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Moving? Secure Your New House Well

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The burglar's handy toolkit
The burglar’s handy toolkit

Once again, a homeowner moves in and shortly afterwards someone comes visiting and steals him blind. The latest incident —  in which the thieves took some $15,000 worth of the guy’s tools — happened in a solidly upper-middle-class East-Valley suburb, lending some truth to what the cop told me at the time of the Garage Invasion episode: that this stuff happens all over the city, pretty uniformly, and it doesn’t much matter where you live.

Around here, moving companies apparently will hire anyone with a strong back and enough hunger to take a job hauling furniture and boxes. The result: some moving guys “moonlight”…literally. So, often people will get themselves moved in and then within a few days or weeks find some uninvited guests have carted off their possessions. And equally often, it’s painfully obvious that the intruders knew how to get in, what to look for, and where to find it.

When SDXB moved into the fixer-upper he bought here in the neighborhood, he (and the moving guys…) found the back door was unsecured — no functional deadbolt on it, and a glass pane in the cheap Home Depot-style door. Moving all his junk in was quite a job, and at some point along the line, he and I remarked that he should come over to my house for dinner and stay the night there, rather than trying to dig out his sheets and shovel aside junk so he could use the bedroom there.

Next  morning he found the back door open and all his boxes cut open and rifled through. They were looking for weapons: they took all his good hunting knives, and a machete he’d picked up as a souvenir while he was stationed in Guatemala.

Mistake #1: He’d pasted an NRA sticker in his truck’s window.

Fortunately, SDXB had the foresight to stash his small arsenal of pistols, rifles, and shotguns at his mother’s place, so the thieves didn’t get any of his armaments. But that’s what they were looking for.

After SDXB moved to Sun City, the new owners of his house had almost the same thing happen. By then, of course, the doors had been secured. The City (which bought the house and handed it over to this couple as part of a relocation project when one of the barrios near the airport was leveled for a new runway) had paid for some very nice renovations. The couple goes off to shop or socialize and, in broad daylight, burglars enter the house. They know the dogs are harmless, and if they haven’t already become pals, throwing a couple handsful of dog kibble all across the kitchen floor made them best of friends. This time the perps stole several hundred dollars in cash, which (you may be sure) a family from the Third-World barrios near the airport could not spare. The couple did have homeowner’s insurance, but the insurance company refused to reimburse them because they couldn’t prove they even had cash in the house, much less how much it was.

A cop and his family moved in down the street. Wasn’t long before someone raided his shed and stole some tires he’d stored there. Unsurprisingly, in that case the perp was caught.

We all know, I suppose, the basic security rules of living in the big city (or in any place where your possessions aren’t red-hot or nailed down). But to those, let’s add a few strategies to keep your possessions and family safe during and after a move.

• Never place an NRA sticker on your vehicle! And don’t leave any copies of American Hunter laying around where movers can see them. Advertising that you’re a member of the NRA is the same as advertising that you have guns in the house. If you want to support the NRA, send them a check.

• Assume any crew of moving men is suspect. Don’t buy a moving company’s assurance that their guys have worked there for ten years.

→ Be present and watchful during the entire moving process.
→ Don’t leave the house to get food or run errands while the movers are present.
→ Do not say, within their earshot, that you intend to go out for dinner, run errands, or stay somewhere else overnight.
→ Emit disinformation in their presence: say you’re taking time off work or (better yet) that you’re retired or unemployed and always around the house.
→ Don’t mention owning any valuables while movers are working — don’t talk about jewelry, guns, cash, tools, hobbies that might entail marketable tools or products, collectibles, or the like

• Hire a reputable moving company. Using a nationally recognized company such as Mayflower’s interstate moving services will help improve safety.

• Stash jewelry and sentimental items at someone else’s house or in a storage unit while the move takes place. Leave them there for several weeks afterward.

• If you’re in the trades, stash your tools at the shop or at a friend’s or relative’s house, and move them into your new house later, without benefit of moving men. If you keep your tools in your truck, park it — locked — inside the garage (and lock the garage, too).

• If at all possible, have the locks rekeyed and high-quality deadbolts installed before moving day. If you don’t have access to the house before then, get a locksmith in on the day of the move.

• If the house has an alarm system, learn to use it right away, and activate it.

• Install security doors with pick-proof Medeco or Schlage locks. These are expensive and available only through locksmiths, but they are so worth the cost.

