Keeping your eyes peeled for you and your neighbors is a big one.
+1
Our neighbors are away on a cruise, and won’t be back until the first part of next week. Like us, they have a couple of motion detector lights outside, as well as several lights on timers inside.
But I believe the best protection they have against a burglary while they are away is they notified us and the sheriff’s office that they’re going to be gone. They also called the post office and had their mail held, but they just let the newspapers keep coming – I’ll hike out to the road in a little while and pick up their newspaper, along with our own mail. On Wednesday morning, I’ll wheel their big, blue trash bin out to the road, and after the trash truck comes, I’ll wheel it back.
Keeping our fingers crossed, we won’t have to shovel out their sidewalk while they’re away. But if it snows, we’ll do that too. Because the whole idea is to make things appear as if our neighbors are home, and not lounging around on a ship somewhere, getting a suntan, while the snow just gets deeper and deeper on their front walk.
They do the same things for us while we’re away. For that matter,
most (not all) of the neighbors around here look out for one another even when we’re
not away. Last Friday, when my wife got home from work, the first thing she said was, “I’m going to call Carol and see if she’s okay. Her car hasn’t been moved in a week.”
Carol is the older, widowed lady that lives down the road a ways. She was okay. She said she was just being lazy, hadn’t had anywhere she really needed to go in a while, so she was just staying inside, out of the cold. And she thanked my wife for checking on her.
At any rate, I believe in neighbors looking out for, and being aware of what’s going on around one another’s places. Some people call it “being nosy,” but I don’t. It’s just being
neighborly, and I think it helps keep the bad guys away.