Maybe this person just assumes you're drug dealers.
All these long "business trips" that Jammies does on short notice: highly suspicious.
Oh, no, I don't think Jammies is in on it. He's a mere dupe. A front man. A fall guy. No, it's all heebie and her burgeoning collection of offspring.
Think about it. No cop will ever frisk a baby in nappies. But babies grow up and become continent! The only solution: BABYSPLOSION.
But babies grow up and become continent!
I thought that was plate tectonics.
Also, plenty of cops have searched for drugs in the diapers of babies. It hits the paper from time to time.
If you're going to leave town for that long, I'd turn off the water.
If you leave the doors open and scatter raw meat through the interior of the house you could probably induce whatever the local mid level predators are (coyotes?) to housesit for you. Sure you'll (probably) have to do a little more cleaning up and driving away packs of dangerous wild animals than you would if you had a student housesit for you or something, but they would probably scare away any local burglars. And you'd be giving back to the local community/eco-system!
But if you get students in, the coyotes will follow them anyway. Predators follow prey. It's all part of the Circle of Life (hakuna matata, ponarke nanama etc. )
So is heroin not big where you live? I don't think I'd believe conspiracy theories about things like that, but burglaries still happen if your stuff/metal can be converted to drugs easily enough.
I haven't heard of much burglary around here. What I have heard about is very targeted (e.g. guy finds out his girlfriend's grandfather has lots of valuables in the house). We did have a heroin dealer nearby, but he got busted because he was too fucking stupid to not be busted. I don't think he stole anything, but the neighbors say he neglected a dog.
'You can't put a hundred pheasants kilos in a child's perambulator!' Doc Spencer said. 'Don't be ridiculous!' 'You can if it's been specially made for the job,' my father said.
Burglaries are down to zero for non-drug dealers? What am I supposed to do with all these bear traps?
14: I assume she meant stealing from drug dealers. The dealers have other ways to make money. Users often don't.
17: Fair enough. What about the blowtorches I have rigged to all the doors?
14 was more to the OP than 13. I agree that regular drug users steal plenty of stuff still.
Burglaries are down to almost zero for non-drug dealers, is my current understanding.
What? No. Home invasion style robberies usually involve drug dealers but regular old burglaries are common as hell.
This is why we can't have nice things.
But how common is hell, really? If there is one, there's only one.
Suburbs are hotbeds of rumors about possible burglary threats, the way middle schools are hotbeds of rumors about who masturbated with a hot dog.
Maybe I am an idiot but I had always understood one of the main points of stopping your mail to be to prevent a bunch of mail from piling up in a way that would signal to potential burglers that you are out of town. Do they really publish the lists of people whose mail is being held? Why on earth would they do that?
You bribe the post master with a list of who has masturbated with a hotdog.
25.1 is correct, but the OP is also correct that there is a widely-held belief (at least in my neck of the woods) that filling out a hold-mail card is asking for trouble.
I have semi-solved this problem by having a mail slot instead of a box. This way you have to be a very dedicated potential burglar (who comes up on to my porch and opens my screen door in order to peek through the mail slot) in order to know that I am gone. I anticipate that my quick-to-rage, gun-toting neighbor would be responding by that point. If I worry about anything, it is that he will do something awful one day, not that my (very few) valuables will get stolen.
Also, I know it's not 40 comments in, but I have to complain about terrible writing. I'm getting paid my very nice freelance rate to work on a document, and I cannot BELIEVE the the kind of errors the (master's degreed) person keeps making.
She consistently removes cuing words that signal key concepts to the reader, so that you end up with a paragraph that is basically a bunch of statistics splattered against the page. NO context, NO telegraphing what part is important. Just numbers. And she destroys parallel structure like she has something against it.
(Original draft sentence: "'Yes' responses on the ice cream question range from a low of 2% among Inuit respondents to a high of 77% among Latinos." Her revision: "Three-quarters of Latinos and Inuit at 2%.")
It's a 50-page document and I'm only half way through, because I keep having to rewrite entire chunks of text.
If you're going to lose 2% of Latinos, you may as well just drop the Inuit.
In the past I've always had a pet, so I had someone coming by to feed the cat. So it's never been something I've thought about until this summer.
