Ever since I lived in Chicago, I have preferred being where the action is.  However, this often comes with some, er, side effects.  When I first moved to Kansas City, I moved into a very cool ex-hotel on the Missouri historical registry.  Unfortunately, it was next to an abandoned building and a few streets down from some, well, crack houses.  I remember one night I got so weebed out by the gunshot sounds that I nailed my window shut.  (I've had brighter ideas in the past, looking back at the fire hazard that THAT was.)

From there, my beloved and I moved in together into an also very cool second floor walk-up in Midtown.  There I learned about a cultural event that involves taking out your handgun and shooting it in the air on the Fourth of July and on New Year's Eve at the stroke of midnight. 

After that place, when we decided to buy, we wanted to stay in town a while longer.  We moved about three miles south into one of those neighborhoods often referred to as "up and coming."  That's a nice way of saying "shitty now, but there's hope."  It was all we could afford at the time.  We did a ton of work to This Old House, and bless them, the neighbors have started doing some work to their old houses, too.  The neighborhood is really coming around.  That's why I was surprised last week when I left the little angel's bedroom at 8:30 to hear my beloved whispering, "Come here!!" in that excited, let's watch the house fire sort of voice.

We went outside on the porch to see five squad cars with their lights flashing.  A paddy wagon was double-parked two houses down. We sat down to watch.  A guy came out of one of the houses with the best Christmas lights in cuffs.

"Do you think I should be scared about this?" I asked.

My beloved laughed, a former small-town-Iowa-boy-turned-city-veteran at my insistence we live in "cool" neighborhoods.  "Not now - see, they got him!" he crowed.

Yeah.