It’s almost Halloween time again and strange things are occurring.  Spooky movies on television, scary candy in the grocery aisles, and strange things are afoot – at the Circle K?  Nope.  In our neighbourhood.

A few days ago I noticed that someone had moved in and, from the looks of it, had set up shop.  Brochures, knick knacks, company car, you name it.  I commented that the place now looks like Elle Woods’s dorm room (except this woman is old enough to know better.)  Now it looks like, well, a salon.  There are 50s Hollywood photos in the hall, a huge full-length mirror in the landing, funky plant type things here and there but, the best part, is the corner by the window (stuff on the windows, against the window, on the floor by the windows…)  I don’t even think Paula Deen would have this much country home junk in her dining room.  Steve pointed out that it’s like a fungus; the decorations just keep growing as they try to take over.

Needless to say, this is a block of flats so, again, this is right outside our front door.  For my Floridian friends, this would be like living in a hotel or a bed and breakfast like this so the hallway between your room and the room across from you was flooded with household wall coverings and big glass planters.  There are two flats per floor and 3/4 of the “common” area has been taken up with Ms. Woods’s decor.

While I won’t bother going into the details of what the company is, I will say that despite our overseer telling her to take down the brochures, the junk is still there.  We apparently have no rights or say over this.  We can’t even object to the art print sketch of the nude woman that I discovered this morning going up the stairway on the other side of our door this morning either. 

I’ve thought of plenty of things to do with said junk, but instead, I purchased Mr. Skeleton up here to counteract the tacky.  I’ve been tempted to do everything from putting cobwebs on the stuff in the window.  But now that we’ve experienced Elle coming over at 7PM just to vacuum the hallway (something we have done by a cleaning lady each week, by the way, and why would you worry about just the hallway if you weren’t setting up a business) we’ve just decided to annoy her.  I’ll make sure to walk through some extra dirt on the way in from bringing in my loud, light up Halloween decorations for our wall. Respectfully, Steve was playing loud punk music for a while too.  Bless him.

And if you don’t remember, this is the Nightmare on My Street original.