City living

We really love our neighborhood. It's fairly quiet. It has a lot of amenities that are close by and even walking distance. You can walk to the library, parks, bicycle-pedestrian path, post office, grocery stores, video store, Target, a couple great coffee shops, a farmers' market, and a bunch of restaurants. We have great neighbors and love being in an older neighborhood. That being said, living in the city can have some downsides. One of them we discovered last night.

While I was penning my poetic attempt in the last blog entry (no offers to publish it yet), I thought I heard some strange knocking or scratching noises outside or on another part of the house. I couldn't tell where they were coming from, so I got up and looked around outside a bit but didn't see anything or hear anything else. I made sure the doors were locked and forgot about it.

Fifteen minutes later I hear conversations outside and a bit later see two police officers with flashlights going car to car. They find one car with four people crouched down in the seats directly in front of our house and proceed to arrest them. It turns out this crew was breaking into cars up and down the block. In the morning you could see based on the piles of glass from the broken side windows where they started and where they ended. They were doing each car in a row indiscriminately. Based on where they were stopped in their activities and arrested, our car would have been the next target. All told, we counted at least 16 cars broken into the next day. A pretty prolific group. Thank goodness the police actually caught these instigators. So often these kinds of crime aren't solvable or don't get the attention of the police.

So, it's a bitter-sweet story. Our car wasn't broken into, but a lot of others were. No one likes to have arrests made in front of their house, but it's nice that the perpetrators were actually caught.

We still love where we live. But incidents like this leave a bad taste in the mouth for a while.