The Strange Behavior of Neighbors

When we lived over on Hawthorne, our neighbors were a bunch of potheads and a loud nightclub/theater. The theater was a bad neighbor, no question. The potheads, aside from filling all common space in the building with the noxious smell of wasted potential, kept themselves to themselves, and that was fine with me. Our new neighborhood is, well, a neighborhood. People know each other by sight and name, they give each other flowers from their own gardens in mason jars, their kids play together. It's all very sweet and wonderful. But even good neighbors have their quirks, and with those directly next door to us, it's parking.  We kind of share a driveway - our rental seems to "own" 2/3 of it (by the fence-line). It's not really paved and rather too muddy for parking when it rains, so we usually park in front of our house, which has led the neighbor to park their car in front of their house and over their third of the driveway. This is kind of frustrating because it makes it hard to pull in front of our house (there's usually someone parked in front of the house to the other side of us too), very difficult to pull into the driveway, and just generally seems rather rude. But today took the cake for crazy weirdness.

There should be two spots in front of our house, and when we got home from the grocery store this evening, there was a car parked in the middle of both of them. Pete thought there might be enough room behind it, but there wasn't, and he began to execute a very awkward three-point turn (as the street is rather narrow) so that we could attempt the driveway. The neighbors were in their front yard, and the owner of the car waited until we had almost completed the turn to run over and offer to move her car so that we could park in front of our own house. Pete tried to wave her off and explain that we'd just park in the driveway, but no no, she was in our way and going to leave soon anyway. She got into her car and instead of backing up or moving forward into one spot or the other... are you ready for this? ...she drove forward so she was completely blocking our driveway. That's right: after taking up two spaces in front of a house she was not visiting, and after being signaled and told that we were planning to park in the driveway, she parked in front of the driveway. And the neighbors just stood there staring at us as we very awkwardly parked in front of the house. When the visitor was done obstructing our off-street parking, she got out of her car and kind of waved, and went right back to chatting with the neighbors, who still said nothing.

Maybe I'm crazy, but if that were our visitor, I would have said something, like, "Dude, don't park in front of their driveway." (Of course, none of our friends or relations would have been so nutty, but I suppose that's neither here nor there.) The question of the day is whether or not they are all members of some kind of glue sniffing club. There's really no other good explanation (not to imply that "glue sniffing club" is a good explanation) of why such otherwise nice and personable people would have such a blind spot to one of the classic Good Neighbor issues. (Parking, fences and dog poops, if you're interested.)