This afternoon the head of our neighborhood association sent this interesting report from one of the residents:
My family and I live in the northwest part of the R*** P*** neighborhood. At 5:15 pm my five children were home together as their dad was working and I’d gone to a school function—about 20 minutes after I left with a girlfriend, whose son was also at my house, a beat-up black Cadillac or that type of car pulled up right in front of our driveway and one man got out and came to the door while three others waited in the car. My oldest daughter (15) watched the man come up to our front door and knock—she didn’t recognize him and got the little ones (4, 3, 19 months) together in my oldest son’s room (11). My son’s room is right next to the front door and he could see the man, in his 20’s, white, buzz cut with light brown or reddish hair and wire glasses. He was also wearing a green shirt that said “Carp” on the back. My daughter said the man didn’t seem too clean and had nothing in his hands to suggest selling something. She said the passengers saw her through our front window and one in the back seat was texting on the phone. The man knocked and then rattled the doorknob for approx 7 to 10 minutes. The man looked into my son’s room through the window and my oldest daughter shut all the shutters and curtains and called the police, but the man and his friends left before the police arrived. My daughter saw the car turn around and drive towards 19th ave. Luckily, we have an alarm and my daughter set it after the police left so she could feel a little safer.
My girlfriend and her son and me and my children were all in my front yard for about an hour before we left to go to the school function, so it makes me think our house was being watched. The odd part is that we had two cars parked in front of our house, so it did look like someone was home. (Normally the cars aren’t there.) Then again, the man definitely saw my daughter and son and heard the younger ones. It seems he wanted in the house.
I’m only going into so much detail because of course I feel terrible that I wasn’t home, but also because it seems like our house was targeted. I’m concerned that these people wanted in the house, that it was daylight, there were obviously children home, and in fact a neighbor’s bike was near our front door but it wasn’t taken.
Holy mackerel! That’s one of the scariest stories I’ve heard in the 17 years or so that I’ve lived in this neighborhood. During that time, we’ve had two home invasions that I know of, but neither involved Bad Guys going after a clutch of children.
The northwest section of the neighborhood is not very good. It’s an area that’s been severely thumped by a series of unhappy circumstances: a slummy supermarket that went unregulated by the City despite chronic code violations; a huge, noisy intersection over which the cops like to park their helicopters while chasing perps; proximity to a set of apartments that have been allowed to turn into tenements and to a blighted district that’s your basic war zone; and most recently the corrosive destruction wrought by the unfinished and apparently never-to-be-finished lightrail train tracks. It was harder hit by the depRecession than any other part of the neighborhood, with the result that even more of the housing than before has been turned into rentals—and they already had plenty of weedy, run-down rentals.
Because of the blighted rentals, it’s reasonable to suspect these characters meant to visit one of their drug-dealing colleagues and had the wrong address. On the other hand, if the mother is right in thinking they were being watched, then obviously they knew only children were home. In that case, it’s very creepy.
I walk the dog at night. And when the weather is nice—as it has been today—I like to have my doors and windows open. Guess I’m going to have to rethink those behaviors…
Okay, so this article appears in today’s Arizona Republic: the City of Phoenix is about to spend $6 million to buy a vacant motel so the property can be handed over to Arizona State University to expand ASU President Michael Crow’s overweening plans to expand his empire.
Let’s see if a beleaguered taxpayer can get this straight:
The city of Phoenix is broke. It’s going to close our neighborhood library, which is mobbed every moment it’s open, and lay off cops and firefighters. It has abandoned the lightrail project up the conduit of blight that is 19th Avenue after having ripped out an entire row of homes in our neighborhood and covered the scars with hideous gray gravel. Then to add insult to injury it’s going to sock us with a regressive tax on food.
But it still has $6 million to stroke Michael Crow’s ego?????
Mr. Mattox, really. What on earth is the city thinking? ASU is out of cash, too. Case in point: the university closed my office, one of the most innovative academic publishing projects anywhere in the country, and canned all five of my staff. It’s shucking off staff as fast as it can dump them, its facilities are going to pot (our office was in an asbestos-ridden condemned building, one of whose floors was closed to public access for fear it would collapse, with no clean source of drinking water and bathrooms so decrepit we would walk to neighboring buildings to use the toilets). ASU is not going to build anything on that downtown site; not during your lifetime or mine. And I can assure you, once Crow is gone, the insanely ambitious schemes that are steering the university toward bankruptcy will come to an end.