• F’rhvevvinsake, if you park your car or truck on the driveway, don’t leave the garage door opener in it! 😀

Image: Burglary tools found in bank, Canadian Illustrated News, 1875. Public Domain

Happy Hallowe’en(?)

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halloween themeSomebody no doubt got grant money for this WTF research. It may even have been taxpayer-supported grant money. You, too, can be surprised and shocked that 30% of kids will kipe an extra piece of candy when left alone with a bowlful of temptations!

Actually, the surprise is that 70% will not.

The political preference angle is pretty entertaining, though: in an overall politically liberal neighborhood, more little kids will gravitate to a table offering free candy from the Democratic presidential candidate rather than from the Republican’s table. Oddly, the researchers seem not to have tried a similar “experiment” in a politically conservative neighborhood, so we may never know whether children are partisan or whether they just happen to like Barack Obama’s face better than they like John McCain’s. 🙄

Far more interesting, IMHO, is this op-ed rumination from The New York Post on how the over-parenting Grinch stole Hallowe’en.

Have you noticed how high the stress levels have become in our culture? People are afraid of everything! We’re scared of our food. We’re scared of our air. We’re scared of the weather. We’re scared of guns. We’re scared of burglars. We’re scared of the cops. We’re scared of terrorists. We’re scared of Big Brother. We’re scared of our cars. We’re scared of panhandlers. We’re scared of sugar. We’re scared of salt. We’re scared of laundry detergent. We’re scared of our schools. We’re scared of dogs. We’re scared of cats. We’re scared of strangers. We’re scared of our mother. We’re scared of our laminate flooring. God knows we’re scared of clowns!

The only thing we’re justifiably scared of is our choice of Presidential candidates. Which, I suppose, is the same as being scared of clowns.

Heh heh… I wonder how many trick-or-treaters will show up dressed as Hillary or Donald?

Hallowe’en is my favorite holiday. Because the ‘hood borders on several low-income neighborhoods infested with violence, prostitution, and drug houses, people who are unfortunate enough to have to bring up families there bundle their kids up and bring them over here, where it’s reasonably safe for them to walk from door to door after dark, and where it’s only moderately insane to knock on a stranger’s door.

The kids show up by the pickup truckload.

In response, here in the neighborhood a kind of informal block party has grown up. Everybody sets up a table and chairs (and scary decorations!) on their driveways, the easier to view the happenings and dispense candy to the hordes of cute little kids. A great deal of socializing goes on and the show proceeds.

The kids are adorable in their spectacular outfits. Because many of these parents can’t afford to buy an expensive costume, a lot of the children show up in wonderfully creative hand-made costumes. It’s really fun to see what they’ve come up with.

So this evening we’ll convene in my neighbor’s driveway. For the first time in years, I bought a giant load of Costco Hallowe’en candy. Last year we ran out of a stash of 150 pieces. So this year we’ll have 300 pieces.

It’ll be interesting to see how long that lasts.

Vector image by Aleksandrsb, DepositPhotos

Shots Fired…

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Not at the Funny Farm, thank God. But down the street.

Up early this morning to get ready to take some friends out to breakfast. Very early: since I won’t eat restaurant breakfasts (especially when I’m trying to drop eight pounds…), I have to get something to eat before going out to eat. 😀 So the dogs and I are are sitting around reading the morning play-nooz headlines, the doors open to let the dogs out in back and to let the cool air and the mosquitoes in, when wap wap! Shots ring out.

Shee-ut.

Well, it was a ways off — probably on Main Drag East/West. Could even have been on the next arterial south of that — the night was quiet and the air still.

But it’s annoying. People take pot-shots at their fellow homicidal drivers on the city streets. It’s really not very safe to drive around near a gang-infested slum, a term that describes most of the territory west of Conduit of Blight Blvd.

Yesterday afternoon a cop helicopter buzzed the neighborhood at rooftop heights for a good forty minutes. They were mostly over La Maya and La Bethulia’s house.  So common are these events now that I couldn’t find even a passing mention of it on any of the news channels. The two women being out of town, I couldn’t get the dope from them, either.

And where are they? Yarnell, of course. Thence to spend several days in Sedona. {grump!}

Sometimes I think…really…I should sell this house and move to Yarnell or Prescott. Or at least to Fountain Hills.

But…my son is here, and the choir is here. My whole life is based in North Central Phoenix. Fountain Hills, a quiet tract just east of Scottsdale, is close enough to that tony tourist trap that one could drive into town for some expensive groceries and high-end clothing. But it’s surely too far from the church to commute in twice a week…and at my age, there’s NO way I’m driving way to hell and gone out to Fountain Hills at 9 p.m., after midweek choir practice.

