Michael Lately, there's an upswing on burglaries in our neighborhood, as we know first-hand from Nextdoor ( Rundbrief 09/2014 ). About six months ago, we fell victim to a burglar too, who cracked open the lock to our parking garage and stole my bicycle. I had been aware that dubious creatures keep wandering around there at night, and took precautions by locking the bike with a thick solid metal lock and tied the bike to a steel pipe by means of a metal cable.

Michael Reactions differ significantly. Some residents stoically ignore the rising crime rate, while others go ballistic even with petty crime, like when homeless people steal their potted plants in front of their houses, to sell them to nearby nurseries. Recently, one of the culprits was caught red-handed on camera, by a so-called Spotcam surveillance cam mounted by the home owner to monitor their premises (Abbildung 1). As you can imagine, this started a major dispute on Nextdoor between relentless law and order men and droves of confrontation-averse hippie idiots populating San Francisco, who send their children to Montessori schools.

Angelika Last Thursday, the weather gods bestowed us with heavy rainfall, so much in fact, that San Francisco and its surrounding areas reported flooding emergencies. While California truly needs the rain because of the ongoing drought, the extremely dry grounds can't absorb the water of prolonged rainfall, and water starts to dam up. And the hopelessly obsolete infrastructure with poorly patched-up roads makes things worse, of course.

Michael American construction sites all have one annoying thing in common. Regardless if it's a big project like earth-quake proofing the Bay Bridge or renovating a run-down house around the corner: They keep dragging on for years and years. It appears that there's no affordable way for the owner to draft a contract to ensure that a building is ready by a specified date. According to my personal research, simple home renovations in our neighborhood take more than a year on average. And remodeling the Bay Bridge, as you might have heard, took more than 30 years.

Angelika We keep going back to Las Vegas, and if it is just because this is where we met for the first time, both travelling the U.S. independently during a long long summer break. Las Vegas keeps reinventing itself, and it's hard to keep track on how fast things are changing. Both being college students back in the day, we were drawn there by the unbeatably low expenses in gambler's paradise: There were all-you-can-eat buffets for only five Dollars and rental cars were cheap, too, to explore the nearby world-renowned national parks. It was not until a few years later that newly themed casinos like the "New York New York", "Treasure Island", or the pyramid-shaped "Luxor" were built on the strip.

Angelika Calling Las Vegas an exemplary environmentally friendly city would be a huge stretch by all means of imagination. I'd even wager that Las Vegas is pretty high up on the top 10 polluters list in the United States. There's hardly any recycling efforts in the casinos yet, although at least the McCarren airport has introduced separate trash containers for recyclables recently.

Michael For many men, one of the more whimsical traditions in our crazy area is growing a mustache during the month of November. Since "mustache" starts with an "M", November simply becomes "Movember" .