I am now unemployed, thanks to the fallout from those insanely ambitious schemes, and at my age I’m not bloody well about to get another job. I’m only one of many thousands of unemployed Phoenicians who probably will never obtain work with anything like the pay we have lost. Of course, I would like to see my city’s downtown thrive as a vibrant urban core. But not on the backs of the new poor, people like me who are struggling to buy groceries as it is.
Use that $6 million to keep our police, firefighters, and libraries operating!
Last weekend my now-former research assistant, who bought a house in the neighborhood shortly before Her Deanship announced the university would close our office and can us all, reported that the house was burgled while she and the kids were at church. The burglars missed her laptop, which was recharging in an out-of-the-way spot in the family room, but they did grab her husband’s laptop and cleaned out all her jewelry, most of which consisted of keepsakes from her mother.
Understandably, she’s feeling pretty disturbed and vulnerable, especially since the burglars entered with ease through the carport door. Apparently popping the lock was so easy, the cops said they couldn’t even find any evidence of forced entry. She’s taken to putting a piece of Scotch tape at the door’s threshhold so she can see whether anyone has entered before she goes into the house.
Even though our area is relatively safe compared to some parts of the city, no neighborhood is immune to burglaries and home invasions. I personally resent and resist living behind iron bars, glaring lights, and shrieking alarms. It’s the criminals who belong in jail, not us!
Over time, I’ve developed a number of strategies to minimize the risk of burglaries and the damage done if a perp gets into the house. Some of these are psycho-philosophical, some are mechanical.
On the philosophical level, I’ve adjusted my attitude about break-ins. Except for the dog, the stuff I have in my house is junk. Most of it is low in value—the only things that really matter are the computers, and even those are not the point: what matters is not the computer; it’s the data in the computer. The data can easily be backed up onto a flashdrive and carried around on one’s keyring, thereby protecting the only truly important inanimate object in the house.
So. My attitude is that I don’t much care if the burglar comes visiting, as long as he stays out of the house while I’m here. I don’t want a home invasion, several of which we have had in this neighborhood, because anyone who knowingly breaks into your house while you’re there doesn’t mean you any good. But otherwise…meh!
For my home office, I installed a solid-core door and a heavy-duty pick-resistant lock whose bolt slides through the framing into the stud next to the door frame. While it’s not 100 percent burglar-proof, it sure will slow the perp down. Outside the window, which faces the street, I planted the thorniest, fiercest roses I could find, and this spring a man-eating bougainvillea may join them. Most burglars would rather enter where they can’t be seen, and obviously they’d prefer an entrance that is not going to leave them bleeding.
From the guys who put the elegant lock on my office door, I learned that most locks are very easy to open. The lock they installed will break the perp’s drill bit if he tries to drill the lock. Trouble is, it ain’t cheap. On the other hand…what’s peace of mind worth?
Other than discouraging entry to my office in my absence, for me the trick is not to make unauthorized entry impossible but to force the perp to make enough noise to alert me if I’m here when he tries to get in. All I want is enough lead time to get out a different door and run down the street—or to barricade myself and the dog inside the office behind the pick-resistant lock so that I can call the cops or, if the phone’s disconnected, climb out the front window.
On the front entrance, I installed a low-end security door, purchased at Lowe’s. The problem is, the locks you buy at big box stores are just ordinary door locks; even the best are simple to defeat. Though the metal door itself is pretty strong, it’s only as burglar-resistant as the lock. To get a security door that will really deter burglars, you have to buy a specialty lock and have a locksmith install it. So, I think of the security door as something that will slow the burglar down a bit and cause him to make enough noise to alert the yapping dog while he’s trying to get in. Here, the point is to let me get out the back door while he’s trying to get in the front.
My house, like my RA’s, has several Arcadia doors, and all the the windows are also sliders. These, as we know, are extremely vulnerable. Some people install bars over the windows and double-wide security doors over the sliding doors. This strategy is counterproductive for two reasons:
• Barring intruders from getting in through a window means you also bar yourself from getting out during a fire. The idea that a set of bars will have locked release catches and in an emergency you’ll find the key, unlock them, and then climb out is highly problematic. In a fire, smoke can cause true black-out conditions. If the power is out, as it’s likely to be once a fire gets going good, you can find yourself trapped in a bedroom with no light, even if there’s little smoke to blind you. Children in particular are likely to panic in these conditions and not be able to find the key or remember how to work it. Personally, I’d rather go mano-à-mano with the burglar than die in a fire.
• Security doors are not at all difficult to break through. All it takes is a crowbar.
La Bethulia had those one of those double-wide security doors put over an Arcadia door in the back of her house. She went out to dinner for about an hour one evening and when she got back some guy had pried it open and had a nice visit. The locksmith told me he felt they’re a waste of money because they’re way too easy to break into, and that for the cost you’re better off installing an alarm system.
