I believe that the neighbor who called on me was probably up to some illegal activities of his own -I say this because aside from being very stand-offish, they had vehicles coming and going at some pretty odd hours (and this coming from a guy who works night-shift) and the place always looked a bit trashy (well, trashier than mine anyway-haha) -in any case, after a few months, they just up and left and the house has been vacant ever since (the owner comes by from time to time to cut the yard but thats about it) -and this was over a year ago.
MY theory was that they called on US to divert any attention from him -figuring (I guess) that if someone called on them, they could claim it was some revenge thing or something. I really don't know.
Until that neighbor, it has always been a neighborhood where everyone pretty much minded their own business. But I HAVE noticed that this is less so now than it used to be.
Shoot, someone calls the fire dept. everytime (and I mean EVERY TIME) I fire up my meat smoker in the back yard. Its a wood-fired home-made smoker that has an 8 rib rack capacity (grin) -though at times I'll smoke some grains to make a smoked porter -to keep the temp on the bottom of the scale (so as not to cook the barley anymore than it already was by the maltster) I only start a very small fire and lob some oak or hickory on the flames, and smoke about a half pound or so of 2-row for about an hour. Results (so far) have been pretty good. I'd like to try peat some time.
Sorry, got a bit off topic there.