Block Party!!

This afternoon, we had a block party on our street! It was fun. Our HOA pres. and his next door neighbor organized the whole thing - actually it's been in the works to some degree for almost 10 years. Mr. Jeff brought his grill and was cooking dogs and burgers for everyone, all the neighbors brought a side dish or appetizer.

We all sat around, yapping and eating for almost 3 hours. (It sort of broke up with the Cowboy game started) The kids were racing around - Mr. Fred made a bean bag toss game that even some adults were having fun with. Ms. Lisa had 3 trash bags full of balloons and some kid games lined up. Lisa also brought water balloons!! It was fun to meet and re-meet everyone, chat and realize that we have common friends that we didn't know about, and just sit around.

One weird thing (there always is): a woman showed up with 2 chubby little kids and was selling cookie dough for their school. It was some school none of us had heard of, but whatever. Well, as things progressed, it came out that they didn't even live in our area. One of the kids said, "We like to come sell stuff over here because it's safer than our neighborhood." Later, she commented to someone that her parents lived nearby - but not our street. So, she and the kids came by, ate big, hung out, chatted us up, played games, sold cookie dough at our block party - and they don't even live there!! They crashed our block party. I suppose if it was that important, then whatever - I wouldn't want the kids to go hungry, not that it looked like they had recently. The part that bothered me was when the HOA pres. was discussing the new crime watch program, and asking for volunteers. This woman was all gung-h0, and said how she would love to help out with something like that. So, she crashes our party, volunteers for our crime watch - what if she was just scoping us out to rob us later? Probably not, but you never know - stranger things have happened.

Anyhow, it was fun, and I hope that the tradition continues. Sometimes it's hard to get to know neighbors that you may have nothing in common with. You see each other as you drive by (or they do) or when you're working in the yard and you wave, but you have no common ground! There's nothing to talk about. Now there is!