Door Bell Rings At Midnight

You might wanna be sure and print that sign in Spanish, especially if you live in Agate Monkey's neighborhood.

 

Whatever. Have another Labatts or something.

 

One of the previous owners of our house had ADT installed. There's at least one sign left on our backyard fence.

Even though we opted not to get ADT, the sign will be there as long as we are.

 

well, that's clever

 

My insurance company lowered my rate about the same amount that my alarm company charges.

 

My dad was head electronics technician for a small college after retiring from the Air Force. This may have been his finest work.

Our neighborhood had some problems with vandals when I was 12, 13. My dad had had enough. He set up motion-sensitive pads around our front yard and driveway, and made them all respond to a single switch, so he could turn them on when he went to bed at night.

When on, if one of the pads was tripped, a camera set up on our roof would take a flash picture of our yard, and a tape recording with my dad's booming voice came on where he said, "We have a photo of you now. You may call us at this number to surrender, or we will turn the photo over to the town police tomorrow morning at 10 a.m."

He caught five (5) young guys this way in five separate incidents. All five of them were so freaked that they all called and begged to be let off the hook before the photo was delivered. My dad got a month of yard work out of each of them.

 

That is AWESOME! Is your dad the dad of the pot-dealing kid in American Beauty?

 

That's just so ironic... steal someon else's alarm sign.

 

I'm still stuck on the hostage situation next door. Care to explain?

 

And the lion sleeps tonight.

 

A big, loud dog can be an effective deterrent, too. We had one when we lived in a sketchy neighborhood. He wasn't at all mean, but I know that the neighbor (teenage) kids wouldn't chase balls or frisbees that landed in our back yard because of him. We were willing to let word get around about the vicious canine in our house.

 

I think it's probably a situation where Person A doesn't allow Person B to leave. And maybe the police are called to the house at some point. It doesn't have to be a Wesley Snipes movie set to qualify as a hostage situation. By the way, if you really want to know just how scary life can be, move to Florida. But you might be better off reading one of the Weird Florida books first. I've never read them, but I can only imagine what's in them.

In one case a few months ago, a guy ran out of his house with a sword. He was chasing his child or his spouse. I believe he pretty much decapitated the person there on the front lawn in the middle of the day. It was a terrible story to read. But every case isn't that gruesome. There are simply a lot of weird things here. For example, yesterday's evening news reported on a guy who jumped into a lake and spent 45 minutes searching for his dog, which had been pulled into the water by a 10-foot alligator. I have no idea what the man was thinking, but he apparently found his dog's corpse with his foot and carried it to shore. The report bothered to say that the dog was dead. In light of the fact that it didn't have scuba gear, I sort of guessed that much.