Non-medical school related rant (just a warning)

We have this neighbor.

Oh, and this will be a long post.

Sigh.

She is somewhat nosy and very picky about having things done her way.

Which is fine and all, as long as she is only picky about her stuff.

We have this tree.

Wait, back up. SHE has this tree. Most of this tree has berries that fall on our side. It is a Mountain Ash tree.

It produces fruit in spring and then the fruit fall off. Into our yard. We don't like these berries for a few reasons: the dogs eat them, the dogs track the berries into our house, and we track the berries into our house. Granted, the berries aren't poisonous to our dogs, but I still don't want them eating things that they shouldn't.

We have spoken with out neighbor a few times about this tree. She just keeps telling us, "Well, the berries aren't poisonous. You should just keep outside shoes and inside shoes. "

We aren't sure how the shoe recommendation would work for our dogs.

She was nice a few months ago and somewhat trimmed the branches (with a professional service).

Oh yeah. ALL OF THE BRANCHES ARE ON OUR SIDE OF THE FENCE. So she has the trunk on her side, and the berries on our side.

Mike spoke with her earlier this week and asked if we could remove some of the branches that had berries on it. She agreed to let him do that. But there was a miscommunication. She assumed that we only meant the tiny branches that directly held the berries. Mike meant the big branches that held branches and branches and branches of berries.

So we cut one down this evening. And while our neighbor was staring out of her window down into our yard, she realized that something was happening that she didn't like.

To make a long and annoying conversation shorter, the result was this:
-Neighbor doesn't want us taking down any branches, she acknowledged on her own that all of the branches are on our side, and she thinks that this is a malicious attack on her (side note on that one... She had her tree pruning service out earlier in July and when they trimmed some other trees of hers and some branches fell on our property. No biggie. What happened was that when the pruning people came onto our property to clean up the branches without asking permission, they removed one of Mike's broccoli plants. One plant isn't a big deal. But was kind of crappy that they didn't even try and pay attention to his vegetable garden when cleaning up. Our neighbor was told about this, because we wanted to say that if they prune branches WE would clean it up. She made the pruning service buy Mike new seeds. Not what we were going after.) So when she went inside her house, she muttered, "One broccoli plant, one branch. I see."
-Neighbor complained about one of our trees that was completely on our property and said that it blocked light on her property so that she couldn't grow what she wanted there. She then offered to remove the tree with the berries if we removed that tree. We agreed.

She didn't like that response. She put herself between a rock and a hard place because she made an offer that she needs to follow through with. We have already started removing big branches from our tree.

The only thing that we could have done differently was pay a professional pruning service to remove the branches that have berries on our yard. But, as she pointed out, that would make it so she basically has no tree there.

We have spoken with her for months about this. We have tried to be very nice about it. But tonight it came down to saying that it is our property and we don't want them there. Mike and I don't want to piss off our neighbors, but you can only do so much.

Argh!

Sorry for the super long rant about nothing related to medicine. I just cannot believe how amazing this is. It really makes me mad that she thinks Mike would do this just to "get back" at her about a stupid broccoli plant. Are you kidding?