A few days ago walking back with B. we noticed a woman, dressed in non-feminine slightly too big clothing, hanging out on the corner of our block. I didn’t recognize her and so I decided that I would do some yard work to keep an eye on her. I don’t want anyone getting the idea they can set up business on my block without someone noticing. B. warned me that doing that could get me in trouble with bad people. You know what? It’s my f*ing yard and my f*ing treebox and I’ll stand out and work in either one of them and observe what I want because they are f*ing mine.
By the time I changed out of my work clothes and into my gettin-dirty clothes, the woman was gone. There was work to be done on the treebox and I had to clean some trash that had flown into the yard so I stayed out there.
I stayed out there long enough to notice a trio of young boys, younger than 16, stopped in front of S.’s house. I glanced at them and went back to working on the treebox. I looked up again and asked one of the boys to stop bouncing on S.’s fence as it looked like he was on his way to bending it or breaking the fence. He stopped and then DM came out of her house and went to talk to the boys. Apparently, as I was only paying 1/2 of my attention to the conversation and the other 1/2 to the task at hand, the boys might be part of a gang trying to get DM’s son into trouble. She was trying to talk some sense into the boys telling them that gang life is a dead end road, if they have a problem with her son not to jump him or call the house threatening him, and so on. She stayed out there a good long while, long after I finished my yard tasks.