Tag: neighborhood

Weekend Notes

August 15, 2022 / DB

Some catchup from the last few days.

Shots Fired…Literally

Friday night we had our old neighbors from Carmel over for dinner. They like to rib us about moving from Carmel, which has little violent crime, to Indianapolis, which like most big cities has some issues. I joked that we hadn’t heard any gunfire from our home in over a year.

Later that night I was in bed, asleep, when I heard one of the girls talking to S. I rolled over and M and C were standing there. I heard them say something about hearing gunshots and police being outside our house. My eyes popped open and, indeed, there were flashing lights reflecting off the trees in our backyard.

I raced downstairs as C told me what she had heard and seen from her bedroom window, which looks out the front of our home. She said at 11:30 she heard a bunch of gunshots then saw a car make a quick U-turn on the main street our house sits off of.

When I got downstairs there was a police car blocking that street directly in front of our house, about 200 feet from our front door. Half a block down there was another police car, half a block beyond it a third. We could see police officers walking around with flashlights as if they were searching for evidence. Soon we saw them placing little evidence markers on the road. This was going on literally within shouting distance of our house, we’re talking 400–500 feet.

This was no bueno.

M must have been watching a lot of police shows lately, because she made the observation that no one must have been hit/hurt because there were only three police cars and no ambulances. I thought that was a pretty astute comment from a privileged kid like her.

As we watched the activity in the street, I pulled up the history from our front door camera and rewound backwards. Sure enough, at exactly 11:30, the quiet night was interrupted by a serious of gun shots. Seconds later you could see the lights of the car making the U-turn in front of our house. But no other cars ever appear.

The cops did their work for about an hour then left. It was a little hard to go back to sleep after that excitement.

Saturday morning I checked Nextdoor and saw a post from one of our neighbors. They had gone out and talked to the police when they first arrived. Based on what the cops found, they were assuming it was just a single car shooting into the air rather than shooting at another car, someone in a house, etc. They found 12 shell casings, which seems excessive to me. But I’m not a gun person. Maybe that’s a normal thing to do on a Friday night. Thankfully it doesn’t seem like the bullets hit any homes and, since it was 11:30 PM, there weren’t any people out doing yard work, grilling, or just hanging out as we had been doing a couple hours earlier.

There wasn’t a thing about the incident on the news Saturday. There were at least two murders in Indy that night, so some idiot emptying a clip on a dark street without any injuries didn’t move the needle.

An unsettling reminder of the world we live in.

Oh, L slept through the whole thing. And S didn’t get out of bed. I believe her comment to the girls was, “Tell your dad about it,” and went back to sleep. Apparently they are less affected by nearby gunfire than the rest of us are.

Fan Girling

The night before the first day of each school year, CHS seniors gather to TP the Hill. They take thousands of donated rolls of toilet paper and throw them over all the trees that line the main entrance to campus. Then on the morning of the first day, the students like the street and greet families by tossing toilet paper at their cars. It’s a mess, but it’s fun.

Wednesday night I volunteered to help serve food at the picnic before the TP-ing. I was given the highly coveted task of handing out hamburger buns. It was fun to see some kids I hadn’t seen since middle school, and to be greeted by M’s many friends. I even had a nice interaction with her boyfriend.[1]

If you are a college hoops recruiting junkie you probably know that, by one measure, the top senior in the country is in M’s class. He showed up, surprisingly, wearing a Team USA t-shirt (from a camp he was cut from) rather than any gear for Michigan State, where he recently committed. When he came through the line I offered him a bun, he accepted, said “Appreciate you,” and moved on.

A few minutes later M came running over.

“I saw you Fan Girling when X came by!” and made a face like I was starstruck.

I shook my head, “I was not ‘Fan Girling’, I just gave him a bun. And I’m disappointed he didn’t comment on my hat.” I was wearing my KU national champs hat. Not sure if he even glanced at it.

Anyway, I thought M accusing me of Fan Girling was pretty funny, even if inaccurate. I figure it was payback for me making fun of her Harry Styles obsession. Which is fair.

Hoops Tryouts

L had her tryout for the St P’s team Saturday. She said that she barely got to play. They mostly used her to set up other people so they could see how they played. She understood why – the evaluators know who she is, what her game is like, and that she had another tryout the next day – but was still bummed she didn’t get to ball more. That season starts in about a month.