Nor do I especially want to live an hour’s drive (when it’s not rush hour) away from my son.

Speaking of driving the homicidal streets, yesterday I washed Phryne for the first time. She’s easier to launder than the Dog Chariot, because she’s not as tall…but the job does still require one to climb up on a stepladder.

And speaking of Phryne LaVenza, lemme tellya about Toyota’s later-model six-banger. HOLEEEEE SH!T!

This thing behaves like the old, titanic Mercedes-Benz engine used to behave: the one designed for drag-racing on the Autobahn. In my ex-husband’s great old Mercedes, once you were at speed, you could just barely touch the gas pedal and the damn thing would shoot off like one of Werner von Braun’s wildest dreams.

Welp. Yesterday for the first time I got on the freeway in the Venza. Traffic was relatively light, it being not quite rush hour.

Mwa ha ha! At last, a chance to let her rip….

More or less: I didn’t even floor it. I just pressed the gas pedal down. The damn thing shot off like a rocket! From 55 mph, I’m sure you could hit 85 in 5 seconds. Maybe less.

So…though her shell is made of plastic that even the cheesiest pistol could penetrate, you could probably dodge the shitheads’ bullets if you knew someone was taking aim! Assuming no morons were blocking the way ahead of you. 😉

It’s quite a powerful engine. That, and of course the Venza is much lighter than the old Mercedes used to be. Those cars were made of metal. A fair amount of Phryne’s body will not hold a magnet. Some of it will. But a lot of it is just plastic. And the newer designs are a lot more streamlined than the old Benz was — I imagine it cuts through the air a lot more efficiently.

Hm. I have gotta take Phryne out on the open road and see what she really can do…

 

A Gorgeous New Day…for Dieting

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What a beautiful day! Clear and cool and indescribably gorgeous. If only we were in Yarnell.

The woochies and I started the day with a crack-of-dawn doggy-walk. Between the damn train and the constant construction, the ’hood has become a noisy place. Especially in the evening, the racket from Conduit of Blight Boulevard is now almost as loud here as it was at my old house, near War Zone Corners. Though this house is in the same tract, it’s generally much quieter: far enough from the Corners that the cop helicopters don’t park on the roof at 11:30 p.m. every Friday and Saturday night, and generally far enough from Conduit of Blight to fade the traffic racket to a distant rumble.

But when the atmospheric conditions are right — as they are when the weather is lovely — the Blight Conduit noise is as loud a roar here as it was in the old house, where some evenings SDXB and I had to shout to make ourselves heard if we had any misbegotten ideas about enjoying an after-dinner drink in the backyard.

Seriously: if there were any infrastructure in Yarnell, I’d move up there in an instant. But: no doctor, no dentist, no vet, one antiquated gas station, a general store for groceries…that’s fine when you’re a young pup, I guess, but at a certain point in life you move beyond your enthusiasm for driving two hours to get to a Costco or a medical specialist.

Oh well. This morning was perfect for breakfast on the back patio. To my horror, I discovered that after losing .5 pounds as of yesterday a.m., I gained .4 back this morning. DAMN!

This, after a fair amount of vigorous activity, including a speed walk of 2+ miles in the afternoon heat. Must have been the polenta. Or…more likely, the beer I had with the mid-day steak and salad.

So we won’t be buying any more beer soon. 😀

I’m about out of food, marking time now until the end of this month’s budget cycle. Out of the melons, apples, and papaya that have been breakfast — and melon is now out of season, so I’m going to have to come up with something new to eat in the morning. Breakfast in America is a challenge when you don’t eat eggs.

But today I dreamed up this: grilled mahi topped with a sort of guacamole made on the fly. It was incredibly good!

Costco sells some factory-made “guacamole” in small, single-serving packets, perfect for smearing on a sandwich or a few crackers. Its drawback is that it does contain some salt, which just now I’m trying to do without by way of engineering a fake but dramatic (morale-building) weight drop. But it tastes pretty good for commercial stuff, and it’s mostly avocado. Better would be to take half a small, ripe avocado and mash it.

To this add a bit of ground cumin (maybe about a quarter tsp±) and, if you have it, a squeeze of fresh lime or lemon. Toss in some chopped tomato. Mix it up.

Rub a slab of fish with some olive oil; sprinkle with herbs to your taste (herbes de Provence came to hand this morning). Cook to perfection over a propane grill. Serve it up with the avocado dressing smeared over it.

