Tuesday

Today I stepped into the inside of my neighbors' place for the first time. He asked me if I wanted to see some knives, to which I responded, "You mean, for sale?" to which he affirmed. Usually my mind doesn't work that quickly and I don't always guess right, but I was happy that this time I was right, with nothing to go on except an unfamiliar SUV in their driveway. He also told me that he meant to give me the newspaper leaning against my door, because the newspaper person gave them two yesterday. I didn't learn anything new in my perusal of the news. I get frustrated by the fact that the newspaper always places a lighthearted story, something unusual or possibly funny, in the bottom corner of the front page, usually about some random event in another part of the country, and then there's a tiny two-paragraph story buried in the paper about something huge that happened in our state. Today that front corner story was about how Merriam-Webster's latest dictionary has 100 new words in it; and buried on page five is a story about a 19-year-old woman who was shot Sunday at Taco Bell, not too far from here, and that the father of her two-year-old child has been arrested for her murder. That's about the extent of the story buried on page five. According to other news agencies that are more aware, the man is only 22 and has been arrested about 17 times in the past four years, some of those arrests directly pertaining to his abuse of her. Police said she was shot in her vehicle, went inside Taco Bell and asked to use the phone, jumped over the counter and hid in a closet, and he followed her over the counter and to the closet and shot her six times.