I have no idea what heroin use is like in this town. I thought it was in every town, so I assumed it was here.
I thought the used electronics market had gotten so shitty that home robberies were no longer profitable. That identity theft was the new burglary.
Nobody wants an Inuit dropped on their toe.
31.3: Even if there aren't electronics, you can still steal the plate.
I thought the used electronics market had gotten so shitty that home robberies were no longer profitable.
Reported burglaries within a half-mile radius of my last house during 2014.
And there were a whole bunch more of them during the first half of 2015.
"After the introduction of European colonists, native populations dropped due to a combination of disease, war, massacre, environmental change, political powerlessness, and ill-considered rounding."
cannot BELIEVE the the kind of errors the (master's degreed) person keeps making
Oh man. I often edit reports written by PhD-level biostatisticians who couldn't write their way out of a paper bag.
Now even names are getting stolen! Will this wave of burglary ever end?
To be fair, most biostats coursework is about math and non-bag writing.
Geez. Link replaced with a permanent image and 38 was me. I only moved about a half-mile away, so I guess I haven't cleared the zone.
My understanding is that, around here, a fairly large percentage of burglaries are the most portable electronics, and that they're distributed through informal networks, not through a fence or whatever. But I'm sure it varies hugely by locale. Remember that case from a year or two ago here where the creepy ex-State Dept. security guy murdered those two kids who broke into his house? Apparently it's a big thing for rural Oxycontin addicts and the like to break into old people's houses just to steal their medicine.
As for me, our house hasn't gone unoccupied for over 24 hours more than a half dozen times in the last 6 years. Doesn't necessarily mean that the mail always gets picked up, but the general air of occupiededness seems to mark it as a poor prospect for burglars.
So a cop just knocked on my door to tell me that my neighbor across the hall had been burglarized and to ask if I'd seen anything. (I hadn't.) He specifically mentioned a big-screen TV as one of the items that was stolen, which would have been pretty noticeable.
That must be Hope Valley in bottom left without a label.
Chris Rock explains the map linked in 34
Our neighbors just had a bag of expensive compost stolen, and then a few days after that someone took the garden hose that they'd poked holes in and snaked around their garden as an irrigation system. The compost would have close to zero resale value (although it is Portland FWIW), and the hose would have none. Their guess is a cut rate gardening service filched it. About 10 years ago some meth addicts stole their copper drain pipe, and someone took their beater for a joyride (they eventually got it back, it had been abandoned a few blocks away).
We've had a pretty regular series of burglaries* in the neighborhood by what based on reports seem to be semi-organized gangs of heroin addicts, who go around the neighborhood during the middle of the day when many people are at work, ringing doorbells of houses that look like no one is home (pretending to be servicepeople if someone unexpectedly answers the door), and if no one answers then doing a quick smash of a door/window and doing a five-minute quick hit on valuables before rushing off. It's obviously a fairly high risk strategy and a bunch of people have been caught, but break-ins keep occurring following this exact same pattern so obviously not everyone has been caught or whoever is organizing this has recruited new volunteers or whatever. Several houses on our street have been hit. It's been going on for about two years.
* not technically "burglaries" as traditionally defined because they're occurring in the day and not at night.
46: When gardeners go bad, they really go all the way.
47 last surprises me slightly. After a failed break in at our previous house some years ago, the police told us that the burglars usually targeted a neighbourhood for a short time, maybe a couple of months, and then moved on to fresh woods and pastures new. They explained why at the time, but I've forgotten the reasons.
47: At least from what I see on the news, we don't have that type of burglary much in my neighborhood. It happens in the suburbs. My area is densely build and full of old people who are around all day. I think that if somebody tried to smash a window or door, the odds of them being heard and/or seen are too high. That's what I tell myself anyway.
My immediate neighborhood has had a few burglaries in the past month. More cases of larceny, robbery, assault, etc. (Not sure what constitutes simple larceny in residential areas - purse or phone snatching?)
50. Nonetheless, the attempted burglary mentioned in 49 was in daylight in a mixed neighbourhood of small terraces with a lot of people around. The burglar tried to kick down our back door; this was heard by our 6' 7" neighbour who came out and kicked him in the arse, at which point he ran away.
