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Urban life

Shoring Up the Barricades

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Okay, so assuming I’m not moving away from Crime Central anytime soon—because I can’t afford anything I want to live in anyplace where I want to live—then presumably it makes sense to shore up the defenses. This house’s barricades are easy to breach: three old sliding doors, all of them ugly, two of them installed by different previous owners, two of them with locks that don’t work, and none of them energy-efficient. The handle set on the front door is falling off; every now and again I have to screw it back on. Neither of the two wooden gates is very sturdy, and one is falling apart.

I can’t afford to fix all this stuff, either…but doing so would be one helluva lot cheaper than selling this place and moving. So, I suppose I’m just going to have to raid Survival Savings and get some work done.

Friday we made a start: a Home Depot subcontractor came by and installed a security door on the kitchen door. It’s not too ugly, and unlike the gate on the front door, its metal screen lets you see out.

Well. It’s not too ugly when the kitchen door is open. With the cheapo door closed, it’s plug-hideous.

Also at the Depot, I picked up three sets of bump-resistant locks. Because these don’t have pins, they supposedly can’t be bumped. Of course, they can be drilled, but that means the Perp has to bring some equipment that can’t be carried in his pants pocket. While these KwikSet Smartkey locks can easily be picked or smashed, they’re much sturdier than the existing locks, and they’re actually quite handsome pieces of hardware.

Heh. I just learned how vulnerable they are while researching the present post, and so will return them to Home Depot and get something better (I hope) from the locksmith. Lissen up, folks: DON’T BUY KWIKSET SMARTKEY “BUMP-PROOF” LOCKS!

The door installer put these on the new security door, and while he was here took out the double-cylinder deadbolt I’d installed on the kitchen door by way of avoiding having to put a security door there and put the old single-cylinder deadbolt back on. With the security door making it harder for the Burglar to break out a light, reach in, and unlock the deadbolt, I no longer need a lock that’s keyed on the inside. That means in the event of a fire, I won’t have to grope around searching for the key to get out.

Couldn’t talk him into installing the other two lock sets on the side and front security doors, which is just as well, since I’ll have to have the locksmith come over with better locks, anyway.

Yes. The cheapo kitchen door combines with the mid-cheapo security door to hideous effect. Plus one of the unlockable sliding doors resides adjacent to the newly secured kitchen door.

So, what I’m thinking is to replace all three sliding doors with single-pane sliders, and to install a matching door in the kitchen—the kind that has just one large glass pane in it. Then all the Arcadia doors would match, they’d all have halfway decent factory-installed hardware, and once they’re supplemented with bars dropped in their tracks, screw-on locks, and door squealers, they should be relatively safe. The back door, then, would be mostly clear glass, so when you look out through it, you’d see the “decorative” (heh) ironwork of the security door: only one layer of kitsch instead of two.

These little gems are not cheap. Each will cost about $1500. On HD’s website, however, I found Anderson knockoffs by some outfit called “Masterpiece” for about  half the price. They’re probably junk—I’m having the company that installed the windows and skylights in this house give me a call, tho’ I don’t expect them to underprice anything at Home Depot, since they carry top-of-the-line products and do first-rate work. I’d rather not spend any money on this  kind of thing, but still…closing costs alone on my house would run over $12,000; and then we’d have the cost of moving my stuff across town, plus the usual mountain of bills that invariably accompanies possession of a new place. Clearly, making the place a little more perp-resistant trumps selling this house, finding a new one, and moving.

Meanwhile, as long as I’m spending money on the house, the interior really, really needs a paint job. The Alexander Julian color scheme my friend and I cooked up when I moved in here about six or seven years ago was very stylish at the time, but it’s pretty…uhm…idiosyncratic. I think I’d like to replace the surprising colors with more neutral shades, and also paint the white doors and trim brown. The color of dirt. I am tired of scouring dirt off the doors and woodwork!

