Living in the Hood

Warning: If you are Ed or Nikki's mother, you should stop reading now.

Ed and I used to think we lived in a safe neighborhood. We walk around a lot and never see scary people loitering about.

Then one day we looked at the crime report in the random neighborhood paper that someone throws in our driveway every week (usually we just drive on until it's reduced to pulp and then we peel it off the driveway and throw it away). In our little town of Albany (15K people) there were 5-10 car break-ins, a couple of auto thefts and an armed robbery. When I mentioned this to my neighbor who lives two streets over, she said that their cars had been broken into on the street, her husband's truck had been stolen, and she suspects some kind of drug operation is going on at the end of her street.

Then today, 4 policemen knocked on my door asking if they could search my backyard because they are chasing a bad guy and he might be back there. Yikes. I peeked through the window - first they sent their dog to sniff around, then when he started eating a weed instead of looking for the bad guy, they all walked back there with their guns out. I went and stood in the front room - I didn't want to be hit by a stray bullet.

A few minutes later, I heard them yelling in the neighbor's backyard. Hopefully that means they caught him. If not, maybe he's hiding in our unlocked shed. I didn't see them look in there and I didn't want to startle them by yelling out the window when they were all standing there with guns drawn.

Now maybe Ed will understand my obsession with keeping the doors looked when we're at home.