Neighborhood Highlights

There's a pretty famous short story called "Lopper Man" about a guy who goes around trimming bushes and tree branches that obstruct the sidewalks in his city, I don't remember the author but it's worth reading if you can find it.  If you can't, contact me and I'll see if I can help you out.
We had neighbors who never trimmed the hedges along the sidewalk and rarely shoveled the walk in winter.  Since we live on a street with a pedestrian bridge at the end of it this has always bugged me (and many others I'm sure) to the point I would shovel a path past their property so at least I could walk by without it being icy from the packed snow, but I never did anything about the hedge. 
When new folks bought the house and started working their asses off to make up for 20 years of neglect I thought all would be good again.  They trimmed the hedge, but never quite got it off the sidewalk, and the first winter they had to move for a job so they rented out the house and thought they'd contracted someone to shovel.  It never got shoveled except when I did it and then contacted them and they found out the person they were paying wasn't doing it.
Recently there was an article in the paper about handicapped people and issues they have with sidewalk obstructions and I used it to my advantage by sending it to the homeowners and offering to cut the hedge myself to help everyone out.  I'm like that ya' know.
Three and a half hours of trimming and you can see the dark area on the sidewalk that had hedges draped over for over a decade.  Of course Bean has to pee on the telephone pole most of the time so we still walk to the left, but Gail and I can now remain hand-in-hand when we walk by together.