Paint the woodwork the color of dirt, and the dirt won’t show. 😉

While visiting the Depot, I came across a gorgeous paint color, or so it appears in the chip. Behr is calling it “faded peach.” It’s really an off-white with just a tiny touch of peach in it. The effect is a very warm, rich neutral that picks up one of the subtle shades in the floor tiles. If someone didn’t tell you it had peach in it, you’d never know. My plan is to put this in the living room, dining room, and up the (presently orange terra-cotta) hallway. The accent wall in the living room, which is now swamp blue a kind of murky teal, will give way to “adobe straw” (a soft grayish brown) or “blanket” (brown brown, which is also going to be the color of the doors and trim). The gray in my bedroom will be covered with “adobe straw,” and the swamp blue accent wall in there repainted with “flint smoke,” a much lighter, subtler sort of misty teal. The master bathroom will be “Arabian sands,” another neutral brown that’s close to “adobe straw” but goes better with the travertine in the shower. The office and other two bedrooms: variants of “peach fade,” “adobe straw,” and “flint smoke.” Overall, the effect will be much more subtle; keeping the woodwork clean will require a lot less elbow grease, and should I decide to sell the house after all, the paint job will be neutral.

While the painter’s here, I think I’ll have him paint the garage walls “adobe straw,” too. Same strategy: hide the dirt.

So, by the time these projects are done, the house will be a little more secure and a lot more attractive. I think.

 

Live-Blogging from the Crime Scene

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My house is surrounded by yellow tape and there’s about a dozen cops out there. A half-dozen cop vehicles have shut down the neighborhood.

Things are a bit quieter now. They dragged one of the three perps out of my garage, but not until some extravagant drama took place.

Yes. My house is a crime scene.

Along about 5:30 or 6, shortly after M’hijito came by to pick up his spectacular dog, I’m sitting in front of the computer cruising the Internet, looking for real estate. Nice little house in another neighborhood, only a hundred grand more than mine. Hm. Could I find a hundred grand on short notice? Oh well.

This reverie is interrupted by a cop helicopter buzzing the house. Normally I don’t pay much attention, because the cops buzz our neighborhood all the time. It’s that kinda place. But this particular cop copter is behaving pretty frantically. I get up off my duff, walk into the front of the house, and check the various doors to be sure they’re locked. They’re not. I throw the deadbolts and lock the doorknobs. Wander back to the office, where I try to focus on ogling houses in nicer parts of town.

This, however, is not easy. The cop helicopter is practically parked on top of the roof, and when I glance out the window, what do I see but hordes of cops and cruisers out there. A male shape runs up the sidewalk on the east side of the house, but he’s going so fast I don’t get a good look at him before he disappears past the wall. I figure he’s a cop, though.

Oh well. Sit down to the computer. Shortly hear a “CLUNK” outside the east wall and steps that sound sorta like someone walking on the roof. Are the cops on the roof?

No…it dawns on me that someone has jumped the back wall and landed on the brick-and-board shelves I stuck out there to hold pots and garden junk. Cops? Or fugitive?

Pick up the phone and dial 9-1-1 and close the office door and lock the heavy-duty deadbolt on it. While talking to the dispatcher, who quickly realizes none of Phoenix’s Finest are inside my backyard, I pull the Ruger from its hiding place.

DeadboltBefore long, it becomes apparent that the smartest thing I’ve done to this house is to have installed that solid-core door with the hardened deadbolt on my office, wherein reside the only objects of any value I happen to own. At this point, the office is now a safe room.

The dispatcher gets off the phone. A few minutes later she calls back and says that the police are going to come into my house and get me out of it with a “caisson.” She actually says they are in the house. I ask how they could have gotten in through the security doors without making a fair amount of noise.

Well, no, they’re not in the house, but they’re about to be. Forthwith they show up at the front door. She asks me to walk through the house and let them in, leaving the dog locked in the office.

A “caisson,” it develops, is a formation of bullet-proof riot shields. These guys have got three of them, which they sandwich around me. Pistols drawn, they escort me out of the house behind these things.

They park me across the street in front of Pretty Daughter’s house while the drama proceeds.

