So a detective knocked on my door...

Think it's a lame start to a joke? It is, since ealier today a detective knocked on my door, informing me that a car parked about eight houses down from mine was set on fire Monday morning at 4:30 a.m. This marks it as the second car on our street to be torched in the nearly eleven months since we first purchased our home in March 2010. Roughly four more cars had been burned down the month before we moved in, in one night of car burning fun. The four cars that night do not include the multiple other cars that had been broken into the same night, in what the local Police Department believes was a related incident. According to them the arsonist was prepping the other cars to be burned as well, and was probably scared off after the cops showed up in response to a report of the first two cars burning.

The last car that burned, back in May, was burned directly across from my house and we first watched it burning from our front window before venturing out to catch the drama unfolding from our front steps. Somewhere I have a really good description of that event, I'll find it and post it tomorrow or write a new one. I might even inclue the video I took from my digital camera of the car burning up.

The Detective told me that one of the neighboors had caught a glimpse of the suspect, tall thin man wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt. Helpful, no? Not to come off like an ass and blame my neighboor for not getting a better view, it was the middle of O'dark and a half past "why am I up?" am. Also, the street that I live on has an Elementary School backing up to it that was closed five years ago and has since been converted to a "continuation high school" with a driveway that lets out onto my street. Directly across from that driveway is a path to a creek that runs behind the whole street, and connects to multiple other creek paths that runs a decent length of our town. To make things even worse, the town High School is two blocks from us. Seriously, why did I buy a house in this neighboorhood? It seems like the perfect breeding ground for getting away with a crime, since traffic around here is almost as changing as traffic in a mobile home park.

Time to finish up the nursery dresser painting project we have going on in the garage so that we can get all of our cars in the driveway and/or garage. Lock your doors ladies and gents, America isn't completely safe.

Starting it all up...

I'll admit like most projects, I started my blog with the intent to make it permanent and a daily activity. Then in an all to short period of time, I become lazy and forget all about my grand plans to have a daily activity. I let other, far un-important things, get in the way and let my projects go unfinished. It would be a stretch of the imagination to call this blog "important" at least to anyone but myself. So when I say "un-important things" I primarily mean that the other things I find to do are utterly lame. IE: watching TV, sleeping, etc. No great excuses such as work, chores, a social life.

What I also mean by referring to this blog as not important to anyone else but myself is this: I used to be a much more creative person. In part my creative outlet of writing poetry and creating stories was an escape from what I deemed a boring and painful childhood/teenage years. Not to get all angsty, because seriously? What teenager doesn't think their life is boring and/or painful? Over the years, I quit acting as I never made it into any of the plays in High School, I cut back on my poetry, I stopped taking art, and slowly my creative writing become less and less important. For a long time my only creative outlet was a livejournal, but even that I've found less time for. I would go over in my mind the posts I wanted to make and then when I sat down to write them I lacked the words. Now my creative outlet has been limited down to random, boring, sometimes fun, "I'm thinking" wall posts on the infamous Facebook. Lame.

As I'm about to embark on Motherhood (even now my spawn is squirming under my skin plotting her escape into the real world) I know that more of the things I use to define "me" are going to become less important. In the face of a child who depends solely on you for sustenance, how do you step away and selfishly do things just for you? Now before I lose more of myself, I want to stake a claim on the creative person I once was. I hope that this stand will help me to keep "me" in this crazy trip I'm about to take, and will leave me feeling more satisfied with myself by the end of each day.

Younger self, I've missed you, let's step out into the cold and find you once again.