A sliding door or window can be secured pretty well in one of several ways:
• Put a piece of doweling in the track along the bottom. This makes it impossible to lift the door and slide it open. An alternative is to drive a small metal screw into the metal frame at the top of the door, tightening it just enough that the head of the screw clears the top of the slider. This also will block a person from lifting the slider far enough off its track to slip the lock and push it open.
• Install two sliding bolts, one that slides downward into a hole drilled in the concrete slab or window frame, and one that slides upward into the frame above the door or window. Be sure the bolt on top side of the door is long enough to slide well into the wood frame. If you place them intelligently, they’re hard or even impossible to see from outside, and so this will usually discourage the perp.
• Get screw-on locks made for sliding doors. They come in two varieties: one with a little lever that you just turn to tighten the device down, and one with a key lock. However, remember that everyone in the house, including children and the very elderly, needs to be able to get out in a fire. These things mustn’t be tightened down so much that a kid can’t get it open quickly and easily, or out of a child’s reach. Better to lose the jewelry and the computer than the kids.
On all my sliders, I use both screw-on locks and dowels in the tracks. To get through a door or window that’s been secured in this way, you have to make some noise. Chances are, you’ll have to break the glass. Many burglars prefer not to break windows, because the noise can draw a neighbor’s attention. In any event, if you’re home, the sound of a man struggling to defeat these devices or breaking glass to get at them will alert you so you can get out before he gets in.
To add to the noise level, you can get inexpensive battery-run alarms that you can attach unobtrusively to sliding doors and windows. I found a lifetime supply of the things at Costco; no doubt Lowe’s and the Depot have them, too. They glue on. When the little switch is in the “on” position, the alarm emits an ear-vibrating shriek when the door or window is opened. Not a true burglar alarm, of course, but it’s enough to wake you up if someone tries to get into the house.
Just knowing that you’ll be alerted is usually enough to give you some peace of mind. I have them on all my sliding doors and windows, and on the dog door cover. Because, when the weather’s nice, I like to sleep with the front door open and the security door locked, I even put one on the security door, so it will go off like a banshee if someone drills that lock.
Should the burglar come a-calling while I’m out of the house, I’ve left a few treats around for him. For example, I have some check pads for old bank accounts that were closed years ago. I put a few of these in easily accessible drawers. If he finds them, he’ll think he’s scored a whole pad of negotiable instruments. An ancient Toshiba laptop, so superannuated it’s useless today, sits out where it’s easy to find. And I’ve also left a few fistfuls of cheap costume jewelry in a couple of drawers.
The things my mother gave me, which aren’t worth much but which I’d like not to lose, are hidden in strange places—yes, you could find them, but it would take some time and effort, both of which are in short supply for burglars.
Truth to tell, many burglars are fairly benign. They don’t relish violence—that’s why they burgle rather than mug, rob banks, or deal dope. My feeling is that if some guy wants to make off with the priceless necklace I made with $20.00 worth of stuff from the craft store, bully for him as long as he stays out of the house when I’m home. A few alarms and extra locks will keep you safe from intruders while you’re in the house, and as for the rest of it…BFD!
Sunday afternoon I dropped by the Costco near M’hijito’s house. The lines at the gas pumps backed up almost to the entrance—a half-dozen waiting customers at every single pump. Sat around for 15 minutes or so (why do I always pick the guy with a megamonster truck who has to refill two extra-large tanks or the old lady who, after pumping gas and paying, has to replace every single item in her capacious purse with engineering precision before she can drive away?), I couldn’t get the damn pump to work, so left without gas.
This didn’t bother me much, because there’s a Costco on the way home from the community college. I figured to fill up on the way home yesterday.
Apparently the reason for the feeding frenzy at the downtown store was the $2.53/gallon price. At the 101 and Cave Creek, Costco was selling gas for $2.59…and that was a dime a gallon below the going price at surrounding gas stations.
Welp. In the new $800/month budget regime, gas purchases are limited to $60 a month, and we’ve seen that can be tight. So instead of filling up, I cut off the pump flow at $30.
Thirty bucks bought exactly one-half tank of gas. The gauge was at 1/4 tank when I pulled up to the pumps. Thirty dollars worth of gasoline filled it to the 3/4 mark.
So, I guess it’s back to hypermiling for moi.
