And the neighorhood is awash with the sound of gunfire...

But not from guns, just the type of fireworks here in Florida. The kids have been setting off string after string of firecrackers designed to sound like automatic weaponry, and I must admit it sounds pretty close to the real thing.

In Iowa, Sioux City to be precise, the sound of one firecracker going off drew enough police cars to patrol Times Square, but here the roadside stands sell the stuff and I haven't seen one cop yet. The "children" are as far as I can tell 100% black, and have been shouting screaming and getting drunk since around 6 this afternoon, and I've yet to see an adult male. Let me put it another way, I haven't seen a father-type; there have been plenty of 18 and aboves staggering around but nary a one of them supervising the kids.

My bad. We moved without taking a look at what the neighborhood was like at night, plus one of the nearby apartment complexes was just turned over to welfare housing. Great looking places too, or they were a couple months back. We'll be getting out of here in a bit, just as soon as the evil little prick who forgot to mention that the area was "changing" gets us into a safer house. And by changing I don't mean the color scheme, frig that. I mean the hoodlums that the police don't police.

Lisa is asleep, thankfully the bedroom is far enough away from the area the gangsta-wannabes are terrorizing so she can conk off without being jolted by the sound of one machine gun after another going off. When I was a kid we'd open the windows at midnight and bang pots and pans to beat the band. That went on for a few minutes and I can never recall one person in the neighborhood complaining. Hey, it's New Years. So I'm being far more tolerant than usual in not going outside and tracking these little assholes down. I figure they'll get tired in an hour or so and nature will take it's course. The ones that survive will crawl home and into bed and the ones that don't will be remembered as being good kids that just got in the way of bad kids. They howl back and forth to one another long into the night, and where they find the energy is beyond me.