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A few months ago, I came across a website called RottenNeighbor.com. As the FAQ states, it is a real estate search engine geared towards helping prospective home buyers or renters find out exactly what kind of neighbors they'll be getting. Granted, it's all done by submission, but when you consider that more people are liable to talk about what awful neighbors they have as opposed to the good ones, it certainly makes sense. Unfortunately, I see only one flaw with this website; it can't warn you about horrid neighbors that move in after you do.

You see, when my husband and I first opted to rent our house, there was no one living next door. Since we live in a neighborhood of row houses (it's like a duplex, but there are four houses instead of two,) we were looking one of the end units, and there was no one living in the unit directly next to ours. However, by the time we had signed the lease and were moving in, apparently the neighboring landlord had achieved the same. So when my husband and I pulled up in front of our new home to unload our belongings, we discovered a young woman moving in at the same time. Since we were all pretty busy with getting moved in, we didn't really have the time to sit and chat, but she seemed nice enough. Just a young mother with a little girl, starting out on her own. Oh, if only we'd known.

What we didn't know was that our new next-door neighbor was, in all actuality, a banshee. For someone who spoke so sweetly and mildly out on the street, she seemed to undergo some sort of metamorphosis upon entering her home, whereupon she would shriek, wail and shout like she was being given multiple bikini waxes. Sometimes, in what we imagine were her more animated moments, she would send something flying, punctuating her screams with the sound of shattering glass.

The reason we didn't know this at first was because she moved in without her boyfriend. They apparently enjoyed an on-again/off-again romance, which we were able to gauge by the amount of noise coming from next door. When they were off, it was completely quiet; when it was on, that's when noise would start up again. And interestingly enough, the boyfriend was actually a very mellow guy; it was she who was in dire need of anger management courses. He'd just keep trying to calm her down, and once he'd had enough of her audio/visual extravaganza, he'd walk.

From what I was able to glean from one of their more epic battles (they had moved it from inside the house out onto the street,) the

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