17 Jul 2000

Some days are more exciting than others.

This morning I found out that the Palo Alto police consider this picketing business enough of a problem that they have assigned an officer with the specific task of monitoring the situation.

We talked for a bit this morning, and I filled him in on the background involved. (He is going to spend considerable time on the web.)

So this afternoon I got a call from him, that the clams had *another* bunch of PIs camped out in the neighborhood, and that the neighbors had complained. He had already talked to the PIs, and he told me that he had checked that the people they claimed to be working for had been contacted and that this time they indeed did work for them. (This was because the last time, the PIs lied about working for IPSA International, and IPSA had complained to the Palo Alto police about the PIs making such a claim.)

Before the recent pickets and PIs, I didn't know too many people in the neighborhood. But recently it seems that just about everyone for several blocks knows I am a target for scientology. If people didn't already have a low opinion of scienology--and many did--they sure do now. Anyway, the positive effect is that the entire neighborhood is making scientology's PIs a "project."

If this wasn't enough excitement, a neighbor left something on the stove which caught fire. Arel (my wife) heard a fire alarm shrieking as I was cooking dinner, so I turned off *my* stove and went looking. The neighbors were gone when I looked in and saw the place filling up with smoke. So I broke out a glass pane, got in, turned off the stove and smothered the fire. Arel had called 911, so when the neighbors came home about 20 minutes later, it was to fire trucks blocking both streets. No serious damage--though I might have just a touch of smoke inhalation.

Some days are just more exciting than others.

Keith Henson