That sucks

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

I hate to start out bitching, but I guess I can’t help myself.

How was your Thanksgiving? Ours was pretty cool. Since we eat turkey two or three times a week, we don’t eat turkey on Thanksgiving. I’m not to the bitching part yet, just hold on a second. Anyway, our tradition is we eat the cuisine of a different country every year. In the past, we’ve sampled countries like Argentina, Thailand and Guatemala. This year, we had Madagascar. It was great—similar to “American” food, but with heavy reliance on ginger, tomato, garlic, onion and rice. Healthful and low-fat overall. A fruit compote for dessert.

Anyway, dinner turned out great, and I wasn’t eating down at the shelter, so I had a lot to be thankful for.

Not yet … I’m getting there.

My old buddy Don Dondero used to call the area of town where our house is, “Living up with the swells.” It’s the Old Southwest, kind of between Cashill and Skyline Boulevards. Basically, we lucked into our house, buying a fixer-upper in a great neighborhood at exactly the right moment.

So, Friday, Kathleen and Hunter and I were walking up to the Scolari’s Shopping Center on Caughlin Ranch Parkway. Along the way, we noticed that a lot of people were out of town for the weekend. How could we possibly know that? It wasn’t from the old newspapers piling up in the driveways, most people know to stop delivery when they’re going to be out of town because everyone knows burglars watch for the accrual of newspapers in driveways to indicate an empty home.

No, we could tell that there were 13 families out of town because there were 13 driveways with AT&T phone books laying in them. Why in the world would AT&T choose to deliver these books on the busiest four-day travel weekend of the year? Those phonebooks remained on driveways for the entire weekend, a clear beacon to criminals that the homes were ripe for the picking.

And that totally sucks.