I’m enjoying a day off today, and hopefully you are too.  It got off to something of an exciting start, at least as “excitement” goes around here.  I was enjoying my morning coffee at my computer when I heard the nearby sound of sirens and screeching tires.  I thought, “Hey that sounds kind of close.”  I looked out the window and saw this little silver car go flying by, with the po-po in hot pursuit a-la Roscoe P. Coltrane.  (Actually it was CHP, somebody was off to a bad start on their holiday.)  Huh, now there’s something you don’t see every day around here.  I could hear the sirens getting louder again, and a few seconds later here they come again, fishtailing around corners and gunning the poor little sedan as hard as he could.  If I ever decide to initiate a police chase, I know one thing;  It wouldn’t be in this neighborhood.  I’m not sure how he got in the gates, but there’s no way to get back out, unless the police are nice enough to sit and wait for them to slowly roll open.  You’re pretty much limited to laps around the block, which is just what they did until apparently he gave it up over on the other side of the neighborhood.  I went back to my morning news, and then Donette came downstairs and noticed everybody out in the front yard.  Not too remarkable, but why is everybody staring at my lawn?  Well, I guess he’d hung a left at my house, and when he noticed it was a dead end he took a nice little shortcut through my lawn.  The neighbor across the street lost a tree in the deal, and I guess I’m out some sod.  I figured the next we’d hear of the deal was when we got a letter from the HOA wanting to know when we’re going to get our lawn repaired.  The CHP did come back and take reports though, like four cars.  They even had the guy cuffed and stuffed in the back of one of the cars.  They said they’d pulled him over for speeding nearby, and he didn’t have a drivers license so he took the exciting car-chase option instead.  Might have been better off taking the ticket on that one…  The almost-even-more-exciting part?  Where he cut through my mulch there in the picture is right where I was sitting at my computer.  Another 8 or 10 feet and my day would have been off to a bad start too!