Happy Independence Day

My grand-daughter Logan is smiling in her sleep.  I still haven't got a real clear look at her eyes. 

Later that night, some of my neighbors had some pretty spectacular backyard fireworks displays.

I'm glad somebody in slumburbia still has plenty of money to waste.  Not all of my neighbors do though.  I'm seeing more vacant homes.  Two houses on my block are vacant and for sale because the elderly owners both died within a fairly short time period.  I haven't seen any of those neon door stickers in our little cross-street neighborhood.  However, just around the corner they are becoming more common, even appearing in clusters, like metastasizing cancer cells.  I finally stopped for a closer look.

I chatted with a neighbor who was sitting on his front porch watching the world go by.  He said the previous owner died and his surviving girlfriend became a crack whore and let it just go to hell.  He reported that she kept breaking in and squatting in the place so they disconnected water service, completely removed the meter, to make it even less attractive to her.  So far so good.  He said the place was listed for $24,000.  Neighborhood property values like that put my mortgage farther underwater than Atlantis, that is, there is a better chance of Atlantis rising from beneath the murky waves than of our selling our house for a price high enough to pay off the balance of the mortgage.  I crossed Pippin Road to see this on another house:

By the way, our local school district is putting up a couple of new buildings and consolidating into nice new digs.  They were to have auctioned off six old properties, though I still haven't found who bought them and what will become of them.  It will be weird for the kids in the neighborhood next winter when the best sledding hill within walking distance is somebody's private property.  Come to think of it, the nearby school was one of the selling points that were so important when we bought our house that are no longer the case.  Others were decent bus service at the entrance of our neighborhood and a thriving strip mall with an independent grocery, independent video store, a butcher shop, an Angelo's pizzeria.  All gone.  I stopped today and looked at a little RV parked by a repair shop with a "For Sale" sign on it, got the number to call.