My neighbor, Tony, loves his house. We live in a low-crime neighborhood on Long Island but Tony is always on guard against miscreants. He has a Ring camera on every side of his house, mounted high so they’re protected from spray paint. Some of the cameras turn on klieg lights and alarms if I step outside at night to toss the trash in the can. He owns a pitbull and a bulldog. He padlocks all his gates and has signs on each that read, “I can make it to the gate in 2.5 seconds. Can you?” A graphic of a snarling pitbull accompanies the challenge. I don’t know if the bulldog is that swift, but I’m sure he’ll get there in his own sweet time.
Tony hired a guy to replace some roof fascia at the high point of his two-story house. I was watching the guy clamber around up there as I was filling a blow-up pool for my granddaughter, Quinn. He wasn’t strapped to anything other than dopey hope and he managed to drop his cordless drill from on high. It took a bounce off the roof of Tony’s sunroom and then careened into my yard, its bit going right into the side of my brand-new, blow-up pool.