They added noting the model make and lic. number of any strange car (if you can) is also a help.

All I could see directly was make/model and color, but not plates, which I told the police line woman. There was no way for me to see the plates without going outside, which I really didn't want to do, even with Kato.

I may have also taken pictures from my window. (Funny how it felt *nothing* like being Veronica Mars.)

Sounds like you did what you should have done.

I've told you about my apartment break in in Chicago?

The street was being cased by a bunch of children - the burglers then knew when people were away for an appreciable length of time and broke in then.

So, I think that anything you see that raises your hackles is probably important.

All I can think of when I see this headline is the old newswriting cliche that dog-bites-man is not news, man-bites-dog is:

Well, to paraphrase Chekov, if you introduce a dog in the first act it needs to go off by the third.

You did absolutely the right thing, Steph. That was awfully suspicious behavior.

I get massively paranoid sometimes. My house is right outside the entrance/exit of an apartment complex, and people stop right in front sometimes, right in the road - to let people get out, or for no reason I can imagine. Sometimes they turn around in my driveway. There are plenty of parking spaces just inside the complex grounds, fifty feet away - why not use those? This is why I don't like going away and leaving my driveway obviously unoccupied for days.

When I lived in Minneapolis, an 8-year-old kid knocked on our door. While I was talking to him, he was trying to look around behind me. He asked me how much my roommate's bike was worth. He then told us his mom sent him to check all the apartments in the building....

I love having Kato in the house, because if anyone tried to break in, he'd be all over it. (Although then I worry that he might get killed because some fool would shoot him.)

My bigger worry is that, of the recent break-ins, 2 of them (one on my street) were initiated outside the house -- a woman got out of her car in her driveway, and some guys jumped out of the bushes (total cliche, right?) with guns. Apparently, because she has balls of STEEL, she shoved one of them away and got inside her house and called the police.

I'm less worried about the house being broken into while I'm here (although that's a worry), and more worried about getting in and out of my goddamn car in my own fucking driveway.

We have no bushes and no other obstructions to the line of sight, though, which makes me feel a little better. Not much, but a little.

Man arrested at large Hadron collider claims to be from the future.

What makes an April Fool's article from last year suddenly be so popular?

Man, I'm trying to streamline a process, and I've come up against a dead end of willpower. Urk. I know the next step. I'm just motivated out. I gots nothing, yo. Nothing.

What makes an April Fool's article from last year suddenly be so popular?

Right now is the future he came from?

Yikes, Steph. Glad you have Kato!

Our next-door neighbors were broken into a few weeks ago, and M feels terrible because he actually saw the guys who did it. He saw a couple of youngish men walk up to the house, ring the doorbell, and then when nobody answered, they walked away. Not terribly suspicious, but a little odd. Then a few hours later the neighbors came home and discovered they'd been robbed. Apparently the guys had walked around to the alley that runs behind our street and gone in through their backyard, which is fenced in with a high wooden fence for their dog. (Fortunately the dog was fine, but apparently she's not quite the guard dog they hoped she might be.)

Anyway, he felt really bad for not calling the cops when he saw them earlier, even though he wasn't sure what he would have said if he had. So I'm gonna say I think you made the right call.

Also, we have now taken to hiding our laptops whenever we leave the house. I'd like to think we're not a particularly attractive target, since we don't have a lot of major electronics or fancy-looking items, and our schedules are somewhat erratic. But I still worry, of course, mostly about what might happen to the (decidedly indoor-only) cats if someone broke in.

Well, to paraphrase Chekov, if you introduce a dog in the first act it needs to go off by the third.

Heh. Good one.