Vacant Homes and their Garbage Cans

I live in a cul de sac that has about a 50% occupancy rate. Of the people who do live there, they are all my customers to my bug business (good neighbors!). One of my neighbors/customers had me over to treat their home and they indicated that the back yard might be the source of their pests. I looked into their backyard from the 2nd floor and had to agree with them - it was an overgrown jungle. They asked me if I knew anyone that could clean up their backyard and I told them "my guy" could. "You have a guy? Can we get his information from you?" I laughed as I realized I made them believe I outsourced my yard work - what I had meant was my oldest son Chase, who has grown into a good worker. I gave them a quote to clean up their backyard and expected them to get back with me right away . . . they didn't.

A few weekends later, when my oldest was off doing a stake youth conference at Camp Lomia for the weekend, is when the neighbors called to see if our offer still stood and they needed it done ASAP. I scheduled to be over to their house the next day knowing that my oldest would be unavailable. At first I was just going to bring my next oldest son, Bradley, but my daughter Allie was persistent that she should help too. I put her off but after working for a bit called home and told her to come on over. I expect a lot from my kids and as a result my kids have to work hard to impress me. That day my daughter impressed me.

We ended up using a mower to grind up all the weeds in the yard. We found a "nest" of kittens. The mom had scampered away and just as we were ready to mow the section where the litter lay, I noticed a kitten scampering around. We relocated them and finished the job at hand. We ended up filling over twenty 50-gallon bags of “jungle”/grass and despite our lack of an engineering degree determined that it wouldn't all fit into a single city garbage can.

Since our neighborhood has so many vacant homes I figured we could utilize all of the unused neighborhood garbages. I sent my son to fetch all the empty homes' garbages and we filled them to the brim and returned them to the correct homes and reminded ourselves that in 6 days we'd be sure to put the garbages out on the street. The backyard looked great and the kids each made $40 for their efforts. Chase was purely peeved to learn that his younger siblings had horned in on his money making opportunities when he got back – he was so bitter that he made lemons seem sweet.

So, it'd seem that life was good, except for the very next couple of days those "vacant" homes had people show up, yep we had new neighbors. Our new neighbors were surprised to find they had a full garbage of jungle/grass. One of the new neighbors was so upset that he put a nice big note on his garbage - "Please don't use our garbage for your trash". So now we are working covertly so all of our new neighbors don't realize that we are the trash filling culprits that we are. Problem is that we still have another 8 bags of trash we need to dump :)

I guess we found out how to surround ourselves with neighbors instead of having all of these foreclosed homes - any of you out there need your yards cleaned up? We have another 100 vacant homes that we need filled with neighbors - some of you are good friends of mine, why don't you come fill up these beautiful homes with your family . . . I promise we won't utilize your garbage.

Andrew "jungle/grass culprit" Brown