I think you underestimate how dumb some of these people are; also desperate. If they were of even average intelligence they could get a job and manage their habits. Also, I don't know what the odds against being caught doing a quick raid on a house in the day are - to short for me, certainly, but if you were suffering serious withdrawal, they might not look so unattractive.
That lends itself to my other neighbor's theory. We haven't had any trouble because if you don't have a car, you have to walk two blocks up a pretty steep hill to get here from the busline. The theory certainly works for trick-or-treaters. If you want good treats, wait until the last ten minutes and take on a steep street. They just shovel the stuff out.
And if they do have a car, I still think that even dumb and desperate people are more likely to head to the suburbs. That's certainly worked for real estate developers.
Two murderers recently escaped from a prison near where we used to live in upstate New York. A friend from that area was just telling me that before they were caught, the two killers were breaking into people's Adirondack summer cabins*, where they generally found not only booze, but drugs and guns, leading the owners to have to do some explaining.
________
* in the local idiom, these are inevitably referred to as "camps," giving you the impression that the owners are roughing it. I suppose sometimes they are, but sometimes these places are essentially second homes.
Nature is sort of boring with drugs or guns. What's more to explain?
you can work just fine as a heroin addict, for the most part. I feel that if I found a lifetime supply of dope I would be veeeeery tempted to use it. the hassle of going to my dealer's every day was almost the main hassle. (happily this is unlikely to happen.) I very occasionally went on the nod in seminar, like twice maybe in my whole undergrad/grad school career. but on the whole my pain was way better controlled, so I had a greater capacity to do things like get to class. my BFF could hold down a steady, complex job when she was using, but as a clean person she's on disability and her crippling pain rules her life. one feels that one should be better rewarded for getting clean and sober. OTOH needing to use to "get well" and being "sick" all the time is horrible and being freed of the compulsion is an unimaginable relief. and I did steal from people when I was an addict, much to my regret and shame. mostly I just called my grandmother to get a few thousand dollars wired to me--this haunts me. I should never have abused her trust that way. if I hadn't had family to mooch off of I might have gone in for more active theft.
I heard an interview in the last week or so about medical uses for marijuana, and per the doctor being interviewed there is research indicating that one of the main cabannoids (sp?), specifically not the one that makes you feel high, is good for treating nerve pain, for which the current treatment options are limited, not very effective and have unpleasant to bad side effects. To have consistent reliable relief from incessant agony without sucky side effects - well if this pans out in my lifetime I'll of course be relieved but also SUPER! PISSED! IT FUCKING TOOK SO LONG! because of bullshit moralizing and power creation/preservation.
59. Yes, I saw that. I wonder if it would work on my dud foot that the neurologists have given up on because it's too hard. I shouldn't have stopped using, apparently.
55: The lesson is that when you make an insurance claim just leave out the drugs they took. It's not worth it and they probably won't reimburse you anyway.
Also: "glamps"?
I think "cabannoids" are actually look-alike rich ladies who hang out around the pool too much. Cannibinoids are the chemicals to which you refer.
My experience is that cannabis is indeed very helpful for managing chronic pain, and indeed I've known A LOT of people who self-medicated with it (and with varying degrees of consciousness about what they were doing) and had pretty positive outcomes.
61.2: When my wife was in girl scouts, they went "glamping." This involved staying in a hotel.
Cannibalnoids.
Copacabananoids.
That has always been my impression of it, but apparently a lot of people have something invested in pretending otherwise and/or not scorning people who think of it as being a kind of camping because I got yelled at the last time I said that.
Paws Up is embracing the term: http://www.pawsup.com/glamping/moonlight-camp.php
although it is Portland FWIW
Wait, are you here these days, Buttercup? If so, a meetup with Emerson is in order. But yes, that sounds like a Portlandish theft. Why, just the other day, someone scooped out some soil from my community garden plot, decimating no small portion of my Cipollini onions. It might have been a squirrel, I guess.
there is research indicating that one of the main cabannoids (sp?), specifically not the one that makes you feel high, is good for treating nerve pain
Having smoked pot for most of the time I had shingles, I can attest to this.
