Disappearing nine patch

Hard to believe that I had never made a disappearing nine patch block before these that I slapped together last night. I had a Layer Cake of Moda's "Fig and Plum" so I cut 3" squares and assembled these blocks, which will finish at 7". There's enough to make 36 blocks. What they will turn into I have no idea. The colors are appealing and you get a fair amount of complexity in the blocks for not a lot of time or work, so I'm enjoying this. It will probably be a Project Linus quilt, unless someone I know announces they're expecting a baby girl in the next several months.

On another front, this morning Mom found that a window in one of her outbuildings had been messed with and the screen was gone. Nothing in the building seemed to be missing, but it was obvious that the window had been pried open. The windows are aluminum frame awning type with the screen on the inside. It's fairly easy to pry on them and pivot them open. She's going to look into installing bars on the windows. We're not sure if it was jimmied the same night the downspouts were stolen or they came back last night.

A security system would have to be fairly complicated. In addition to the house, on the acre lot there is a detached garage, a small storage building where she puts the garden tools and lawn mowers and a third building about 12 ft by 20 ft that's fully finished inside, which we used to jokingly call the bunkhouse because we kids would sleep there in the summer. She uses it to store furniture, things she has collected over the years, her quilting frame, and stuff from my and my brother's childhood that we have left there for the last 45+ years (I blush to admit it.). That's the building where the window was jimmied. There's really nothing the creeps would want to steal in there, since they just want stuff to sell, probably for drug money. It would be a little hard to sneak out with a desk or a butcher block table, not to mention that stuff like that would be hard to sell, unlike scrap aluminum or hand tools they could dump at swap meets.

You know, she's not inside city limits. Wonder if it would be legal to do a little target shooting out on the back of her property, down toward the creek? Might scare the whiz out of the neighbor she thinks is doing this if he heard a little gunplay. Make her look a little less vulnerable, you know?

When I visit her in a couple of weeks I'm getting estimates for a security system, which I'll have installed and pay for. Which she will fight me over paying for. She's very independent.

A new low in criminal behavior

I called my Mom this morning and asked "What's new?"

She replied that the sheriff's deputy had just left after filling out a theft report. She got up this morning and discovered that someone had stolen the downspouts from the rain gutters on her garage. OK, I know that times may be tough, but that has to be a new definition for petty theft. How much could you get for the scrap aluminum in five 12 foot long downspouts? Maybe enough for lunch at McDonald's. They also tried to break into her storage building (for the third time) but she has a mega-lock on it now and they didn't get far.

This is absolutely ridiculous. To know there is someone low and miserable enough out there that they would steal the rain gutters from an 86 year old woman's property - and the pitiful thing is that she is 90% certain she knows who did it, and it's a neighbor. But how do you prove it?

She's having the power company install a new mercury vapor light on the utility pole so that the back yard is better illuminated. But that doesn't remedy the fact that the neighborhood is seriously going downhill. It used to be that in the area where I grew up most people didn't have a lot of money, but they weren't trash. Now it seems it's being overrun with sleazy people who will pick up anything that's not nailed down (and yank down stuff that is) and walk away with it. Floodlights probably won't deter them.