Truly, I spent most of my time day-dreaming about building this as a child. Which often lead to this very comment from teachers.

http://xkcd.com/987/

Tomatoes, tiny carrots, chard, peppers,  and some weird looking beets

The problem

We have a lovely little apartment in a somewhat unpleasant part of town. There are a lot of nice old houses, and a few crappy run-down drug dens. There is plenty of random foot traffic through our alley, and a population of transients that inhabits the area. Kinda weird, but you would think it’s small enough to just ignore. There are lots of people trying to help lift the community up and a local church is investing a lot in building a community center in the area, but there’s just lots of people around, and sometimes people are a real pain.

The Scare

Last week we had a couple weird things happen around our home and our neighbor told us she spotted someone trying to pull out the screen on our front window. While my wife was home. Yeah. All they stole was some mail before the neighbor scared them off, but she had a laptop stolen recently and it has us a little freaked out.

I see this as a big problem. We enjoy the place we live, and don’t really feel like moving right now. It’s one advantage to being a renter that we can move if we want, but it’s a lot of work and expense to do so.

I began considering the options and forming a plan of action. I want to fix this. Now.

I just thought about starting to document my progress on this project over the next little while and cover some of the little details. I’m not sure how useful this would be to everyone, but I want to get some of this out of my system and offer support to other people going through similar things. Our situation is unique, I recognize that, so my plan may not make sense for everyone, but here is my rough outline.

The Plan

• Social
  • Make friends with the neighbors.
• Surveillance
  • Webcams with motion detection.
• Communication
  • An intercom at the doorbell.
• Perimeter Security
  • Motion Activated Lights
  • Alarms
  • Bars
  • Locking Mailbox
• Defense
  • A Dog?
  • Guns and classes?
• Preparedness
  • Planning
  • Documenting Valuables
  • Lockbox for Important Documents

Check Back

I intend to document the installations and some of the outcomes of my projects over the next few days as my orders arrive and I start putting things together. I hope it all works, but I want others to learn from my mistakes if I run into them.

Just asking.

I don’t really think I have the time or energy to keep this updated anymore. I have twitter, Google plus, and facebook, and I barely have the energy to keep those updated. I have a blog that I started to write with Becca, and I care about it, but don’t post to it anymore, either. I guess this is a great place to put my flickr photos, but I barely remember to do that now that I don’t have a data plan on my phone. What I’m trying to say is I have an emotional attachment to my blog, but I’m not sure it really matters to me in a practical way. Also, the spam comments are annoying to delete. How much work am I interested in putting into centralizing all of my online social activity into this place? What does anyone expect of a personal blog anymore? Did anyone ever really read this?

Yummy.

The miniature golf courses don’t open this early in the spring.