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The St. Johns neighborhood has a lot of meth addicts. This is a reality that is simultaneously fascinating and tiresome; the meth users who wander the area are clearly wrecked by the effects of drug use, and their decision-making processes suffer just like their skin, hair, teeth, and general physical health. As for genuinely violent criminal motivations, most of them seem incapable of much more than wandering the streets, high on meth, looking for cans to steal so they can 1) return them for the cash deposit value and 2) buy more meth.
We don’t have a fence. Not having a fence is, obviously, the same as having a sign out that says “meth heads welcome to rifle through contents of trash and recycling at will.” It’s possible to be standing right there and have a can wraith (our nickname for them) come up and start checking out your trash.
This is troubling, as we do not want to support the meth culture, however accidental and unintentional the aid may be.
Our current solution is simple:
1) Decoy glass recycling bin, visible from street, gets the wine bottles and other non-deposit items. If a meth head approaches the bin, he/she will assume that one of their colleagues has already collected the tribute. Meth heads being rather unmotivated, this is enough to keep them from further investigation.
2) Out of sight around the corner is the “real” recycling bin. Given our affection for microbrews, it’s quite the gold mine.
3) We return the bottles to the store ourselves, as there seems to be no other guaranteed way of keeping them from falling into meth-y hands.
But now I am faced with a dilemma: what to do with the deposit money? It’s not much, but it seems, I don’t know, special. I think we should start saving it up, but for what? More beer? Too easy. Trip to Europe? Would take too long, unless we dramatically increase our beer intake. Meth addiction program? Um, maybe. Is there a good one? I don’t know.
Any ideas?
I’m still pretty gleeful as I write this. Last night, we had a really, really great experience with a local business owner.
I have terrible respiratory allergies, and one of the things that has become more and more troubling for me over time is tobacco smoke. It used to be that it occasionally would provoke a coughing fit, but now it’s an invariable and awful consequence of being exposed to smoke. This means that we have to scout out the road ahead of us when we are walking and cross streets to avoid smokers, leave outdoor seating at restaurants when a smoker lights up, and that my day can at any instant be reduced to a fit of coughing and choking when some freewheeling tobacco lover exercises their stupid right to smoke what seems like everywhere but inside businesses.
Since Oregon’s anti-smoking laws came into effect, I thought it would be easier. In fact, it’s worse, if anything. Smokers now hang out outside of dive bars and smoke on the sidewalk, which is….hello….a place shared with people who may NOT be smokers, and every outdoor dining area I have been in is still crawling with them.
So, we were at Sam’s martini bar in the Pearl, Olive or Twist. The name is awesome, I know. We were sitting outside, and someone a table away lit up. I was immediately apprehensive, but the wind was blowing his direction, so it was ok for a couple minutes. Then it shifted, and I immediately started coughing. GRRRRR. We collected our drinks and headed inside, but Sam spotted us, noted my obvious gasping for breath, and asked if the smoke was bothering us. We said yes, and he told us not to go inside, that he would take care of it.
And bless his heart forever, Sam went over to the smoker and asked him to leave. Never, ever, ever has a business owner done anything to protect their customers from smokers while I was around, and I am incredibly appreciative. It was nice for once to have the smoker have to leave, not me.
I’m highly aware that I have family members and friends whom I love who smoke, but I just don’t believe it’s right that smokers be able to endanger my health and foul up public spaces.
So, it was Thursday morning. Thursday as in the day that’s after the day the neighbor had said he would be out of the meth house across the street. And he was, of course, still there. The criminal factor in the neighborhood was becoming disproportionate, even for St Johns.
At this point, he had been “packing” for some 30-odd hours, aided no doubt by some kind of uppers. And a great help they had been–the truck, while lamentably still across the street, was piled high with what I can only describe as a a precarious and random pile of rubbish. No beds were yet in sight, which made us think that another night of being neighbors with him + criminal consorts was in store.
7:25 am. I leave for work, my mind filled with fantasies of not coming home to more of this view:
But at this rate, expectations were low. Continue reading Anatomy of an eviction > part 3 (Thursday)
I had no idea that the St Johns Burgerville would prove such a treasure trove of linguistic chaos. Witness the June marquee, which Brooks most obligingly photographed for me during last night’s evening perambulation.
Either way, we’re all going to have a good time!
We left off the tale of the adventures of our anti-hero as Tuesday night fell. It still felt like Tuesday night when his friends began to arrive Wednesday morning, probably because it was…still night.
4:05 am. Friends of neighbor begin to arrive.
6:00 am. The increasing volume of evictee’s efforts are an effective alarm clock.
