Light Up Dwight

what's new, I ought to be working and I'm not.

Nothing much to say about wedding stuff. A professor in my department actually offered up her beach house to have the wedding at. A really nice offer, but wraught with complication that I don't want to bother getting into here.

Maybe this will just turn into a regular ole' blog. New Haven is an interesting town. There's a lot of crime. A lot. And it's way better than in the past. The police just sent out a notice via email about a shooting on Mansfield St. Everyone in my lab freaked out a bit individually thinking it might be Steve - he works in the office to my right and lives on Mansfield - but no, it wasn't Steve. It was Jeremy. Who also lives on Mansfield (AKA Manslaughter) and works in the office to my left. He's one of the four post docs in my lab. Jeremy was out in his backyard having a bbq with his roommate and their respective girlfriends. A guy with a mask and a gun entered the yard. They jumped him, tackled him to the ground, he fired two shots into the ground and then fired into the roommate's stomach. They still managed to restrain him and throw away the gun. The police came. The roommate went into surgury. And everybody seems to be all right. The gunman is going to get 12 years in prison because of some sort of three strikes law.

Dwight Street, where I live, is right on the border of good and bad parts of town. Greg belongs to a blockwatch for our neighborhood whose sole purpose is "Light Up Dwight" - i.e., convince homeowners to put up brighter lights and relocate ones they currently have to reduce crime. Well New Haven or Yale or somebody apparently wasn't aware of Light Up Dwight. And they decided to light up dwight all on their own. With a football stadium light. Directly outside of our house. Pointed into our windows. Streaming light across the upstairs tennants pillow in their bedroom. You can make shadow puppets 15 feet away from the window and there's still a strong silhouette. I'm not kidding. It's like the Kenny Rogers light in that Seinfeld episode. You've never seen anything so bright. It is like friggin' daylight in our living room.

The light is conveniently pointed away from Rainbow Park - the small green space located across the house where the drunk woman goes to scream every night and pee in the corner - and the border of the light/dark zone just barely scrapes off the crack stoop - an abondoned building where bums sleep and greg found a crack pipe - so basically, the whole thing doesn't do a damn thing. Except light up our house.

Light up Dwight? more like light up 215 dwight.

Okay enough for now. Later.