The people in my neighborhood

I've lived in my house for a little over six months now. That's half a year of making mortgage payments, fixing leaks and paying gas bills that at points during the winter threatened to go from merely unreasonable to Scrooge McDuck's money bin-level ridiculous.
All in all, it's been a good experience. It has not, however, been a particularly social experience.
In the more than half year I've owned my house I've met just three of my neighbors. Four if you count the conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with the neighbor who never actually told me her name. I don't, though, because the conversation consisted mostly of passive-aggressive questions about whether I planned to mow my lawn. In my defense, I did.
There are some legitimate reasons for this lack of interaction. For one thing, I closed on the house in November. We had our first significant snowstorm before I ever packed a box. I was shoveling sidewalks at my house before I lived there, and through the long and snowy winter there was never much reason for neighborhood residents to congregate outside.
Still, would it have been so hard for people to welcome me to the neighborhood with a cake or a pie or a four-course dinner? I don't think so.
I've started to meet the neighbors since spring weather started to show itself in the Twin Cities. And they've started to fill me in on a little bit of my new home's history. Mostly, they seem eager to tell me my house was used once upon a time as a practice house by the Minneapolis SWAT team.
Apparently this is one of the things that goes along with buying a house once owned by the city. On the positive side, I don't owe any property taxes this year. On the negative, on more than one occasion men in riot gear stormed through my house practicing R.T. Rybak knows what kinds of emergency scenarios.
At least I know if I'm ever taken hostage by Finnish terrorists demanding herring and sun lamps in exchange for my freedom my potential rescuers will know their way around.
I've learned a few other things about my neighborhood in recent months. I've learned, for example, that it's a pretty decent area, and that the problems my neighbors had a while back with people breaking into their garages is pretty much done now. I've learned that my neighbor to the south addressed the break-in problem in part by buying a pit bull.
I met that particular dog before I ever met a human neighbor, back before I'd even moved in. I was checking out the shed in my back yard when the dog lunged halfway into my yard with hate in its eyes. I've since learned from the dog's owner that the miniature Cerberus displays those kinds of face-eating tendencies only when its in the house or on the line in the yard. By my count that leaves "when it's asleep" and "in Milwaukee" as the only places this particular beast would not immediately try to disembowel me.
What a relief.
I'm sure I'll learn more as the months go by and I meet more of my neighbors. Maybe I'll discover my neighbors to the north have an unhealthy fascination with whether I've washed my windows. Or that the guy across the alley has a mutant parakeet just waiting to peck out my eyes. Or that Army Special Forces units still plan to use my basement as a practice facility for defusing bombs.
On second thought, maybe I'll just stay inside.

----------------
Now playing: Mason Jennings - Little Details
via FoxyTunes