Three desperadoes, I’m told, are on the loose. They’ve committed a robbery and taken off in an orange vehicle; just up the street they jumped out of the car and ran off on foot. The cops found one guy’s clothes stashed under the shrubbery in my front yard.

They now extract a German shepherd from a cruiser, kick the locked side gate open, and charge into the backyard.

There, who should they meet but…yes! The perp!

He saunters out of the garage, dressed in a T-shirt and (expensive!) white cover-up I’d left hanging by the washer, with my garden hat on his head and my mud-slogging shoes on his feet. (This means, BTW, that he has gone through a garage cabinet, because that’s where the shoes were stashed, and he’s also come close enough to the kitchen door to try to pull it open, because the hat was hanging on a nail right next to the door.)

“Hi, fellas,” says he. “What’s going on?”

He claims to be the gardener, there to trim the trees.

The officers in the yard radio over to their cohort near me to ask if I have a gardener. I ask what their gardener’s name is.

“Matthew.”

“My gardener’s name is Gerardo. Wrong gardener!”

They now pounce this guy and physically drag him, kicking and fighting, out of my backyard.

They bloody up my shirt in the process. At first they were going to give my hat and the mud-sloggers back, but now they decide to keep them as evidence. In addition to unlawful trespass, they’re charging him with burglary and the theft of the hat, shoes, T-shirt, and overshirt!

Heh heh heh heh…

What can one say?

So now they proceed to wrap my house with yellow crime tape. They’ve already shut down the streets in three directions. The drama shifts toward the baroque.

I get into a conversation with a very charming and attractive middle-aged officer. A widower, he has a five-year-old son born late in life (the father’s life, that is): his wife died three years ago, and he’s on the verge of retirement. He’s been with the police force over 20 years. I’m thinking this is a pretty nice guy and he seems to be thinking about the same and things are going along well until he mentions that his mom just turned 70 and I say… “Gee, you could be my son! I’m almost her age.”

Bad move.

“No! You can’t be!”

“Yup. I’m 67.”

Moment of silence.

“Well. You certainly don’t look your age.”

{sigh} If I’d kept my mouth shut, maybe he’d have concluded that older women make good lovers. 😉

Moving on.

The police officers had to kick their way through the garden gate, which was pretty easy because it was flimsy when it was new and now it’s flimsy and old. To my amazement, they actually repaired it on the spot! It’ll need a little touch-up, but thanks to their extra effort, the gate is latched shut.

They figured the perp had stashed a weapon somewhere, possibly on my premises. So they searched the cabinets and the outdoor shed, without coming across anything. If he ran up an alley at any time while they were pursuing him, he probably dropped his gun in a garbage can. But tomorrow when it’s light I’ll open the garage door and check the place more carefully. All I need is that turkey to come back looking for his pistol.

* * *

La Maya and La Bethulia got wind of this when the neighborhood association sent out a memo explaining what was happening. After the dust settled, they invited me over for a quick dinner and a gin and tonic. I really wasn’t hungry, having had a large meal with Tina over the lunch hour. However, I certainly wasn’t about to turn down the company.

So now it’s quiet here again. The crime scene tape is gone. The perp is probably out of jail by now. The cute cop has gone on his way. Cassie is crapped out on the floor. My father’s pistol is back in its hidey-hole.

I think that fine door deserves a paint job.

Postscript: Turns out the two reasons the cops were in high Swat Team mode were

  1. Matthew and his cohorts had kidnapped three people who were in the pawn shop they robbed at gunpoint; and
  2. A couple of months before this incident, two guys who had stuck up another business and fled with the law in pursuit broke into a house about three or four miles from my house. They murdered the couple who lived there.

Images:

Police Helicopter. Matthew Field. GNU Free Documentation License.
Schlage hardened deadbolt. Mine.
Taped-off crime scene. U.S. Army. Public domain.

