It's news to us
2006-11-06 - 2:10 p.m.

A couple nights ago I woke up around 1:00 a.m. to see lights flashing on the wall next to our bed. I sat up and realized they were blue and white police lights coming through one of the front windows, so I got up to see what was going on. Between the flashes of blindingly-bright light I could see at least a half dozen cars parked outside, and it looked like maybe half were police cars. I could also see that some people were standing next to one of the police cars across the street, but I couldn't distinguish anything else so I went back to bed. B got up and checked it out, too, and he said it looked like the police were talking to the occupants of the cars individually and then letting them leave one by one. I still have no idea what that was all about, but I'm really curious to know.

Today N is over doing his usual stuff (painting, raking leaves) and he got here while I was in the shower. Later while I was getting dressed in the bedroom, B came in and told me that one of our nextdoor neighbors died last Friday. This came as a total shock because we didn't even know he'd been sick, but he died of pancreatic cancer, IIRC. The guy's father-in-law was staying with them for a while and apparently he's died, too. Not sure when that was. We found out about all this because the guy's wife saw N raking leaves in the yard and came over to tell him, thinking he was a family member of ours or something (I guess).

I don't remember if I wrote about this or exactly when this happened, but B had a little run-in with this neighbor a while back over the neighbor's radio. The neighbor put this huge radio tower up in his driveway and our receiver was picking up his morse code and other interference when we were watching TV, so after one particular instance when it happened B went over there to find out if anything could be done about the interference. The neighbor got really defensive and, I can't remember now what was said, but B came back totally steamed. It seemed like the neighbor had a dissproportionate reaction to B, and now we're wondering if he was just feeling mad at the world in because of his condition.

I don't know how old this guy was, but I don't think he was very old. Maybe mid to late 40s. It was a real shock to hear that he's dead. I just saw him walking around in his yard a few weeks ago and he looked fine. We didn't talk to these people that much, obviously.

B has continued to massage me every night and I think I might see just the slightest lessening of swelling going on, but nothing really noteworthy. Nothing worth breaking out the camera for (yet).

My download of the latest Ayumi concert is still going - 47.2%. Still going really slooooow. One of these days I'll get to see it.

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