I’m going to try to keep the gasoline expenditures to no more than sixty bucks, which at current prices is one, count it, (1) tankful of gas. This month it ought to be doable, since last week I spent almost all of my Costco budget in restocking my hoard and so I won’t be making any more trips to that place for the next three or four weeks. Still, teaching at Paradise Valley requires three 24-mile round trips a week—almost 75 miles!—and there are no affordable grocery stores on the direct route. To get to a Safeway or a Food City, I have to go a mile out of the way, adding two miles to the homeward trip.
Contemplated whether I could bicycle to Safeway. That would be a six-mile round trip, most of it across hectic main drags populated by homicidal drivers. And I couldn’t carry any more than I could stuff in a backpack. I certainly could walk or bicycle to the Albertson’s or Sprouts, but I don’t feel safe in those stores’ parking lots when I have a layer of steel between me and the aggressive panhandlers and the young thugs with their pants down around their crotches, their gang colors shining loud and clear. The nearest Food City is populated by families, but it also requires four miles of navigating dangerous streets through questionable neighborhoods.
{sigh} Conserving gas ain’t easy when the nearest subsistence shopping isn’t safe for old ladies.
Quite a little freshet blew through last night. Apparently it started around 11:30—that’s when my power went out—and carried on into the wee hours. Cassie woke me at one in the morning, barking at the distant thunder and fretting to go out. The wind was blowing so hard it made a weird, symphonic noise: like an orchestra of kazoos.
Almost 300,000 utility customers lost power. Mine came back on around 8:30 this morning. By then, the refrigerator’s interior appeared to be at about room temperature: around 62 degrees. I haven’t dared to open the freezer, but I expect it will be OK, even though, being a cheapie, it’s not well insulated.
This minor episode brought one issue sharply to my attention: I am not prepared for a serious emergency lasting any length of time.
I couldn’t even make a cup of coffee this morning: without power, I can’t grind coffee beans. (OK, OK: I do have a molcajete and yes, yes, I could have ground the darn things by hand. I’d have to be driven to greater depths of desperation to do that, thank you.)
Without a propane grill—I dumped mine in favor of a much nicer charcoal grill—I would be in trouble if the gas went out along with the electric power.
My gas stove will operate during a power outage, but it’s not happy, and the manufacturer inveighs against it. Modern gas ranges have electric igniters, so when the power’s out you have to light the gas with a match or butane lighter. Problem is, the burners want to flicker out; in the absence of a pilot light (which is what used to light gas burners and keep them lit), you risk asphyxiating yourself. Or blowing up the kitchen. You have to stand there next to the stove all the time the burner is going and keep a close eye on it.
I do have water stored, but I forget to empty it over the plants once a month, wash out the carboys, and refill them. Must get my act together there.
And I think it would be a good idea to pick up a camp stove and a couple bottles of propane. Actually, I think one of those stoves will run off a barbecue-sized propane canister, two of which I happen to own. Probably all I need is the stove and a canister refill.
The other thing I don’t have is a cooler. I need to pick up one of those, so I can carry dry ice to stock the freezer during an extended outage. They’re cheap and can be had readily at yard sales.
There’s food enough in the house to last a month or so. The issue is cooking it. And, in the case of frozen and refrigerated items, storing it.
Really, there’s no excuse not to be prepared. Here’s what I see as the bare minimum to have around the house:
• Blankets • Toilet paper • First-aid kit • Analgesics, antihistamine tablets, and any prescriptions you need • Five to ten gallons of clean water • Propane • Propane stove or grill with side burner • Candles • Camping lantern • Flashlights and batteries • Battery-operated radio • Cell phone, BlackBerry, or land-line phone that is not wireless • Supply of food, enough to last from a week to a month • Possibly a five-gallon can of gasoline
Got any other thoughts? What else might one have around the house, just in case?
Update:
In just a couple of days, a slew of ideas have come in, over the transom and through the “Comments” on this post. Here’s a summary:
• A hand-cranked radio may be more reliable than a battery-operated one. At the very least, have more than one radio that will operate on something other than AC. And keep a good supply of fresh batteries.
• Cash stash. The Katrina disaster proved that cash speaks louder than bank cards or checks. When power goes down and stays down, computerized cash registers quit working. Unable to process bank transactions, many merchants will accept cash when nothing else works.
• Barterable goods may come in handy in a crisis that lasts for a lengthy time. Cigarettes, alcohol, and (yes, I’m going to say it!) grass can be traded for food, clothing, bandages, medications, and other necessaries. Also useful: sanitary napkins and tampons, candy, jewelry.
• Water purifer and sanitizer. Check camping stores for devices and chemicals designed to disinfect suspect water. Among these are the SteriPEN, iodine tablets or liquid, and chlorine tablets. Remember that water filters do not kill pathogens.
