It's stuck in WHAT?

Aaaaaah, kids.  Never a dull moment.  I walk into the living room and what do I see?  My darling little girl caught red-handed shoving a plastic toy ice cream cone into the bass speaker of our surround sound system.  I say, "No, don't put stuff in there" as I have said many times before.  Promptly darling little girl shoves it in even further and I hear ever-so-faint click-type sound.  My heart sinks.  No, no, no please tell me she hasn't shoved it in there so now that it is stuck.  I investigate.  I pull on the cone and it comes out...leaving the vanilla scoop wedged in there.  Now what?  After many different tries and experiments with various makeshift tools (fork, utility knife, wire, hair frosting hook, drill) the toy is still stuck.  Not only is it still stuck, it's getting pushed back further into the speaker.  This only amounts to is an exercise in frustration (compounded with Madeline demanding to watch various movies).  Finally, I thought to use a melted glue stick to retract the toy out.  This works only to bring it back some, but not past the ridge that is keeping it stuck.  The glue stick just pulls off again.  So back to the other tools at my disposal.  I use everything in my arsenal along WITH my glue stick to keep it from getting shoved back further and VIOLA!  One extracted toy scoop of ice cream.  Whew!  Jesse is now calling me MaGyver.  I like that, but maybe I should be Ma'Gyver?

My covert husband

So I talked Jesse into taking a photo of the house on his way to work to show the weird fencing going on in the owner's driveway.  I had originally estimated the alcove to be 1x12 foot.  But now that I see it in daylight, I think it is 1 foot by much more than that...maybe over 20 feet possibly.  It's a real head-scratcher.  Why does the new owner find this to be remotely a good thing to do?  I am not the only one.  I see various people across the street just standing in their yards looking     as perplexed, staring at the house that is slowly becoming encased in a wooden capsule.  People walking down the street and cannot help themselves from looking at it with a furrowed brow.  I know what they are thinking because I am thinking it too.  They are saying to themselves, "What are these people doing??"

Covert action...FOILED!!

So this morning I tried to go out first thing in the morning to take pictures of the other side of the house.  They have attached fencing DIRECTLY to the house itself in some areas and have completely fenced in the small 1 foot by twelve foot area between their driveway and house (thus making unusuable space for the new owners...??).  It's really hard to explain so I was really hoping to get a photo.  But I was foiled!!!  I got up early and walked down the street.  As soon as I turned the corner I found myself in the neighbor's driveway staring at the back of the worker's freshly parked SUV.  So I scurried off.  I did manage to get a photo of the front of their house from our driveway.  I returned to a confused and somewhat still asleep Madeline asking, "Mommy, what you doing?"

The Wooden Fortress

So the house that was sitting vacant next door for the last couple of years just recently sold.  That seemed like good news until the workers showed up to install the new fence.  We had to intervene as the worker was measuring to lay out a 6 foot fence in the front yard that encroached on our property.  I won't go into all the details...but I will suffice to say that twice we had to stop construction on our property and also a good deal of our mature greenery on our side yard was chopped down by the workers.  The pictures can show you the progress of the wooden fortress so far.  I get the feeling the new owner is not interested in making any friends.  The 20+ foot tall fence in the back is still under construction.  The 6 foot front yard privacy fence appears to be complete.