Thumper Thinks Out Loud

Edit 9/19/08: I edited out the images, which were screwing up the page for people with older monitors using lower resolutions...in place are links to click if you want to see the pretty graphs...

Yesterday the Spouse Thingy and I went to a very enjoyable lunch with my mother-in-law (Olive Garden! Endless Pasta Bowl! But mine ended with one bowl...), and then we set out towards a suburb of Sacramento to see if we might like living there. Housing prices are reasonable, so we figured why not? It looks like it would be much less of a commute for him, and lots of the houses have 3 car garages. I would love a 3 car garage. Our bikes would love a 3 car garage. Someday, we might own more than one car.

As we tooled around we were commenting about how nice the neighborhoods looked, how well laid out it was. And while the traffic was Horrendous (capital H necessary) it wouldn't take any longer for the Spouse Thingy to get to work.

At one point we passed a whole bunch of cops going into a house, but hey, maybe there were there for a late lunch with a buddy. Cops eat together, right?

We agreed it was a doable place, and then we braved the traffic home.

And then I got online, and as I was surfing with the television on my desk tuned to the news, I heard a story about all these houses in that little suburb that were raided right about the time we were there. Drug houses right by the elementary school. But maybe that was an anomaly. Surely.

So in my surfing around online, I looked for crime stats for where we already live.

Vacaville Crime Graph

Then I looked for another area we're interested in.

Dixon Crime Graph

And then I found the ones for the suburb we were wandering around, admiring all the pretty houses.

Elk Grove Crime Graph

Wow.

I feel a whole lot better about the crime rate in Vacaville, like the little town of Dixon (the only reason their murder rate looks high is because they actually had one last year, their first in who knows how long; it skewed their stats) and oh yeah, we're taking suburban Elk Grove off our list of Maybe There.

Now it's more like, Oh Hell No Not There.

'Course, we're looking and thinking and starting to really hope, and we're going to be stuck in our lease until the house sells...and then New Owner will want us out in 30 days. Cause that's our luck.

(Ok, not really...overall we're pretty fortunate people. But when you're whining, that's what pops out.)