If you happened to read my previous post (law and order), you’ll have noticed that I may just live in the ghetto. Ok, so it’s not that bad, but I like to make it sound more exciting. Anywhoo…. Royal is out of town all week for work, so I’m doing the single mom thing, which by the way I am not sure how single moms do it without either going crazy or being hospitalized for exhaustion, because I now notice that I love it when Royal comes home and can pay attention to Jayden for a few hours. :) Anyways… with Royal gone, I have made sure all the doors are locked up tight, even the door that goes to the garage, which is sometimes locked and sometimes not, but this week has been locked for sure. So, tonite I was going to go get some food to eat, b/c I didn’t want to cook, so I grab Jayden and my keys and wallet and go out to the garage. It isn’t until I hear the garage door slam shut that I realize that it just might be locked. I run back to the door and yes, my suspicion was correct, it was locked. I run back to the car searching for my keys…what do I find? Only the car keys…no house keys. I’m like oh crap, now what am I going to do? Royal’s in Alabama, he has a key. Jordan is in Portland, he has a key. The spare key to the house is INSIDE (great place for it). Basically I’m screwed. I started thinking, could Jayden and I sleep in the car and just wait for Royal to come home tomorrow night? Ummmm I think not. I notice my neighbor Ed across the street in his garage (not the drug dealer neighbor) He’s one of those guys who has connections everywhere and knows everything that happens in the neighborhood, and I mean everything. So I grab Jayden and run across the road. I’m like ‘hey Ed, I just locked myself out of the house, you wouldn’t happen to be an expert lock picker would you?’ He’s like ‘well….hang on one sec’. He runs in the house for a minute and then comes back out with a credit card. I’m like ‘what?? that actually works??’ He goes, ‘well you have to know how to do it’ I’m like ‘who showed you?’ And he said ‘I had one of the inmates show me how to do it’ No, Ed has never been to prison, well at least not in a cell. He’s a guard at the Shelton Pen. So, Ed goes right up to the door, puts the card in the door jam and 2 seconds later the door is open. I’m like ‘you got to be kidding me. why do I even lock the door???’ Ed’s like ‘yea, you might as well not lock it and just call me if you think someone’s in your house’ A few days earlier when the cops were running through the neighborhood looking for drug dealers, Ed proceeded to give me his phone number and said ‘I have 7 guns and I know how to use them, you call me if you’re scared’ I love Ed!!!!

Last Friday, around 11:00, my mom and I were feeding Jayden some breakfast consisting of bananas and oatmeal, his favorite but really has nothing to do with the story. When all of the sudden, my mom says, ‘whose running across your yard?’ I look out the window and low and behold there is a man with a big black garbage bag slung over his shoulder running across my yard. I of course, being the big intimidating being that I am (all 5′1″ of me), run out of the house to confront this person and tell them to say the heck out of my yard and use the road like a normal person. But I miss the guy as he jumps into a car waiting for him by the road and speeds off. My second thought was, ‘now that was a stupid move..what if he was doing something he didn’t want to be seen doing and happened to have a gun and thought, ‘hmm lets dust the short blonde chick so there’s no witnesses’ Luckily that didn’t happen, so I go back in the house, tell my mom they got away, and call the police. There had been a break-in a few houses down from ours a few nights prior, so I called the police just in case someone reports a robery or something. The police dispatcher takes my statement and then says she was sending a patrol guy out my way. I was like ‘ok’, thinking I would never really find out what really happened. Boy was I ever wrong…

‘Bout 15 mins later, a sheriff knocks on my door. He asks me to tell him what I saw again and then asks if he can look around my back yard. I’m like ‘Yea, fine with me’. And he tells me there is another sheriff on the way and he’ll probably want to look at my back yard too. So, a few mins later, there are 2 sheriff’s cars parked in my front yard and police guys nosing around. They leave soon after w/o really telling me anything. I once again think ‘what the heck is going on that 2 sheriff’s show up for a “maybe” suspicious guy running across my yard. My mom leaves a little while later and I promptly lock all the doors.

A couple hours later, another knock on the door. I’m thinking, ‘crap, i’m alone, what if it’s someone coming to retaliate for calling the cops on ‘em’. I peak out the door and there are 2 guys out there and I slowly open the door… Now I’m telling you, it was just like an episode of law and order. These two guys say, ‘Are you rachel?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ They go, ‘Well we’re Detectives so-and-so and so-and-so, with the lacey police department’ and then they flash me their badges. I’m thinking ‘Am I on tv?? Is this really happening? So they really do that in real life??’ ha ha ha They confirm the story that I told that morning and then show me a picture and say ‘Is that the guy?’ I’m thinking, ‘This is JUST like tv!!’ And then I start thinking ‘Oh crap, so they think they know who the guys is and they have a big ole folder on him’ So, I say, ‘Is that who you guys think it was, and if it was, do I need to be worried that he was around the house?’ So they preceed to tell me that they had been over at the guys house this morning with a search warrant b/c there were reports he was dealing drugs out of his house. The guy slammed the door on them and while they were waiting for back-up, he obviously collected all his loot, stuffed it in a bag and threw it over the fence, into my yard. Yea, that’s right folks, this guy is my neighbor. Once the cops got into his house, there was nothing inside and there was nothing in his back yard. Nobody thought to look in my back yard. I made the call to the cops about 15 mins after they showed up at his house in the morning. Coincidence?….I think not.

So, lets just say I’m seriously thinking of building a 12 foot cement wall around the house w/ lights that turn on by motion and some really BIG dogs with sharp teeth.