Update on my old neighborhood.

On a recent trip to the city that I used to live in, I stopped through my old neighborhood where I lived for like 7-8 years, for coffee with a friend, and to try to catch some random people and say hi.

My one friend says that public transpo is as bad if not worse than when I left -- with frequency reductions, there's just packed busses, and no-one wears masks, and so you're around people coughing all the time.

She also said that one time recently she was on the subway and that one guy sat down on one side of her and then another guy on the other, and they reached across her to conduct a drug deal (!!!).

At the one neighborhood hardware store, too, the (white) (townie) (retired cop) owner said it's worse than when I left, with safety on public transportation, and also around the neighborhood.

Like, on the business strip 3 blocks from my last apartment where his shop is, there's now been nighttime break-ins at the places up and down those blocks, though they haven't hit his store yet, probably because he has a serious gate on the front door and then a solid row of bikes across all of the big front plate-glass window.

"They probably don't feel like crawling over all the bikes if they break out the window," he was like.

He was also saying that he and his wife live upstairs up above the store, which I never knew, and that they installed a thick bolt on the door that goes down into the shop, since it's unlikely that anyone would break in and then want to go upstairs, but they wanted it there for peace-of-mind and safety's sake, just in case.

Besides all that, too, he said that electricity really jumped up and hammered him with that bill, and he even called the company to see if he could get a lower rate, but that didn't do any good.

I also stopped by to see some neighbors and my old landlord back on my old block, but no-one was home, and since I didn't have any paper to leave notes, I texted my old landlord to let him know that I'd dropped by and to say hello to people for me -- only to discover that him and his wife and his kids moved out to the suburbs a few months ago, "Kind of the same reasons you moved...", he was like, texting me.