PJ and I rang in the new year in relatively calm fashion as usual. We played a couple of games of Scrabble, noshed on King crab legs, and toasted the end of the horrible year that was 2007 with sparkling cider.

We're not exactly party animals.

Of course this being Phoenix, we had gunshots going on all around us. Idiots here like to shoot guns into the air to celebrate things like the new year, Independence Day, and "I have a gun and I'm gonna shoot it cuz I'm a moron" day.

This is apparently a tradition that comes to us from south of the border. Not one of their better traditions as far as I'm concerned.

The gunshots were coming faster and closer to us than they did last year. We called the police, but they won't do anything unless there's property damage, injuries, or a positive identification of the criminals getting their guns off. Why? Because they have too many calls to investigate, so they concentrate on the ones that might give them an arrest or would help someone who's been shot.

We're not talking little pea shooter kind of guns, either. We're talking semi-automatic weapons. No full autos that we could hear, but it was obvious there were semis out there this time.

Our tradition of listening to the police scanner went by the wayside since the local departments have gone all digital on their radios and we've got an analog scanner which won't decode those signals. Some of the calls on New Year's Eve can be quite intriguing. Others downright frightening.

Sometimes this small-minded big city scares the hell out of me.

        

 

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