The Sunday tryout was for a Cathedral-sponsored team that will play in the gap between the CYO season and when travel ball picks back up in March. She is excited to play with some girls she met at camp in June, and to learn from the high school team’s staff.

Her travel team jumps back onto the court this coming week, playing in a two-month Back to School league. She will re-tryout for that program in two weeks, although she will stay on the team she played for this past year. It’s just a way to get another $30 out of families.

Her (likely) final kickball season starts on Tuesday.

So Long Oooey Pooey

This weekend Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis announced that it was splitting into two schools. IU will take over most of the campus and call it IU-Indy. Purdue will still control the engineering and computer science programs, likely as an extension of the West Lafayette campus.

The reason given was simple: branding. While IUPUI billed itself as offering the best of both schools, no one really got it. And the name was endlessly mockable. I guess this will help them get more applicants/enrollees?

I did most of my graduate work on the IUPUI campus, but don’t have any real connection to the school. I doubt many people have strong feelings about the split. I think we will all miss the name, though.

It is official, she has used the term around us. ↩

Car Troubles

November 19, 2019 / DB

We had an interesting Monday when it came to interactions with automobiles, both indirectly and directly.

Things started with a bit of a bang. Just before we were heading out of the house to do school drop offs C yelled to us, “There’s a car on fire outside!”

I ran to our front door and, sure enough, on the main road our house sits near, about 100 yards from our front door, a car was sitting, hood open, with flames pouring out of the engine block area. I yelled up to S and then got on the phone to 911. As I waited to get patched through to the fire department, I saw S running down our street to check if there were any people inside who needed assistance.

A fire truck had already been dispatched so we watched out our window for a few moments. S wasn’t quite to the car yet when the battery or something else under the hood blew, shooting sparks out with a loud pop.

As I said, it was nearly time for us to leave and we were picking up another student on the way, so we couldn’t linger. Just as we were leaving the fire truck pulled up and began dousing the car. We would normally drive right next to where the car was sitting but took the back way out of our neighborhood to avoid the traffic that was buying up and hoped all would be well.

By the time I made the school circuit and returned home, all seemed quiet. The car was still sitting there, hood up, but apparently safe because the kids who catch the bus at that corner were standing 20 feet away waiting on their ride.

About an hour later a man showed up and started gathering what I assumed his belongings. Moments later a tow truck arrived to collect the car.

No idea what happened but there appeared to be no injuries. S told us in the evening that when she ran over a school bus driver who was down the side street was already looking in to see if anyone was in the car. Neither of the saw anyone. We assume the driver had run over to the YMCA that is next door to wait for the fire department to arrive.

Our afternoon drive from school take us through some of the finest stretches of roads in the city. (Sarcasm alert.) We go through long stretches that are filled with potholes, both new and roughly patched older ones. It’s a wild ride some days. Yesterday I think the odds finally caught up with me and I had the first blowout flat tire of my life.

We were about five minutes from home, in a relatively healthy stretch of road, when I heard an odd, metallic pop. I hadn’t seen anything in the road before I heard the noise but checked my rearview mirror as I passed to see if I had indeed driven over something. I saw nothing.

I figured it best to check my tire pressure readings in case I had driven over something. Sure enough, one tire was rapidly losing pressure. I gambled that we could make it home, got lucky with a stop light, and we crawled into our driveway as the tire was going totally flat. We were moments from being what has become a common site in Indy the past few winters: a car driving slowly with a completely flat tire that is beginning to shred itself.

Semi-amazingly, I did not change a tire until I was 29 or 30. But since then I’ve changed my share. S seems to be a magnet for nails and construction debris. I’ve changed many tires for her. I’ve had a few normal flats of my own, the kind you have no idea are flat until you walk into the garage to leave and a deflated tire greets you. I’ve helped family and friends change tires. In other words, I’m experienced.

I knew going in the process would suck. I currently drive a Chevy Tahoe, and this is my first completely flat tire with it.[1] But I did have to use the spare tire on my previous vehicle, a Suburban, so I knew that Chevy hides all the parts you need to change the tire in strange places that require an engineering degree to access. I won’t bore you with all the details but it took me a full 45 minutes to find all the parts of and assemble the jack, figure out how to access the spare, get the spare on the ground, and then figure out the proper/safe place to connect the jack to my Tahoe’s frame. Along the way I read the owner’s manual to the point of frustration and had to watch three different YouTube videos.

