copy. That's fine for simple sites that aren't updated often (to be fair, Cloudfare Pages tell you that's what they're for up front) but it just seemed uncool, yo. So uncool.
So I considered doing a third site on GitHub Pages, but then I thought, what if I wanted to do some non- HTML/CSS type stuff . . . a little PHP here, a dash of SQL there . . . and I remembered Nuzzle House (love that groovy 90s look) uses Nearly Free Speech and has been happy with it. Buuuuuuut . . . even 1 cent a day isn't free and then I found this article on how to use Cloudfare R2 - some kind of bucket thing? I don't know, yo, all these buckets and instances and dockers . . . my aching brain! - to set up a free site and not have to Star Trek transporter the files each time I updated it . . . buuuuuuut I had to give them a credit card and it's possible I might have to eventually pay, sooooo . . .
GitHub Pages it was. There's no server-side stuff available, but I know how to use it and my site is hecka simple.
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Comments. I thought of trying to add comments to the site. Never had them (except for when I used WordPress back in the day). Disqus is a hot mess of ads and privacy issues. Blech. But it is ubiquitous. And free. Found RemarkBox to maybe kinda be a possibility . . . perhaps? Or GraphComment? It seems like a big headache for something that will get minuscule use, and, if someone really wants to reach out, they can do it via email or text.
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Accessibility. Looking into making the site pretty gosh darned accessible. Looks like W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is the place to be for that. Gonna have to start learning how to use main, header, and footer tags, and proper title tags. And aria-labels? So much to learn.
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Old stuff. I'll probably bring over some of the stuff from baki.cc - archive and stories eventually. Or maybe not?
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All in all it feels good to be back in the bakiwop.com digs. I actually kinda like the baki.cc domain name a bit more - seems new and fresh and "with it" and "hip" - but bakiwop.com was where it all started . . . well . . . mostly started . . . I did have school tilde server space back in the mid-90s, one of those .edu tilde sites, but bakiwop.com was my first domain name and it's nice to have it back after a quarter of a century or so.
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Also? I seem to be using an absurd amount of ellipses in this post . . . what the gosh darn heck?
It's been nearly a quarter century since i owned the bakiwop.com domain. Tonight? Tonight I couldn't fall asleep so I went downstairs, fired up the pc, and, for some reason, checked to see if it was available (I'd checked on and off over the years to no avail, natch) . . . and there it was, just waiting for me, looking all pretty and shiny on the domain registrar shelf. How cool is that?
caveat lector