New Neighbours

I guess at some point we've all had odd neighbours, or neighbours that we wouldn't normally choose to socialise with, if we met them at a function etc. Well, we have a woman who lives behind us who is quite mad.... She screams at all hours, she mimics the birds in the trees, she barks at her dogs - You could say that she's barking mad! By the way, I might just add, that her dog was born deaf..... We are (very) slowly learning to deal with her very odd and noisy behaviour. Trust me when I say it has not been easy, and after only living here for a short period of time, we were seriously considering going further into debt, and selling up to get away from the constant and intrusive noise pollution.

Okay, so that woman lives behind us, so the neighbour on one side of us is an older single male and has one son who lives with him. He's pleasant enough and we very rarely see him. On the other side, we had an elderly couple..... He used to open our mail, peak through the fence when we had female friends over for a swim in the pool, tell the other neighbours that I didn't like him because he was Maltese..... The funny thing is that my wife's parents are Maltese... So, What the?!?! He would badger me about our mortgage.... He would tell me that he would pay our mortgage outright, and then we could pay him back at 'different rates'.... He was as dodgy as all hell. Just because someone is old, doesn't mean that they are 'sweet little old' things. 

Gradually he got the message that I didn't want his money and that I didn't appreciate him opening our mail. One day he simply stopped acknowledging us, which I honestly didn't lose any sleep over. Prior to this, if I was out the front - mowing the lawn or getting into my car and I saw him, I would wave and he would wave back..... Then it just stopped, it was as if he was looking right through us.... It was quite odd.

Anyway, about two months ago their house went up for sale and sold very quickly. We're actually expecting new neighbours to move in any day now, as people have been in cleaning the house. I have two things weighing on my mind regarding the new neighbours.... The first is that the old neighbour taunted our Labrador Angel through the fence, even though I had repeatedly told him not to do it..... So whenever the old couple were in the backyard or they had a tradesman in the backyard, Angel would go ballistic as I'm sure she was waiting for him to approach the fence - which he did finally stop doing, however the pattern of behaviour had already been set in motion.

My gorgeous Labrador Angel with her rope toy.

So my concern is, that Angel will view the new neighbours as being either 'the old neighbours or tradesmen' and go nuts at the fence every time the new neighbours go outside. I have googled for answers regarding dogs and new neighbours... Most of the sites had the same info, which was to invite the neighbours in to meet your dog. Okay, yeah that makes sense... But what if - and this is the second thing weighing on my mind.... What if the new neighbours aren't the kind of people that we would either choose not to 'normally' socialise with or for whatever reason, we don't want them in our home?

Angel rolling around playing with her toys.

Angel is not by any means an aggressive dog, she's a rescue dog who was badly neglected when she was a puppy and just loves people. I guess only time will tell what's going to happen when our new neighbours move in, and how Angel will react to them...... I can only hope that things will sort themselves out.