In the satellite photo, there is an ancient white Volvo parked in the driveway and a waterbed tipped up on its edge where both have been for at least a decade. A surveyor was here the past few days, locating property lines and updating contours for the new owner of our neighbor’s house. The sale closed a week ago but the previous owners have been slow to vacate. The locks have been changed. The buyer is land developer and we fear he will try to create a triplex out of the building and flip it. That is one rumor.

The good news is that we are not built on that property, as our previous neighbor believed. She based this on a survey completed by another neighbor. That neighbor had been half responsible for inaccurate work in two counties. (Thirty years ago I was doing research for an architect, and the county engineer told me that surveyor and another one had been told to retire, that their work was so bad they would no longer accept it. Nevertheless, that neighbor was the one who surveyed that house when it was built in the 80s though that survey was not, of course, recorded with the county. At that time the area was so badly out of kilter that local firms refused as there were no reliable markers to work from.)

Times have changed.

The waterbed is gone, but the Volvo is still there. Last week, the former owners took out a few things on a flatbed truck, always in the middle of the night. (Make of that what you will. Marijuana is legal in Oregon.) Moving didn’t really take off until the day after closing when an enormous U-Haul blocked the entire road. There was a great deal of shouting and banging.

It was my grandfather who surveyed property lines for our house in the 40s (the older one was built by his aunts in 1911), and his third wife Genevieve who had walls built at the north and south in the early 60s. The wall on the south side is entirely on our property. Turns out the neighbor’s dog is buried mostly on our front yard, and so are all their downspout drains that have given us so much trouble. Ruby’s fort is well within our property.

There are still three Bobs left. One is a tenant, one owns the rental across the street, and a third lives a block away. The new owner is not a Bob. We hope the new owner will not create a triplex of short-term rentals. We hope that will not happen. We like having real neighbors.

NaNo is going fine with over 33k words. There were briefly over 34k, but then I began butchering.

One of my favorite websites is selling little bags to use for sandwiches in the toaster—reusable “up to 50 times” and “completely food safe.” The trouble is that they are made of fiberglass and PTFE (DuPont’s Teflon). Teflon has been labeled carcinogenic by some (many), but there is considerable disagreement about that. (My husband points out that overheated Teflon releases fumes that can kill pet birds in the house. Trust him to know that.) Fiberglass can release tiny particles which are not healthy, but there is such a thing as “food grade fiberglass.” So maybe okay? . . . Even if it’s chemically harmless to use in a toaster (really?), such bags make nasty trash.

fyi When I want a heated sandwich, wrap it in parchment paper in the oven or a toaster oven. I reuse my parchment paper over and over, too, and it’s a lot cheaper than bags that might kill the parrot. If we had one.