Hump Day and Crime Stoppers edition

This is feeling like a grumpy hump day. It's raining. DD let one of the dogs in the house on her way out the door and now I have muddy wet paw prints through 3 rooms of carpet.  I'm just going to let it dry - seems like the dry dirt comes out of the carpet with vacuuming easier than trying to wipe it up wet and just grinding it in more. Work is a headache from the first email I opened - my boss is dealing with a company trying to valuate our company and not understanding why we didn't match our budget for 2013 (done at the end of 2012). Well, gee....it was just a guess based on the factors we knew at the time. It is what it is. And now we have a much lower budget done up for 2014, based on what we know for our 2014 income - which we estimate to be quite a bit lower due to a contract change with our biggest customer. The valuation company wants our 2014 forecast to match our 2013 actuals...well, that isn't going to happen, at least for this year.  I think my boss has such a big headache dealing with it all that she forwarded me the emails to get my opinion. I had to read through them 4 times to wrap my head around what the valuation company is trying to ask/get from us. I guess my responses back to her were on the money and I think she just needed some support that my responses were exactly what she was thinking, too.

DH's mission in life right now is to run out the drug dealers. A good mission, but I'm tired of listening to him go and on about it. Yesterday he went around to several houses in 2 housing developments that back up (with a wood fence) to our neighborhood. The constant in and out of loud racing cars has got to be annoying them as much as us (they are actually closer to the main road then we are). He wrote up a letter, asking people to just take a minute to anonymously call the sheriff non-emergency line and give the street of where all the activity is going on. He talked to a few people and left a copy of the letter on the other's doors. Most of the people seemed apathetic to what is going on literally 30 feet behind their back doors! DH had talked to a sheriff yesterday and he said the more people that call the more they can make this area a priority. The druggies either got their meth made or a shipment in of whatever they sell...Monday night 3 cars going in and out (there is only one private road back into our neighborhood - one way in and one way out). They'd come back to the house and wait there a bit, with their engines running. If they got cold they'd start revving it up louder, then out they'd head (loud mufflers) to make their delivery and 15 minutes later back again. This literally went on all day yesterday, until about 11 last night. 24 hours of it! At least the traffic up and down the street we live on has really gone down the past 10 days or so..the cars involved seem to be back at the other drug house down behind us and therefore just use the main road that our side street links to.

Late yesterday afternoon DH was outside with the dogs and kept hearing a faint alarm going off in the distance. An hour later he kept hearing it. It kind of sounded like it was coming from the house directly across from us (their back yard is what we face) or maybe the house on the other side of them (which is empty due to foreclosure). Finally he got in our car to drive around the corner and see if he could tell exactly where it was coming from. He still couldn't tell which house it was (one sits on an acre lot and the other 1.5 acres), so I tried calling the house directly in front us us, but no answer, so he called 911 and a fire truck came out. They determined it was the empty house - someone had broken in the back sliding glass door (along with part of the fence in front). They wouldn't go inside, in case there was someone inside, so they had to call the police and wait for them to come out - which ended up being a long time. DH stayed there and talked with them quite awhile (they were the ones who came out for our illegal garbage burning call in early December). While sitting there the same 3 drug dealer cars when in and out like 3 or 4 times. The firemen finally said "are those the same cars that just went by a little while ago?" So, then they said the same thing - just keep calling it in. The best part of DH sitting there, was he was finally able to get 2 of the cars license plates #'s (DD and I had already got one of them last week, while following the little truck down our street). So late last night, as you can hear them revving up and still going in and out of the neighborhood - DH called it in again, this time with car descriptions and license plate numbers. The cops did a drive through and later another cop did one and sat with his lights out across from the drug house for about 15 minutes. Haven't heard any of the cars since.  Hopefully, when our good next door neighbor gets back from his long vacation next week, he will join in the fight, as he said he would. He just didn't want to make waves before he left on his 3 week vacation, which I don't blame him.

That poor foreclosure house! it's just going to end up a demolished mess. It's such a nice house too, with a nice yard, on an acre lot. I'm not really sure what is going on with it - county records still show the lady owns it, not the bank yet, and they moved out like 6 months ago. They were a nice family - a couple in their 40's or 50's who's mom owns the house. She has MS and they lived with her to help take care of her, but she needed to go to a nursing home and with the house underwater and broken into 3 times that year, they just decided to move out and let the bank have it. Sad that it's taking so long for the bank to take it over and get it sold. The fireman said it will likely end up burned down by vandals or squatters before the bank takes over and sells it. That makes me so sad, it's always been one of my favorite houses in the neighborhood. The lady that lived there the first 15 or 20 years we lived here was always outside working in her yard, like every day and was so nice and always a wave or a hello if we were driving or walking by. Then she and her DH divorced and she couldn't afford it on her own, so sold it to this latest family. They kind of kept to themselves, but seemed nice and took care of the place.