What Now

BAD BOYS, BAD BOYS Whatchoo gonna do? Whatchoo gonna do when they come for you?

Last night we had a wee bit of excitement. Well, as much excitement as can happen in our neighborhood, I guess. Steve and I were eating last night when all of a sudden, BAM! The lights go off. Then come back on. Then go off again and stay off. It wasn't the kind of power outage that happens during a storm, mostly because the sky was clear, but everything snapped off with a vengance. When you have as many computers, printers and scanners as we have, that is a noisy thing to happen. So we're sitting there, and I'm immediately scared. I hate the dark. I'm scared to death of it. I don't know why, it's just an irrational fear I can't explain. I suppose that's why it's irrational. : ) Anyways, I'm sitting there with my dinner, and I can't move. I say "Steve, could you go find a candle? All I hear is him munching. So I say it again, sadly close to panic, "Steve, could you go find some fire or something PLEASE?!" and he laughs and gets up. Luckily he has one of those little LED lights on his key chain, and Mr. Lee had gotten us some emergency, no battery flashlights for our cars that we hadn't taken out of the boxes yet. Once I had those, I was okay. As I walked through the house, patting myself on the back and congratulating myself on my obsessive candle buying, I made sure every room I might have to go in was lit in some way. So we sat there trying to figure out why the lights were off, and then we go outside to see if we can see any problems. I personally never knew there were so many stars over our house, but with all of the light gone, the sky was beautiful, so we stood out there for a while. While we were out there, we saw about 15 or twenty cars slowly drive around our circle, which is weird because we hardly ever have that many people on our street at one time. It was kind of creepy! Then Mr. Lee called and let us know that someone had had an accident just down the street from where we live, and knocked the power out to about a fourth of downtown Huntsville. Wow! That explained the cars too, because the cops were rerouting them around our circle. So Steve and I drove down the street and saw all of the emergency vehicles and cops that had converged at this nasty curve where the accident happened and then we turned around and went home. Steve got bored really quickly and decided to go to bed. I didn't want to be up in the dark by myself, so I took a book and my flashlight to bed and decided to read for a while. I'm not sure how long we had been in there, but Steve had already fallen asleep, when I heard angry voices outside. Steve was snoring, so I had to shake him awake to hear what was going on. I went into the guest room and opened the window, and I saw two cars on the side of the street in front of our neighbors house, and people were arguing. All I could hear was "You (explitive deleted) (explitive deleted), you can't (explitive deleted) do this (explitive deleted) to us! I know all about the (explitive deleted) law! (Explitive deleted) you!" and so on and so forth. I told Steve we might need to call the police, because stuff like this doesn't normally happen in our neighborhood. Before he could do it, though, two police cars from the accident scene showed up. Steve and I, under the cover of darkness, went into the living room and opened the front windows so we could hear better. We never could hear everything that was said, but we could hear snippits. Apparently, some regular citizen had detained these teenagers for something. We could hear this loud older person saying this to the cops, but then he got muffled again. When they had been rerouted, the older person stopped them on our street and they had gotten into an argument. This was when the police were called. At some point, one of the people yelled out "WAR BUZZARDS!" and I thought, Great. Only in Alabama could a crime scene of some sort turn into an Alabama/Auburn pissing contest. All we needed at this point was for the police to handcuff some drunk redneck in a wifebeater and drag him to the car while a coked out, half dressed girlfriend hurled insults and beer cans at them. (Insert eye rolling here) Anyways. This went on for about 45 minutes, and in that time we gathered that the kids had been driving and partaking in some illegal drinking, and this guy stopped them (thank you, sir). The kids had then tried to throw out their beer bottles and cans, but the cops found them. We aren't sure, but we think that a couple of the kids were arrested, and some parents were called. Another cop car showed up, the first two left. A wrecker came and hauled off one of the cars (which wasn't wrecked, so we figure the driver was being taken in) and the solo cop took down the report. Darn the bad accoustics on our street!!! We couldn't hear anything but someone laughing after that.

At some point before the car was hauled away and the kids were taken off, the power came back on. Steve and my cover was totally blown. We had been sitting backwards on the couch with our faces pressed to the screens, and then not only did the lights come back on, but so did the TV and the computers, scanners, printers and clocks. We couldn't have been more obvious if we were sitting on the stoop with a pair of binoculars and a bowl of popcorn. We dived into the couch and started laughing and then got up to turn everything off. After everyone left, we went back to bed, but it took me a long time to sleep. It's not everyday that we get to see the justice system in action on our quiet, conservative little street.