Nasty doings continue

Sophie trying so hard to be still
as she waits for a daredevil squirrel to reappear

This is not a peaceful weekend in our calm and lovely neighborhood. The wrap-up from last night’s excitement with a kidnapper hiding by the creek is pretty much what you’d expect—he was caught and that’s all we know. We probably never will get the whole truth of it. I did see a clip of him and the girl running down the street—he should try out for sprint races! That guy can run, though I guess he had some incentive. The girl couldn’t keep up, and he clearly never looked back to see what was happening to her. The video shows her veering off the street and heading for a house. Originally the rumor was that there were two or three people in addition to the supposed kidnap-victim, but that clearly was hype. The police, however, did arrest the girl. Apparently, she was an “acquaintance” of the man. And they began their flight in a stolen vehicle in San Antonio, not Waco. A picture shows a car that is pretty much totaled.

And the neighborhood has moved on. This morning we learned that the plate glass on two Park Place businesses was shattered in an act of senseless vandalism. Winehaus, a cozy wine bar scheduled to close at the end of the month, had the windows shattered, and next to it, the front door of Chadra Mezza was smashed. As someone pointed out on the neighborhood listserv, it’s hard to believe that anyone could get away with this on a main street and an evening when police presence in the neighborhood was extraordinarily heavy.

We are unhappily accustomed in my neighborhood to what I call night walkers—people, mostly young men and often wearing backpacks, who walk the driveways, checking all car doors for an unlocked one. Some take whatever they find—like loose coins, a cell telephone, whatever, and others just resort to messing up the interior, strewing papers around, etc. Woe to the person who leaves a laptop in the car. Most of us are now pretty good about locking our cars, but I have heard there is a magnetic device that can pop the lock on some cars—I imagine older cars, which would fit my 2004 VW.  A lot of households now have Ring or other cameras that cover the driveweay, so our listserv gets pictures of these intruders. It’s petty theft and vandalism, but willful destruction of  business windows seems to raise nasty activity to a new pay grade.

And as a final insult, the patio umbrella in our yard crashed into the ground cover. No serious damage, but we are bumfuzzled how it crashed on a calm, stll morning. It was upright until about ten o’clock this morning, but when I looked out it had suddenly gone down. I did have a bizarre thought last night as I sat locked in my cottage with the umbrella casting strange shadows and red and green scatter lights playing on the neighbor’s outside wall that I was probably perfectly safe. If the fugitive did make it into our yard, he would think he’d wandered into an alternate universe and prefer to take his chances outside with the law on his tail. The umbrella is righted now and all seems in order.

May your world stay in as much order as possible in the coming week, and may you stay safe and healthy.