 

 

Market on the Move: Ultrafrugal produce

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Saturday morning La Maya and I set out at dawn for a new-to-us produce market, a moveable feast hosted by a nonprofit group called the 3000 Club. What these people do is “rescue” produce that grocers and distributors would toss out because it’s not the perfect size or shape to sell instantly or because it hasn’t moved off grocery shelves in a day or two. Each year, millions of pounds of veggies and fruits are thrown in the landfill. The 3000 club acquires this otherwise doomed food. The produce is donated and sold through the group’s Market on the Move, where $10 will buy you up to 60 pounds (!) of produce.

Proceeds go to support food banks and other worthy causes.

So it was off to the nearest market. Semi trucks haul loads of produce to a number of churches and community centers around the Valley each weekend. We chose to visit one in a small food desert on the north end of the conduit of blight that is 19th Avenue, putting us down on the backside of Moon Valley in an area where the only supermarket, a decrepit Safeway, closed years ago.

The produce was incredible! Though selection was limited, it was huge. We found spectacular heirloom tomatoes, peppers, gorgeous eggplants, zucchini, crookneck squash, organic sweet grape tomatoes, piles of sweet corn. For ten bucks, I got as much food as I could carry (which was far from 60 pounds!). And this weekend I set out to roast it all.

Check out the bounty:

And take a look at these amazing heirloom tomatoes:

I couldn’t have bought those alone (or the three boxes of fancy organic “grape” tomatoes, either) for ten bucks. Amazing, huh?

They were on the high side of ripe and needed to be consumed or prepared right away, more about which later. Meanwhile, I needed some onions and carrots, which the Market on the Move didn’t offer. Six dollars later I returned from the corner ethnic market with more loot:

Mwa ha ha! All I needed to turn the MoM loot into gold, and then some. Plus a can of sardines in tomato sauce. w00t!

I kept half of one of those purple tomatoes and a large, firm red one for Saturday’s dinner, which was mozzarella slices sandwiched between juicy, sweet/tangy tomato slices drenched in a vinaigrette made of Meyer lemon juice (from the backyard tree), garlic, and olive oil, accompanied by some roasted asparagus and lettuce from the back yard.

Then I minced a half-dozen cloves of garlic and about a half-cup of back-yard parsley, which I stirred into about 3/4 cup of olive oil. Cut the remaining tomatoes in half, arrayed them in baking pans, and packed them with the garlic, parsley, and olive oil mix.

Set these in a preheated 400-degree oven and let them roast for about an hour.

When you do this, tomatoes melt down into an incredible sauce. All that remained to do was to lift them out of the pan into a bowl and whack them into a sauce with a fork. The result is staggeringly delicious. Perfect for pasta or for some of that eggplant that came from the MoM.

Then I roasted all the corn on the cob, as well as a bunch of asparagus I’d picked up at a Safeway. Tossed both in olive oil; flavored the asparagus with a little tarragon and the corn with some fines herbes.

Today I’m still cooking. I’ll convert the squash, onion, and eggplant into ratatouille, some of which I may flavor with a bit of that cilantro from the Mexican market. What’s left, I intend to use in a “vegetable stew” from the Provençal cookbook I picked up at an estate sale—it looks fresher and brighter than traditional ratatouille. The carrots will be roasted with sweet herbs, and the cabbage with onions, garlic, apple, and white wine.

By golly, there’s enough veggies there to last me for a month! 🙂 What doesn’t get eaten quickly will go into the freezer, ready to spring into action when needed.

Watch for organizations like this in your town. It’s an improvement over a CSA because you get to select what you want, rather than having to take what someone else puts in a food basket for you. And you don’t have to drive so far to find a Market on the Move venue. On the other hand, later in the day La Maya made a run on one at another site and found the choices and quality disappointing—apparently the quality of the market depends on the quality of the volunteers who are working it and the luck of the draw.

High Noon: Concealed Weapons on the College Campus

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Having been vetoed by our governor last year, our wacko legislators are trying again to make it legal for students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on college campuses.

Does anyone need any other evidence of how crazy these people are? Even after the bonkers defunct Senator Russell Pearce was yanked out of office by a recall election, they just don’t get the picture that Arizona still has some rational citizens.