Cardashianoids
Canopenoids
Cabinindawoids
But surely this is one of those bullshit urban myths, yes? (The OP is, I mean?) The newspaper doesn't actually print lists of which houses the post office is holding mail for? And the Post Office can't be giving out that list either?
Because that just sounds ridiculous. Like the tape recording of the crying baby on the porch ridiculous.
No, the accusation is that there's a dirty employee sharing the list, not that it's published.
So, I guess the baby-thing is common enough
to have hit Snopes.
Why, just the other day, someone scooped out some soil from my community garden plot, decimating no small portion of my Cipollini onions. It might have been a squirrel, I guess.
Hells yeah, around here, thefts are usually of relatively ordinary household items: a lawn mower. A ladder. A hose, a bicycle, some power tools, a trash can.
The gate to our garden here has been found suspiciously and unaccountably wide open a couple of times in the last week or two, and I can't make it out: we do have a groundhog problem, and they will dig their way under the gate and somehow kick it open when entering/exiting (and the cat jumps over it and kicks off, thereby swinging it open), but that's been fixed so it can't happen. Still, yesterday afternoon it was suddenly wide open again. I suspect the 13-ish-year-old kid next door, who's slightly developmentally disabled, so it's innocent enough on his part, but dang it, the groundhog(s) get in when it's open.
Or ... it might be a really determined critter somehow, I suppose. And it's not like I really need more zucchini and tomatoes.
Anyway, I signed up for the usps mail hold. I gotta live.
Just remember that if you hear a crying baby on your porch, shoot through the door.
Stupid zucchini grows so fast and tastes so bad.
Hey, how about a Portland meet up? I'll be there and out from under the jackboot obligations of wedding ness (just kidding! love them!) from Sunday through Wednesday the week after this coming one.
Zucchini is ok, when it's small/young, but I don't know why anyone would grow it themselves. I mean, I understand gardening for vegetables in general but there's no way to grow zucchini that doesn't end up with either wasting food, annoying friends, or hating zucchini by the end of the summer. I'm convinced the recipes using zucchini flowers exist mostly due to desperate gardeners trying to prevent zucchini from growing while pretending they're not doing that.
Zucchini tastes bad even for squash.
Are you eating them raw or something? Zucchini is great when cooked properly, and when you don't have like ten pounds of it showing up every week.
We did them on the grill. I had to eat them because vegetables tasting edible is something you need to tell lies about when you have kids.
Zucchini is great for any number of things: there's ratatouille, of course, and zucchini fritters or cakes, baked zucchini sticks, zucchini bread, and you can make an incredible layered tomato/zucchini tian (which is on the menu for tonight), and around here we like it raw in a sort of marinated vegetable salad. Plus just adding sauteed zucchini to eggs (or in an omelette). Also goes with pasta in various ways, and it can be added to a chunky tomato sauce.
That said, what you should not do is plant 4 zucchini plants. One or maybe two will do. We're composting them at this point.
I'm debating whether to try making this spread, which is freezable, but it calls for cooking at low heat for about an hour, and it's frankly too hot for that.
There's an awesome recipe for 'em in the April Bloomfield veggie book - the whole book is great, highly recommended as is her first book.
Moby, grilled zucchini is good with a spicy peanut or tahini sauce drizzled over.
We used to compost the astonishingly numerous but not good tasting plums off the tree of an apartment we rented on McKinley St. in Berkeley years ago and when the pile was fully loaded and cooking turning it was like hazardous duty in an off piste slivovitz set up. I hope the worms appreciated their annual toot.
This raises the question of why you didn't just make slivovitz.
86: In the Bittman gazpacho recipes in the NYT, there is a good zucchini one. You do need to sauté them a bit, but that's not as bad as turning the oven on.
Zoodles are fun to make and eat.
My parents love grilled zucchini spears but they definitely need some kind of interesting sauce on them to work, and the really big zucchini usually end up tasting bitter if you cook them that way.
I'm thinking of going for soup dumplings for dinner. Wash the thought of the taste of zucchini out of my mouth.
Slivovitz has never really appealed but we make delicious damson gin (provided blossom bluff doesn't sell all the damsons to restaurants like they did last year).