After all that it was an easy five-minute process to put the spare on. But, good Lord, it was an effort to get there. Thanks goodness I was in my garage with good lighting and some shelter, even if the floor was wet from the morning’s rain. I was glad I wasn’t in a dark parking lot somewhere with rain coming down.[2] And I cursed the people at Chevy who found a way to make changing a tire way more complicated than it should be. I hope there’s a special place in hell for all those jackasses.

I had a slowly leaking tire on it two months ago that I did not have to swap for the spare before having repaired. ↩
I’ve done that before. ↩

The New Local

July 16, 2018 / DB

Now that we’ve been in the new house for three weeks, I think I owe my readers a tour. Not of the house; that would be weird and difficult to do via text. If you want to see it, you just need to schedule a visit!

Rather a tour of our area, Nora, because it is quite different than the old digs.

We have a YMCA that is literally within walking distance. So close that if the girls went together we’d be comfortable letting them go there alone. They just have to cut across the edge of our neighbors’ yard, duck through a break in the tree line, and they’re in the Y’s parking lot. We finally joined last Friday and spent an hour at the pool before it got too hot to stay in the sun. Once our summer membership expires that is where I’ll be doing my daily workouts.

Running just behind our neighborhood, and accessible from the Y’s parking lot, is the Monon trail, the urban path that extends from downtown Indy 20 miles to the far northern ‘burbs. Last week L and I hopped on our bikes and rode down to Broad Ripple and back. It was only about a 5 mile round trip and she said she’s ready to go further next time.

Our old neighborhood was very suburban. We were surrounded by other neighborhoods, parks, gravel mines, and corn fields. The nearest shops and restaurants were all a healthy walk away. In the new ‘hood, we are less than half a mile from a grocery store, a Target, and their surrounding shopping areas, a Walgreen’s and CVS, and[1] a liquor store. We’ve already walked to a restaurant for dinner one night and a yogurt place for dessert another night. There are plenty of fast food options, a pizza place, a great bagel place, and a few other nice restaurants all within a 15 minute walk. As we were strolling home from dinner last week I told S it was almost like living on the Plaza in Kansas City again. Except we live in a house with a big yard instead of sharing walls with our neighbors.

North Central High School is also right up the street from our house. Friday night there was a high school football all star game at their stadium and we could clearly hear the PA announcer from our front steps. NC usually has a really good basketball team – famous alums include Jason Gardner, Eric Gordon, and Kris Wilkes – so I think L is excited to go watch them this winter.

L and I took 15–20 minutes to bike down to Broad Ripple Friday. When we hop in the car, as we did for dinner Sunday, we can be there in about five minutes. Broad Ripple was a 20-minute drive from our old house because of traffic lights, which meant we didn’t take advantage of all its dining opportunities very often. We could usually find something closer and more convenient. Now, thought, we’ve already eaten down there three times in three weeks.

The demographics of our area are quite different than in Carmel, too. Nora leans to the affluent side for sure. We have a pretty fat house and there are plenty that would be well beyond our budget. While new construction like ours isn’t uncommon, Nora tends to be filled with big, beautiful old homes.

That affluence extends to about half a mile north of our house. When you get past the 86th Street shopping corridor you move into an area of older apartments that are home to mostly working class African-American and Hispanic families. That area, and some others within Washington Township, make North Central almost evenly split between white and black students, with a healthy slice of Hispanic students as well. While our girls won’t go to school there, just being in this area will certainly open their eyes to the truth that there are people who look different than us and have very different lives than us.

Allow me to jump back for a minute to talk about our grocery store. I was very excited to have one right around the corner because I go to the store roughly 87 times a week. After three trips to our new one, though, I’m kind of done with it. They never, ever have enough people working the registers and on two trips I spent nearly as much time in line as I did filling my cart. I freaking hate waiting to check out at stores so I’ve given up on that location for all but quick stops. It is also older, with very narrow aisles, and it seems to always be filled with old people who block the aisles and can’t hear you when you say “Excuse me,” and try to squeeze by.

