It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood...

Our neighborhood made the news not once but twice this past month.  And this isn't some small town, rinky dink newspaper where you make the news for growing the best zinnias.  If you make it into Las Vegas news, it means some crazy cra-zap just went down.  Twice.

One night, while enjoying the solitude that is the time after all children go to bed, our house shook, sonic boom style.  Then, shortly after, it shook again.  Jon went out to investigate.  Shortly afterward, a small neighborhood block party formed outside, trying to figure out what happened.  All they could see was a huge blazing fire coming from the shopping center across the street.  

Local news later informed us that a guy in a pick up truck t-boned a UPS truck and the gas tank exploded.  Somehow both guys made it out okay and no one was hurt.  The pickup truck driver even tried to run away from the scene.  Dummy.

Then, just a few short weeks later, I come home from running errands to find my neighbors house surrounded by police cars.  This registered extremely low on the surprise meter because this is a semi regular occurrence at this house.  But this was no domestic disturbance call, I soon realized.  Something big was going down.

Before I knew it, the police had barricaded us in at all ends, had surrounded the house and had a guy on a bull horn trying to talk a man into surrendering.  About every 10 minutes or so, he would get on the horn and repeat the same stuff, we have you surrounded, we are not leaving, come out with your hands on your head... over and over and over again.  Seriously, they gave this guy A LOT of chances.  

Jon talked to the officers, who said they were pretty sure the guy inside wasn't armed.  But we wouldn't put it past our crazy neighbors, not to mention we are pretty sure it has been a meth lab on more than one occasion, so during the showdown we hung out on the opposite side of the house from the action.

Except for when these guys showed up.  It was too crazy to not get a picture.

Here are my facebook posts from the day.  The standoff was long and I was extremely homebound stir crazy.

Do we really have to love all our neighbors? Don't come visit me at the moment...

"we don't want to cause any damage to your moms house ron, just come out with your hands on your head." So the whole neighborhood now knows he did something bad AND he lives with his mom. Double lv police burn...

"dad says if we hear any pops we should jump behind this bed" "yeah cause that might be a gun" "don't worry guys, i don't think there's gonna be any..." BOOM. And swat is done with warnings.

So after about a million warnings, they set off a few rounds of very loud, house shaking explosions (seriously, its amazing our poor old house is still standing) and after the last one, the bull horn stopped and people cleared out shortly after.  I found out later on the news that the guy was wanted for attempted murder.  Awesome.