$300 for mediation actually sounds pretty reasonable to me (a lawyer friend told me similar disputes can hit thousands in legal fees). I actually side with your neighbor here though - you moved next to someone who wanted a taller fence and then used the city rule to force him to redo it 18 inches back. That's basically making him eat the cost of a whole new install just because you didn't like his choice. 6 months is actually fast for government stuff too, I've seen property line fights take over a year in Calgary easy.

it's like how every recipe tells you to add more garlic and then suddenly your food just tastes like burnt garlic instead of actual flavor. we kind of get trained to think more = better, especially with texture and volume. but fine hair doesn't have the same structure as thick hair so all those layers just collapse and look sad. it's the same thing with people who pile on too many skincare products thinking they'll get glowing skin but end up breaking out instead. sometimes the simple approach is actually the smarter one, it just goes against what everyone keeps telling you is the "right" way to do things. glad you figured it out before you spent years fighting with that technique.

Flip through those 100 pages and see what you were stressing about back in March. You probably won't even remember half of it. Makes you realize most of the stuff we write down isn't worth the ink.

oh no way, @taraw16, you're totally right about the tool change thing, lol. but i gotta say, "perfection" is a stretch when you're working with tenths of an inch - 0.001" is basically a hair width, so you're probably closer to perfect than you think.

Yeah, but did you see the follow up where he admitted he was wrong? I actually felt bad for the guy, he seemed genuinely embarrassed about the whole thing. It's easy to sit here and laugh but we've all done dumb stuff in traffic when we're in a hurry. Nothing like getting caught on camera to humble you real quick. Hope he's doing alright after all that.