The one thing I will give the local store is that it shows off the area’s demographics. On one recent trip there was a group of African-American women shopping together. Two were in the little moto-carts for folks who can’t get around well. They had a third lady with them and they were cruising around, saying hello to everyone, having a great time. At one point the ladies in the carts got separated and the third lady was walking around yelling for the other, “MONIQUE!!! MONIQUE!!! WHERE ARE YOU????” Then she’d belly laugh. L was with me that day and was rolling.

That same day I got behind an older white man in line and he kept turning around making racial comments about the black lady in front of him. Nice. I will admit she was making an odd transaction. She paid for all her groceries at once, then kept a green pepper separate. I don’t know what she used to pay for the pepper, but she asked for $200 in change from whatever she used. That kicked off a 10 minute process of finding the right person to get into the office to replenish the drawer with cash. While that is certainly odd and out of the ordinary, I’m not sure it was worthy of racial comments from Angry Old White Man in front of me.

One register over, there was a staggeringly attractive white lady[2] in her best workout gear who was screaming at her kids for going over and looking at the gumball machine. They didn’t mess with it in any way. They just looked at it. These girls were like 4 and 3 but something about that set their hottie mom off. Then again, as parents we all have those days when you’re barely hanging on and some tiny thing will provoke all your parental fury.

Quite the gamut in one trip to the grocery store. Shame that the service in there is so bad and I won’t be getting to see shows like this every week.

With a new one coming soon. ↩
I got a little woozy every time I passed her in the aisles. She was well put together. ↩

New Friends

April 25, 2012 / DB

As I shared last week, we have new neighbors.

They began to arrive Friday night, and then spent much of the weekend replacing carpet, painting, and moving their stuff in. We finally met them on Sunday. Nice folks.

Like we guessed, they have one daughter who is about M’s age and another who is about C’s age. As a bonus, their cousins, two more girls in the same age range, live about a block away. So Sunday all seven girls played together for awhile as the parents chatted.

Tuesday the girls started playing the minute all five were home from school and didn’t stop until I called mine in for dinner at 5:30. I was staining our deck and their dad was working in his garage. At one point he called over to me and said, “It’s a shame our girls aren’t getting along at all.” Seriously, it’s awesome how kids just hook up and start playing, not worried about occupation, religion, politics, or other socio-economic factors. You’re my age and want to play? Awesome!

I’m sure it won’t always be this easy. Sooner or later there will be hurt feelings, broken toys, picking on each other, etc. But they’re off to a great start, which is a relief for us and I’m sure for their parents as well.

Moving On

April 18, 2012 / DB

Wednesday was a sad day at our house. Our next-door-neighbors, who have lived here for nearly six years, finished three days of packing and left for a new home in Texas. They were pretty much the perfect neighbors: our age with kids, friendly and easy to talk to but not ever in our business.

Their kids and our girls spent nearly every day playing together in the summers, and usually hooked up after school as well. That relationship was perfect, too. Their kids never came wandering into our home uninvited, nor did our kids ever enter their house without permission. There were very occasional minor disagreements, but generally they got along together very well.

I’m not sure it’s really hit our girls what has happened yet. They gave their friends hugs and yelled goodbye, but never acted sad or disappointed. My wife tells me that is developmentally normal for their ages. I’m sure soon we’ll start hearing about how they miss their friends and are sad they’ve left us.

The good news is our new neighbors, who may move in as soon as this weekend, have two girls that look about the same ages as M. and C. While there’s no guarantee they’ll get along, kids that age don’t have a whole lot of trouble making friends. I would bet everything works out. We can only hope the parents are as good neighbors as our departed ones.

Watching them load up and move out reminded S. and I of something important: moving sucks. We are glad we love our home and neighborhood because we don’t want to go through that any time soon.

Friday Grab Bag

February 17, 2012 / DB

This week kind of went off the rails yesterday, so I’m going to throw some bits-and-pieces that could have turned into longer, individual posts into a single grab bag to end the week.