• More than a few gallons of clean water may be needed. Adults may need as much as three gallons of drinking water a day.
• Remember that a water heater holds 20 to 60 gallons of potable water. Swimming pool and decorative fountain or pond water, while not drinkable without purification, can be used for washing and bathing. Dishes can be washed in ocean, river, or lake water, with plenty of detergent. Rinse in boiling water.
• Watch yard sales to collect a stash of candles. Tea lights as well as tapers and pillar candles are good to have on hand. I personally find that tapers put out more light than other types of candles.
• Propane camp lanterns or oil lamps are also good to have on hand. Use devices that are sources of combustion outdoors.
• Build a stash of matches as well as butane lighters. Keep your matches dry inside Ziploc bags.
• All these supplies should be kept in a dry, safe place, out of childrens’ reach.
• Some readers have questioned the safety of using a propane stove indoors. City codes require an effective venting system over a gas stove for a reason! That reason is called “carbon monoxide,” an odorless, toxic gas that is a byproduct of burning. If you’re forced to use a propane stove inside because of weather conditions, place it near or on your stovetop and turn on the vent. If you have no power, use it near an open window or place it in the cold firebox of your fireplace with the flue open, and don’t use it for any length of time. It is best to use these devices outdoors.
Mighty Bargain Hunter has a new money site, called Cash Commons. It’s pretty interesting: readers ask questions, others answer them, and people earn “reputation points” whose value is unclear but which make for a fun gimmick.
One of the questions, “Is having a Walmart hundreds of feet from a property a good or a bad idea,” led me to draft a response that was way too long for the site, which apparently is designed for the short & the quick. The more I thought about it, the more my response began to look like a whole new post. So I decided to cut it short there and hold forth at greater length here at FaM.
There’s a Walmart within walking distance (more or less) of the house M’hijito and I co-own in mid-town Phoenix. His neighborhood is on the low side of middling; it’s one of the few in-town areas that have been seriously thumped by the recession—in general the worst-affected districts are outlying suburbs. The main source of the property devaluation in that specific residential area, sandwiched between a slum and a very upscale district, has not been the nearby mall—also the scene of a Costco and a Target—but the many foreclosures that have driven down comparables.
The shopping center, which is extremely busy, has a correspondingly high rate of car break-ins, thefts, and robberies. So, when you look at one of those online maps of crime rates, it appears that the entire area has a high crime rate, even though the neighborhood to the east of it, where the pretty little house resides, is relatively safe. This factor undoubtedly will influence some potential buyers.
The area just to the south of it, on the other hand, consists of run-down apartments and is the scene of almost nightly cop helicopter fly-overs. A few years ago, a friend of mine, who lived in one of those dumps, was murdered in the parking lot by some guys who were trying to steal his car. The low-rent apartments were there before the WalMart went in and probably were neither created nor worsened by the nearby commerce.
Reds show high-crime areas, yellow middling rates, greens lower rates. The Walmart shopping center forms the bull’s-eye.
The City has built a light-rail line that passes about a half-mile from the house and has a terminal in that Walmart shopping center. This has turned a substantial part of the mall’s parking into a park-‘n’-ride for those who are brave enough to leave their cars there. We are told that light-rail is supposed to increase property values in bordering neighborhoods. So far we haven’t seen that happen in the area; this could be attributable either to the scruffy shopping mall and tenement district or to the deprecession.
On a slightly tangential note, friends owned a house that backed onto a Fry’s Supermarket. In our area, Fry’s caters to a downscale crowd, and in this case that was true with a vengeance. The Fry’s and the shopping center owners were particularly insouciant about the neighboring residences. They arranged for garbage to be collected (illegally) in the wee hours of the morning (commercial garbage collection sounds like a wrecking yard—SDXB and I lived several blocks away and could not leave a window open on a nice night without being awakened by the racket) and allowed homeless mentally ill to camp in the parking lot and throw trash, garbage, and human waste over the neighbors’ walls.
At the top of the bubble, the couple arranged to have a new house built. Lacking a crystal ball, they decided to stay in their existing home while construction proceeded, rather than selling right away and squatting in a rental until the new house was ready. We know what happened next. After the market crashed, they couldn’t even give away the old house. No one in their right mind would buy a house—or rent!—behind a Fry’s, not when far more desirable property could be had for a song. After several years of struggling to sell it or to keep it rented, they finally defaulted.
The bank hasn’t been able to unload it, either.
Extrapolating from that, I’d advise that the instant you get wind of a new Walmart or any other large commercial retail about to go in near your home, sell!