Pearce promptly found new work as the state Republican party’s vice-chairman (its no. 2 position) and still maintains a Web page describing himself as Senator. Why bother to take it down, after all? He intends to run again to take the seat back.

When (not “if,” I’m afraid) they finally push this crazy legislation through, I’ll need to consider whether I really want to stay in the classroom, or if there’s some other way to make what passes for a living here.

It sounds melodramatic to say you’re not going to stand in front of a class when who knows how many students are toting pistols around. But to understand the situation, all you have to do is watch the video of Pima Community College that poor nut case Jared Loughner posted before he shot an elected representative and a bunch of innocent citizens, including a child.

Loughner is far from unique. Every college and university campus hosts a few people who are so far lost in the wilds of mental illness that they’re capable of anything. The last thing we need to do is make it OK for them to arm themselves. And between you and me, I don’t think it’s worth risking my life to earn $2,400 per 16-week class.

The idea that if everyone is armed we’re all going be safe…my god! Is it even possible to express how absurd that is?

In the first place, the fact is most people do not easily shoot another human being, all bragging to the contrary. No matter what we think we’ll do, few of us know exactly how we will react under stress. It takes training—a lot of it—to prepare a person to make a decision, under duress, to kill another person and then move to do it quickly and accurately.

And in the second place, few American citizens get that kind of training. At civilian ranges you learn to shoot at motionless targets. By and large it takes military or police training to learn to shoot a moving target accurately, and it takes a great deal of psychological preparation to shoot a moving target that happens to be a human being. How many of the 18-year-olds wandering around college campuses have that kind of training? A few returning veterans may, but that’s about it. And I can guarantee that not one in a hundred college professors have a trained shootist’s mindset.

My father was a military sharpshooter and he remained a firearms enthusiast all his life. I have one of his guns, and yes, I’d use it against an intruder, given the right circumstances. But I don’t practice often enough to delude myself that I could strike an assailant in a classroom without hitting a kid, too—or even that I could get at a pistol in time to do much if such a person burst into the room.

My own strategy for avoiding harm is simply to stay out of harm’s way. And since our legislators propose to bring a lot more harm into my workplace, I guess it’s time to consider how I might find some other workplace.

At my age, there’s not much I’ll be able to do. But I have considered that during this relatively slow semester I could get myself licensed as a Realtor. The course, I’m told, is very easy, and as an adjunct “employee” I can probably take it for free through the community college. While I’m not much of a salesperson, I certainly could work as an assistant in a real estate office. In Arizona, you need a Realtor’s license even to work as a gofer for a real estate office. Pay would be low—but what I’m earning now is lower than low. A part-time job filling out forms and answering phones would at least bring in money through the summer instead of just eight months a year.

Real estate. Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at that.

Black Friday: Turn Off Your Phone at the Mall

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If you’re planning to dive into the Black Friday maelstrom, you might want to think about turning off your cell phone before you walk into the mall. That is, if you’re the type who passionately values your privacy.

In the latest encroachment by the quasi-government that is Corporate America, a couple of malls will experiment with tracking people’s movements as they wander from store to store by tracking radio emissions from their cell phones. This will be a lot subtler than some of the earlier strategies, which have even included hiring employees to stalk you through the mall. Forest City Commercial Management, which runs the malls in Southern California and in Virginia, claims this is not an invasion of your privacy because supposedly they can’t personally identify you without a court order.

Well. One man’s “not an invasion” is another man’s “get out of my face!” And as one reader pointed out, eventually computerized face recognition programs will make it easy enough to connect the image gathered as you enter the mall with the image you posted on Facebook. Nor is it impossible to imagine hackers breaking into the system and identifying users. If a hacker can do it, big business or government can hire the hacker to do it.

The only way to stop this intrusion is to turn off your cell phone before you enter the mall. Of course, that defeats the purpose of owning the cell phone, for which you pay a pretty penny: you wouldn’t have the thing if you didn’t want to be jangled up at every hour of the day and night, no matter where you happen to be or what you happen to be doing. But nevermind.