The biggest obstacle we faced this week came Thursday morning at approximately 3:30 am. I woke to hear the smoke alarms and cable backup box chirping and seeing strange flashes of light out the windows. After a few moments I realized the power had gone out. I waited a few more minutes until it was apparent this wasn’t just a quick flicker because a squirrel touched two power lines, and then took a flashlight into C. and L.’s room so if they woke up they wouldn’t freak out. A few minutes later there was another pop in the distance and some more flashes of light. “Great,” I thought, “transformers are blowing up.”

The weather was fine, so my hope was that this would be a quick fix. But at 7:00 the power was still off so we scrambled to get M. ready for school in the dark. When we left, a police car was blocking one way out of our neighborhood. That direction you could see one of the main power lines that is usually 40 feet in the air down on the ground and several of the utility poles had broken cross-supports. Greater still.

C.’s school was first delayed and then cancelled, so she, L. and I sat at home, them watching movies on a laptop and me reading in the light from the front window. Eventually I checked the Indy Star’s website and learned that a drunk driver had a run-in with a utility pole. Initially 6000 people lost power, but after some work, only about 300, all in our neighborhood, remained in the dark. And, according to the power company, it was going to take most of the day to fix it.

We went out for lunch, went to the library, and after getting M. went to my in-laws’ until we learned the power was back on after 5:00 pm. Good times. The girls were well-behaved and, fortunately, the temperature was in the 40s. By the time we left the house to get M. it was getting a little chilly, but it obviously could have been much worse this time of year. And yes, we have a fireplace that we’ve never used. I suppose if it was freezing we could have kicked it on, but I’d hate to be one of those people who used a fireplace for the first time in eight years and then their chimney caught on fire because there are birds nests in it or something.

And who drives drunk at 3:30 am on a Thursday?

OK, that was longer that I thought. I’ll keep the rest of this brief.

I covered a rousing comeback Tuesday night. My team, GHS, which had only won three games all season, dug out of a 13-point hole to beat a team with two Division I recruits by 11. GHS has, obviously, struggled this year but that was their third-straight win. It was great to not only see the comeback, but see a team developing confidence in the last couple weeks of the season. It’s unlikely they’ll make any kind of run in sectionals, but at least there is a glimmer of hope now.

Plans may change, but I am scheduled to attend my first Pacers game in six years this Sunday. They broke a five-game losing streak last night, but had been one of the surprises of the early NBA season before that. I wouldn’t say I’m getting back on the NBA bandwagon, but for the first time since before the Brawl, I’m at least paying a little attention to them.

Since my power outage rant went longer than planned, I’ll cut this off here. Have a great weekend.

ↁ

Routines

January 9, 2012 / DB

Finally, the holidays are over. M. is back in school today, which means we get to work our way back into our normal routine. She reminded me last night that I utterly failed at the one thing I wanted to accomplish with her over the break: master tying her shoes. Oh well, she’s waited this long. It won’t kill her to put it off another month. She can read a 150 page book in a night, but she can’t tie her own shoes. I love the little contradictions in our kids.

Speaking of routines, our trash day changed last week. Our service now runs through the city rather than through our HOA. What makes it especially difficult is we had been a Monday pickup neighborhood since we moved here. So, for 8 1/2 years my routine every Sunday was to gather up all the trash in the house, load the dumpsters, and roll them out to street. The only hard part was remembering whether it was a recycling week or not. Somehow I managed to only forget that once, and it was the week before Christmas, which was a bad time to have an overloaded recycling bin.

Despite leaving myself many mental reminders, predictably I rolled out of bed at 7:45 last Wednesday, looked outside, saw all the other trash bins in our cul-de-sac out, and made a panicked dash to get ours out before the truck came. Only it didn’t come, since Monday was a holiday, so I looked doubly foolish. I figured that was payback for all the Monday holidays when I smuggly gazed at the neighbors’ bins while I was the only one who remembered there was no pick-up that morning.

Why am I sharing this? Because many times over the years I’ve thought about writing an ode to the Monday trash pickup. It’s perfect, in my view. You immediately get rid of any extra trash you accumulated from weekend entertaining or cleaning projects. You’re starting the new week off fresh. And there’s a built-in reminder, as you do you other Sunday evening preparations for the coming week.

Wednesdays are devoid of meaning or benefits when it comes to trash. I’m going to have to write it on the family calendar until it becomes second nature. If/when we move, I think going to a Monday trash neighborhood will be high on my list of desires in a new home.