6:00:07 am. Standing in living room window, spying on watching the “progress.” So far, they have succeeded in loading the defunct Harley in the FRONT of the trailer. This took no small effort, as merely days before, neighbor had lost a key part to the bike in his lawn. It happened to be essential to starting that lovely piece of…work.
We did not offer to help him find it.
6:45 am. Two bicycles have now joined the Harley in the front of the trailer. I spy a cardboard box on the premises. This is promising. How long can it possibly take to pack a crack pipe and several empty Jack Daniels bottles? And once the 4-year-old’s stuff is packed, dad’s stuff can surely fit into an additional few boxes. Continue reading Anatomy of an eviction > part 2 (Wednesday)
In retrospect, I should have lived blogged this. For that huge FAIL, I will always be sorry. We were, however, very caught up in the memorable moments of the past few days.
Background: ex-felon who rents the house across the street is a nuisance. He hits on the women in the neighborhood, married and single, and doesn’t get the standard social cues of “leave me alone, you freak. I’m not interested.” He rides his Harley on the street (and on the sidewalk, because why wouldn’t you?), at incredible speeds and with incredible amounts of noise, any time of the day or night. He neglects his child. He shouts. He accuses. He has a parade of skanky people in and out of his house, day and night. Some leave so high they can hardly walk and also try to engage in conversation with cars.
He is, in other words, a bad-ass MoFo who is pathetic (and even sympathetic) in his own ways.
But he’s, at last, no longer a neighbor. Here’s how it went down; times are somewhat approximate.
Tuesday evening, 8 pm. We note suspiciously normal older couple at house across the street. They haven’t arrived on loud Harleys, they haven’t driven motorcycles down the sidewalk at 50 mph, and they do not appear interested in either buying or selling meth. They are clean, and it’s even possible that they shower regularly.
Tuesday evening, 8:01 pm. I find Brooks downstairs and ask if he’d recognize neighbor’s landlords, since I think they may be across the street.
8:01:14 pm. Brooks is now in the front yard, innocently watering. Watching from the window, I realize I was right–those were the landlords.
8:02 pm. Brooks waves at landlords, who cross street and engage in conversation.
8:09 pm. Animated conversation continues.
8:15 pm. Brooks comes inside, confirms that they are the landlords, and gives me the GLORIOUS news that the problematic tenant is being evicted for non-payment of rent.
8:15:10 pm. Celebration ensues. Continue reading Anatomy of an eviction > part 1 (Tuesday)
My newly arthritic ankle tells me that rain is likely today. This is an outcome I didn’t see coming when I broke my foot months ago, and I still hope it’s just coincidence that every day there has been rain in the last month, I have woken up with inexplicable soreness. I find this quite amusing but at the same time annoying.
The one confounding factor to my newly-minted weather predictor is that I had a wee bicycle accident last weekend. More of a falling over than an actual crash, it involved trying to go up a hill and finding the limit of my atrophied muscles. However, I did fall over on the offending foot, so…maybe it won’t rain today. Either way, life is good.
This falls under the “I have the best boyfriend in the world” category. I’m headed off to southern Oregon today for my sister’s birthday celebration. Even though it’s a Saturday morning, Brooks got up at 6 am to go to the store so he could send me on my way with fresh, homemade buttermilk biscuits and sausage. I’m torn between AWWW! and wow!
The recipe he is using is from Cook’s Illustrated The New Best Recipe. I hear the sound of the food processor cutting the butter into the flour now. Yum.
I have been puzzled for several weeks about what this sign outside of the St Johns Burgerville could possibly mean:
One of the many great things about Brooks is that he always takes my crazy suggestions seriously. A recent one has to do with his upcoming garage remodel. Or to put it more accurately, current garage destruction, digging of enormous hole for garage basement (because what garage is complete without a basement?!), and construction of a much larger, lighter space for the cool garagy things he has.
Since the garage is separated from the house by a patio area that is outfitted with a grill, I suggested that he might want to consider making that wall of the garage out of some kind of glass door. This would expand the patio area if needed, allow for balmy summer breezes, and inspire envy the next time he has a motorcycle work party. And then I found these. And they totally work.
But what’s even better is the website itself. Clearly, The Folding Sliding Door Company devotes most of their energy to making super fly doors, not web design or copywriting. And while the site is functional enough–you can, for example, get a “quotation”–it is full of charming near-use of the English language. The best part is their “why buy from us” page. Apparently, there are MANY manufacturers out there masquerading as “folding sliding door specialists.” Many. And that information is accompanied with the following dire warning:
We specialise in folding sliding doors only. The design and manufacture of folding sliding doors is an exact science. Do not buy from chancers.
Do not buy from chancers! Love it! Love their doors too, so the website is an added bonus.
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