Serious/not serious/worse?

[rebeccmeister]

Last night, I thought R was at home and had gone to bed, with the central air blowing air around the house (but not ventilating with the outside world). So I went to sleep.

I woke up at 12:15 or so, to the sound of five gunshots. It sounded like they were coming from near the train tracks, just south of us. My sleep-addled brain instructed me to get low to the ground--I suspect that this was either drug-related or somehow tied to the high school area. A short while later, two more shots were fired, somewhere off to our west.

There's just not much to do in a situation like this. Part of me REALLY wants to get a neighborhood watch started, at least to distribute flyers with police contact info on them up and down the street. It couldn't hurt. But it would be a lot of work, and there are so many crappy rental properties on our street with really high turnover that it seems like it would be a futile endeavor. In the very least, we have our small corner of three houses, as well as the folks in the house right across the street.

It was really hard to get back to sleep--I was too hot, sweat-soaked. It's really strange to get used to sweating in the way I'm sweating now, where most of the sweat is just straight water, but is just unstoppable because of the heat. The one nice side-effect is that when most people are complaining about how hot it is, I really don't feel all that hot.

My sunburn has started to peel. Last night, after I rode home from the Tuesday night CRAP ride, I noticed beads of sweat on my arm that wouldn't wipe off. The sunburned skin is apparently not as porous as regular skin, so sweat got trapped between the outermost layer and the tissue underneath. It's one of the strangest things ever.

Back to ants. Between the lack of sleep and the abundance of ant-watching, I'm feeling crazy.

Comments

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

Before we moved further south here in Tempe, we lived right by the university in a small, lower class neighborhood (directly south of the Commons on Apache, if you know where that is). The last week in our old place, we woke to the sound of automatic gunfire in the yard directly behind us. I got my wife and daughter on the floor, mindful of the windows, and called the police. On my own street we had neighbors to the right of us who found it high sport to set bonfires in their backyard using pressure-treated lumber and then blast mariachi music until 4am, and to the left of us lived an alcoholic who was in and out of jail for beating his wife and children.

As you said - crappy rental properties, the people living in them know this, and they treat them accordingly. Needless to say, we were all too happy to get out.

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

I'm on Farmer, tucked in between Maple-Ash and Mitchell Park. There are a good number of home owners in the area, but our street, affectionately referred to as the "rail district," is an exception. I really hope that the people occupying the building up at the corner of University and Farmer do something awesome with the space, so that more cool people start to walk around on the street during the day, keeping the riffraff down.

[hiding-in-here.livejournal.com]

you must live quite close to me because I was awake & heard them too but they sounded like they were right outside my window. the sad thing was that i blew them off like its something normal.

[bluepapercup]

I heard about eight shots in my neighborhood a few weeks ago, it'd a fucking terrifying feeling. I hope the rental gets filled with some cool folks.

[purpurin.livejournal.com]

If you have a neighborhood association or neighborhood watch, you can change a lot. In our neighboorhood, we have a google group that posts police advisory committee news. It has news of break-ins, theft of gardening things, bike theft, incident reports from the police. We see very few people in our neighborhood who don't belong, mostly as a result of really active neighborhood watch.
Also, our neighborhood association's google group asks people to post any vacancies, so they can encourage friends and good people to move in and replace the bad renters. It helps.