Hmm. Actually, this could be a good thing: wouldn’t it be nice to shop for a day without having to listen to people yapping on the phone?

While we’re in the silver lining department, this sort of news invariably makes me glad I can’t afford a cell phone and I can’t afford to shop in malls any more.

😀

Image: Appraiser, Escalator at Edmonton Mall. Public domain. Edmonton Mall is NOT one of the properties reported to track customers’ cell phones.

Urban Hallowe’en Tales: The Burglar Who Is Still Running

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God, but we were stupid when we were young.

It was late when my still-youngish husband and an even younger me arrived home from a night on the town. We were both very tired.

Our aged German shepherd, Greta, had been cooped up inside all night long and half the day. Her plumbing didn’t work so fast any more, she being an indeed very aged Ger-shep. We’d acquired a new Ger-shep, Brandy, who we hoped would take the illustrious Greta’s place when the time came for Greta to pass through the veil. But Brandy was still a puppy. She knew from nothing.

Greta, however, could open and close the screen door into the back yard. So, that night, not wanting to wait for Her Ladyship to do her endlessly slow Thing, we left the back door into the fenced yard open and the screen unlatched, so she could visit the doggy facilities at her convenience. Without a second thought, the humans fell blithely into the sack.

Well, my not-so-very-young husband, pushing early middle age, was beginning to snore. The volume had yet to reach the stage where I was forced to spend all my nights on the sofa (and eventually in a bed far from his house). But at that time, on occasion when he was very tired he would snore loudly enough that I couldn’t sleep. So it was that night.

After he started sawing logs, I got up and repaired to the living-room sofa, where I pulled a blanket over my altogether naked body and stuck my head under a pillow.

Greta the German Shepherd, half-deaf, was at her usual station, asleep in the hall right outside our bedroom door. Brandy…who knows? Probably somewhere near the bed, or in the baby’s room.

Along about three in the morning, I awoke and heard Greta go boof? A quiet, tentative inquiry, launched from the hall outside the bedroom. Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I saw a light in the kitchen: a flashlight beam.

Here’s what goes through the mind of a youngish mother at three in the morning:

Oh! John must have gotten up to get a bottle for the baby, and the power must be out and he had to get a flashlight to get into the fridge.

I go, “John?”

And from the the back of the house a flickin’ NUCLEAR EXPLOSION ERUPTS!

Holy God!

Greta comes blasting into the front of the house with both afterburners roaring.

The flashlight is jerking around frantically. Greta’s savage rage is splitting the air. John and I each shoot up about three feet off our respective sacks. The flashlight goes berserk. Greta goes even more berserk.

Still innocent of what’s going on, I drop the blanket like Venus Rising from the Shower Drain and walk toward the kitchen. As I flick on the light, John comes in from the other direction. Greta is at the side door, hackles on end and mad as Hell.

“Who was that man?” he asks.

“What man?” say I.

“The one who just went out this door!”

The light dawns on the lush young society matron. “Oh, my god!”

He opens the door. Greta charges outside. He slams the door shut.

The guy had come in the back screen door—develops he’d been seen trying someone else’s back door in the neighborhood—and wandered into the kitchen. When Greta heard me call her name from the living room, realized I wasn’t in the bedroom and that wasn’t me in the kitchen either, she went ballistic and got between him and the door he’d come in. Those old houses in the Encanto district are like mazes, with their various additions, so he had a panicky search for a way out.

Fortunately, the burglar had the presence of mind to shut the backyard gate behind him as he fled. So Greta is not still chasing him around and around the world. Still, I imagine by now the poor guy has circumnavigated the globe about eight times.

One thing you have to say for an angry German shepherd: it’ll get your attention. Having an asthma attack, need a shot of adrenalin? Piss off a German shepherd.

The cop who eventually showed up after John called remarked that someone who comes into your house when he knows you’re there doesn’t mean you any good.

It wasn’t the first time Greta saved her humans. Wasn’t the last. But it probably was the most memorable.

Image: Botticelli. La Nascita de Venere, ca. 1486. Public domain.