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Chronicles of Home |
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Sunday, August 27 It's been a while since I last updated here -- it's been a whole summer, in fact. Not as much went on around the house this summer as I had hoped, but there are some things to report. New Neighbors The very quiet people who lived next door to us with two ancient dogs and an impossibly small chihuahua puppy who could squeeze under the fence and galumph in circles around our yard, they moved. Their house sold in under a week, and for more than we paid for our house, which is good. I believe a mother and four children are living there now. Sometimes I see one or more men, but I am not sure if they live there. I've smiled at the woman, but she is always on her cell phone when outside, so we've never spoken. Faith, however, has spent a good deal of time talking to the four kids through the shared fence. Dog Days of Summer We managed to keep the house comfortable this summer, between the three air conditioning units. We set up a series of fans upstairs to pull cool air around from the dining room into the bedrooms, and the main level is pretty easy to keep cool. And even though BGE, the gas and electric company, raised their rates coinciding with a major heat wave, I am not aghast at our energy bill. Tomato Garden After record rainfall at the end of June, we've had dry weather. The yard is crackly and when Rick last mowed it, only dust came up. We've been decent about remembering to water the tomato garden, though, and are enjoying a large crop of big, juicy tomatoes. I've enjoyed sharing them with family and friends, but this weekend the plants were overloaded and so I took 24 tomatoes and turned them into five and a half pints of salsa.
Moving Pictures We got to several movie nights out at Bengies (click here to see the list of movies we've watched) and plan to continue going until the close for the winter. The summer seems officially over now that everyone is back in school. Now we settle down to the task of getting ready for the holiday season and the new addition to the family! Thursday, May 18 see how I rule Although I was home sick today, I got off my duff and took a ton of recycling down to the recycling dropoff. Then I started clearing stuff out from underneath the back porch. We are having a party this weekend and I wanted to put up this rather cheap canopy that we got last spring, but a) the pieces have been sitting outside for a year now and b) the directions for putting it together are long gone.
Overheard Last night before I went to bed I heard one of the sounds that I always think could be a gunshot... or a car backfiring, or a noise from the trucking yard nearby. About 10 minutes later, though, Foxtrot was up and circling the vicinity, and I heard police cars. The helicopter stayed up for probably 15 minutes. About an hour later, Rick called and woke me up. He was coming home from a late hockey game and the main road that leads to our street was shut down and taped off for a police investigation. Nice... Lost in the City There's a well-publicized story going around of two people who were headed home to Virginia from an Orioles game and got lost. They ended up in Cherry Hill, which is very close to my neck of the woods, tried to ask a police officer for directions, and ended up getting arrested for trespassing. Now, while it would be easy to get outraged, there are a few things to think about here. First, of course the police report differs from the couple's account -- it says they were belligerent and that the man tried to rip up a citation he was receiving for running a stop sign. Second, Cherry Hill is not a place you'd want to be at night. "Out-of-towners" come there to buy drugs. If the police officer saw two white people stopped on the street, she might easily think they were there for an inappropriate reason. Third, I've ended up accidentally in Cherry Hill, myself. I turned myself around and got out without getting arrested. If the officer told these people to leave, possibly for their own good, they should have driven at least out of the neighborhood before stopping again to call for directions. Still, makes for a good media story about how awful Baltimore is, doesn't it? 
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My fingers are still burning from chopping the chiles. The salsa turned out pretty spicy. 
