life at the manor (the drunk dump manor)

Well, it finally happened again on our street of peril (aka the Delmas)—someone tried to break into our house last night.  I awakened to the sound of a person shoving an object through our bathroom window screen, which popped off the latching mechanism on our window.  I then heard some rustling outside of our house and went to make sure the doors were locked.  After that, I heard nothing (it should be noted that Natan did not awaken during any of this).  In the morning, our stroller was missing from our porch and our hose had been turned on.  Luckily, I found the stroller down the street, just sitting on the sidewalk with a discarded beer can in the storage area.  Our neighbors were similarly terrorized, with the vandals drinking their Gatorade, pouring out their bottled water and then tagging their cars with spray paint.  

At least we lock our doors now, after the bizarre break-in a few years ago, when a local homeless lady came inside and asked for pants.  And did I ever mention that our old gardener (who disappeared suddenly) was a registered sex offender (we discovered this by utilizing the Megan’s Law website)?  While I was showering this morning, it occurred to me that the biggest problem with living in “difficult” neighborhoods is their total chaos and unpredictability.  You never know when a crazy person is going to wake the whole street up with hours of incohesive yelling in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, or when a drunk citizen will rudely tell you that your child does not need glasses and they will “explain it all to you later” (both things have happened in the last year).  To our landlord’s credit, however, he did immediately focus his energy on making our house more impenetrable by devising a plan to put bars on our windows (like in Central American countries and South Africa).  How cosmopolitan of us!