I'm mostly with Moby on zucchini, but I do really like a local place's thinly sliced breaded zucchini. They do it as an appetizer, served with a delicious lemon-herb aioli or on top of linguine as a variation on eggplant parmesan, which I think we can all agree is the only possible way to eat otherwise disgusting eggplant.*
*Not the commenter; he's great.
97 is a secret plot to discredit Moby by implying that he's saying something insane isn't it. "I think he's right about zucchini - it's gross just like eggplant and oral sex."
Yeah, gazpacho with zucchini is a definite possibility.
As for really big zucchini, like a foot long or more: compost. Unless you're desperate for zucchini, I suppose, or just a purist who refuses to discard any produce whatsoever.
Grilled zucchini sauce, I'm telling you: spicy peanut/tahini sauce, with garlic and a few red pepper flakes. Add water to it, so it's drizzleable. I haven't made it in a while, I think it may call for lemon juice, but as I recall, it needn't be cooked.
If you use tahini sauce and some lemon juice, you can substitute chickpeas for zucchini and get something that tastes good.
thinly sliced breaded zucchini. They do it as an appetizer, served with a delicious lemon-herb aioli or on top of linguine as a variation on eggplant parmesan
Dude, I made that last week. The variation on eggplant parmesan. Baked breaded zucchini slices have a multitude of uses. (Note for cooks: you don't thinly slice the zucchini to start: there's shrinkage in the baking process. Slice 1/2 inch thick at least.)
Okay, okay, Moby. You don't like zucchini: that's fine! I have a friend who despises cucumbers. Even the smell of them. It's just a thing he has.
zucchini flowers stuffed with goat cheese that has been mixed with fresh herbs, and breaded and shallow fried in olive oil are THE FUCKING BEST. I never get them in narnia.
Thinly slice zucchini (1/8th in) into rounds, toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Place on parchment paper, top with a bit of grated Parmesan or similar cheese. Bake in 450 oven for 20-25 minutes (golden brown.) Crispy and tasty.
97 You're tripping. Eggplant is great. The food and the commenter. This thread is making me hungry.
I can't let this thread pass without linking to tomato & zucchini tian, in part because that's a great recipe,* but chiefly because it's a great blog.
* I don't bother to saute the onion in butter/olive oil: just spread thinly sliced onion (red or yellow) & olive olive oil on the bottom, works fine.
And: interleave basil leaves between the tomato & zucchini slices. Or chiffonade them, and sprinkle.
I've grown to be ok with zucchini, especially when in a sauce I like, but the only times I've been ok with eggplant have been when it's in a soup that disguises and overwhelms what I generally think of as the canonical eggplant taste.
Eggplant can be good, but only if properly prepared to remove the slimy texture. I don't care for the flavor on its own but it can be good when complemented (as opposed to just covered up) by the right ingredients. Roasted eggplant dip or spread is usually pretty nice.
You can slice the zukes and put them next to the bison burgers on the grill. Then toss them out and eat the bison burgers. This works just as well with a tri-tip.
Sounds more efficient than our current process where we put them in the fridge until they spoil before tossing them.
the thought of the taste of zucchini
THE LITTLE KNOWN EARLY VERSION OF THE ONE HE DID WITH NANCI GRIFFITH
I just had a zucchini for dinner -- thin slices sautéed until they were a little brown, and then thrown in at the end of cooking risotto. Wasn't bad, although I admit that I was trying to dispose of the zucchini more than excited about it.
Yes, zucchini is the vegetative equivalent of styrofoam. Before we stopped growing it years ago, we made a lot of zucchini bread.
94: and the really big zucchini usually end up tasting bitter
Try some flavored lube?
Burgle burgle argle-bargle Fendi Fendi Prada
Basic bitches steal that shit so I don't even bother.
Bugle burgle, they stole your dress
Burgle burgle, your house is a mess
Burgle burgle, how did they know?
Stamp dude, told them so!
68, 81
I am indeed in Portland. I'm here through August. I suppose I could get over my crippling social anxiety of meeting online people in real life and actually meet up.
Meeting online people in real life is totally worth it. (At least for Unfogged people.) And I say that as someone who is plagued with crippling social anxiety in general.
Sadly, I'm off to go backpacking for a week the day dq arrives, but I'd love to meet up another time.
I am flexible in when I can meet.
