last week's drama

Directly behind my house last week, there was a lot of yelling, police, and even a drone in the air.

See the photos from my bedroom window and read the story...

On the first day, I think the yelling didn't start until I was already off of my work shift. The weather was drizzly. I looked out back and saw a police car parked directly behind my back fence gate. Two women were sheltering from the rain under the vehicle's raised back door. I saw at least half a dozen police and a few emergency vehicles. I expected violence, because the police at my alley were carrying equipment in their hands to break down a door. I didn't understand why I kept hearing a weed whacker, since it didn't make sense that a neighbor would be doing that chore in the drizzle. I finally noticed the police drone in the air, and I took this bad photo of it. That's what was making the whirring noise. After a while, though, everyone left, and the two women entered the back door of the house. A strange conclusion to the event.

The next day there was yelling again, during my lunch break at work. This time, there were some women in the back yard talking to the yelling man through a window. I suspect these are the crisis intervention crew that we asked for instead of police response to everything. They stayed there a while through the additional yelling. I continued back to work. During a particularly intense period of yelling, I took a break and went back to the window. I caught a photo of the police arresting the man in the back yard. I don't know if someone inside pushed him through the window or if he went willingly, but he seemed only vocal during the arrest rather than violent.

End of drama. No gunfire at all. I'll call it a win.

In similar news from the warzone, El Salvador was once famous for its homicide rate. Now, that rate has dropped so significantly in the last decade that it is approaching the homicide rate of the USA. Wide averages are misleading, of course, and some areas of El Salvador are more dangerous than others. (If you average me with Bill Gates, I'm a millionaire.) By the same token, some areas of the USA are probably more dangerous than most areas of El Salvador. I offer my neighborhood as one example. The Trace has updated their data for recent years, and here is the gun shooting map within a 1-mile (1.6km) radius of my house. Click "Explore the map" in that link to roam freely and have a good look at the USA. These bullets are only the few that contact a person. There are vastly many more bullets flying through the air around here that never hit a person.

That photo is clearly more dense than the same one I posted in 2020 when it had less data to display. I call this my beloved warzone for a reason.

In happier news, yesterday I saw this small brown bunny in my back yard in the clover. (As always, click the photos to zoom in.) The well-camouflaged rabbit is in the center of the photo. I know critters have a wide range of travel, but I'll try to notice if it spends more time in my yard than not. I hope it decides my yard is a good place to nest.