Had a few grapes with it: they’re in season just now and very delicious.

This kind of good-for-you food is surprisingly easy to make, especially if you have a propane grill and weather that allows you to cook outside year-round.

The Borderlands Food Bank folk will be back in the neighborhood come the first Saturday of November. I will be there when they open, around 8 a.m. Sixty pounds of produce for $10 just about defies belief! I’m still eating the frozen servings of eggplant lasagne I made from their largesse last spring. Unfortunately, I put some rotelli in it to stretch it, which worked nicely but which militates against using the stuff as diet food.

The main features of the 30-day/4 Months Diet are

• Lots of fruit & veggies, in salads or cooked
• Fresh meats and fish
• No added salt
• No processed sugar (but fruits are allowed)
• No refined starches (i.e., nothing with any kind of flour in it)
• Few or no other food starches (i.e., avoid potatoes, rice, corn, processed cereals, peas…)
• 40 to 60 minutes of moderate exercise per day (i.e., a decent brisk walk or two)

Honest to God. It is just too obscenely beautiful to (ugh!) work today. I feel like dropping everything, tossing the dogs in the car, and baptizing Phryne LaVenza on Yarnell Hill.

Buy this book, my friends, so I will never have to work again. 🙂

cookbook

Microgardening?

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🙂 I’d put money on it that I’m not the first to dream up that term, “microgardening.” And no, I’m not gunna google it to find out.

The various tiny gardens around the yard are springing to life, now that fall (Arizona’s second spring) is here. Not feeling excessively ambitious this year, I decided a) to plant things in pots, not the weed-prone ground; and b) to experiment with grocery-store gardening.

The latter entails sprouting new veggies from scraps left over in the kitchen. Check out this little guy, for example:

microgardenlettuceThat is the stump end from a head of romaine lettuce. Turns out if you set it in about an inch of water for a few days and then plant it in dirt, it sprouts a whole new head of lettuce! It’s only been in the pot a few days, and it’s already put out a healthy-looking spray of deep-green leaves.

I planted another one in a different pot, only from a head of red leaf lettuce. It’s alive but not going to town like this one — possibly because it doesn’t get as much light?

We’re told, too that you can do this trick with little green onions: just plant the nipped-off root end in the dirt and watch it sprout. Okayyy…still watching:

microgardenonionsetsMoving on, I did condescend to buy and plant some chard seeds, a totally can’t-miss plant in these parts:

microgardenchardThey’ve sprouted like crazy…and now need to be thinned, something I’ll have to get to today or tomorrow. Today a lot of work is on the plate, but I’m sure they won’t have crowded themselves into extinction by tomorrow.

micorgardenherbsAlso part of the fall microgarden are these two new additions to the herb collection: French tarragon on the left and rosemary on the left. They showed up this summer, have made it through the heat, and seem to be thriving.

This old standard has been growing for years — many, many years — in a kitschy pot from a locally owned nursery I used to patronize when I was employed but can no longer afford:

microgardenchivesApparently chives live forever and cannot be killed by neglect. I believe I brought that potful of chives over here from the old house…which would mean they’ve lived here for the past 12 years. Occasionally I add a little more dirt to the pot, to replace the soil that slowly rinses out through the bottom hole. Love chives.

The Thai basil and the regular basil also are in good shape, but they’ll die back when the weather cools. For the nonce, though, they’re great with tomatoes of any sort, cooked or  raw.

microgardenbasilThey also live in the shade and don’t seem to mind it. That thing that looks like an onion isn’t (I don’t think…). I believe it’s an iris or some such. Though why an iris would decide to sprout now escapes me. Sooner or later, I suppose, we’ll see.

The weather remains surprisingly warm. Yesterday — almost the end of October! — I was in the pool and it was wonderful. Crisp but not bone-jarring. Temps have been in the mid-90s and the sky generally clear. So I guess the combination of the warm air and the direct sunlight is keeping the water a little warmer than usual. This afternoon, if I can get quit of the most urgent computer-based work, I plan to jump in again, after overheating myself with some more pruning and digging.

Sometime within the next few days (today?), I need to soak the ground in the poolside flowerbed and extract the goddamned bermudagrass that took it over this summer.

microgardenbermudagrass

The evil weed has about been killed off from repeated applications of Over-the-Top, a grass killer, which I ordered from Amazon because it’s almost impossible to buy in these parts.

