dailies

I admit, I’ve become (or perhaps, always was) a neighborhood spy. I work from home, with an office that faces out on the street. I see everything. One day I’ll become the crotchety old man next door, but for now, I’m the quiet nosey neighbor.

Our neighbors across the street are currently under my evil eye treatment. The problem is that they leave all of their vehicles warming up in the morning F O R E V E R. Looks like a dude and his wife and their four huge dogs. He drives a diesel SuperDuty, she, a Tahoe. Neither of which are particularly environmentally conscious. He gets up every morning and starts that truck up, and the Tahoe at the same time, and let’s them warm up while he gets ready for work. This usually amounts to at least 15 minutes (sometimes twice that) of the diesel running before he leaves. The Tahoe, mind you, runs the entire time, PLUS an additional 30+ minutes before she comes out and drives it away.

This morning I got up just as the diesel was leaving. She didn’t leave for 40 minutes after that. FORTY MINUTES that V8 was idling in the driveway “warming up.” Nevermind the fact that he probably started it 20 minutes before I even noticed. I find this to be an infuriating insult to our environment and the economy. The #1 air pollution cause in Fort Collins (and I suspect much of the world) is from automobile exhaust. It seems that no matter when you look outside, one of those trucks sits idling with the headlights lighting up the garage door.

Sigh. What do I do? Nothing? Leave a note or some anonymous article highlighting Colorado’s increasingly polluted air? If I had real balls I’d march over there and shut the frickin’ things off, but of course that would land me in another undesirable situation. How can you be that dumb to let your car sit running for over an hour every morning? It probably only takes her ten minutes to get to work.