Unfortunately, it’s not its old self. The current product contains Sethoxydim, which only sorta works. The old Over-the -Top really, truly did work on grasses without taking out broad-leafed plants. But it’s no longer available…at least, not as Over-the-Top. The new product stinks something fierce: you really need to use disposable gloves when applying, so as not to get it on your hands. Yuch!

As it happened, a few days ago I decided to clean out the garage cabinets. And what should I find but a years-old squirt bottle of the original Over-the-Top! Instead of Sethoxydim, the original stuff contained fluazifop-p-butyl. Wondering if it still worked, I tried it on the still-vigorous, barely scathed bermudagrass. And LO! The old stuff WORKS! As in it really works: the bermudagrass promptly croaked over, leaving only the chore of yanking it out of the ground and freeing air and water resources for the surviving Mexican primrose.

You can still get fluazifop-p-butyl — apparently it’s not one of the effective products that have been taken out of consumers’ gummy little hands, after all. It’s in Ornamec 170 herbicide…also available on Amazon. A US Forest Service risk assessment of this chemical suggests the  risk to humans is fairly low; don’t spray it on food crops, don’t pour it in ponds, lakes, or streams, and don’t saturate the ground with it. Use it, literally, “over the top”: a little goes a long way.

And so…to work.

Why You Shouldn’t Carry a Purse…

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The older you get, the more inviting a target you become for various kinds of low-life. This morning while perusing the electronic news, I came across a squib posted last June (the local play-nooz outfits really don’t understand about “yesterday’s news”) describing a purse-snatching in a local McDonald’s:

A man in his early 20s walked into the busy dining room and spotted a 65-year-old woman.

“He walks past her once, then starts walking towards her again and, this time, grabs her purse,” Burch said. “The woman hangs on, fighting for her purse. As she fell to the ground, the guy literally dragged her across the floor, breaking her finger.”

Uh huh. Pretty par for the course.

This is why I don’t carry a purse unless I absolutely have to. I have a spare driver’s license hidden in the car (you can get a copy by telling DOT you ran yours through the washer or the dog ate it). If I know I’m going someplace that will accept my credit cards, I stick the plastic in a pocket.

It’s a nuisance if you’re a woman, because many — maybe most — women’s clothes have no pockets. That’s why I live in Costco blue jeans: they have five pockets. It means either I can’t run any errands after church or else I have to wear my dungarees to church. None of my presentable clothes have pockets sturdy enough to hold a weighty collection of car and house keys. Fortunately, choir members robe up for the services, so no one knows that one of us looks like an old hippie girl.

Purse-snatchers can be quite violent. Women are often injured in these attacks, and elderly women are frequently targets because they look helpless. The perpetrators are very nasty people, indeed. One of my neighbors, who has since (for obvious reasons) moved away from the ’hood, was shot by a purse-snatcher at one of the corner shopping malls. She and her daughter had gone into a sewing machine and vacuum repair shop. They started to leave, and the guy grabbed her purse as she stepped out the door. Startled, she jumped back and yelled at her daughter to stay inside the store. He thought she was resisting, so he shot her.

So. Don’t carry a purse unless there’s some very good reason that you have to. And if you do have a purse with you, carry your car keys separately, in a pocket.

There really isn’t much defense against some jerk grabbing your purse. Here’s a pretty sappy list of helpful hints, some of them obvious, some of them hopelessly stupid.

My late mother-in-sin favored a belly-bag, which she used to call her “purse.” All those things that women haul around in purses were strapped to her waist. That surely is an option — IMHO not a very aesthetic one, but effective. A purse-snatcher is more likely to accost someone else than to try to unbuckle or cut through a strap running under your sweater or jacket.

You can get small, minimalist wallets to carry your cards in — some of these will fit in a decent-size pocket. Here’s another one that looks better organized and maybe a little classier. If you’re old, though, you have to haul a raft of Medicare ID around with you, and so keeping photocopies of your Medicare card (with the Social Security number blacked out), Medigap, and Part D cards in your car along with a spare driver’s license is probably the path of least resistance.

If you simply must have your lipstick, your Kleenex, your packets of glasses cleaner, your sunglasses, your reading glasses, your cough drops, your notebook and pen, your checkbook, your phone, your business cards, all your accursed store “member” cards, your calendar, the key to the gym locker, your comb and brush, a mirror, and the kitchen sink with you at all times, wear clothing with serious pockets and put your phone, charge card, and driver’s license in them.

Then carry nothing in the purse but the throw-away junk.