The definition of bad timing

I like to think of myself as a musician, though sometimes I question my ability. This past weekend I ran into my good friend and former bandmate Jon at a local university basketball game. He's been working as a crew member on a number of film and television projects the past couple of years, including getting himself a credit on the movie, "Stomp the Yard." We began discussing combining our love of music and films together and working on writing some incidental background music that we could sell to some of the lower budget films he's been working on. I guess he was trying to convince me of the positives of such an undertaking (the prospects of making some extra money already has my attention) when he said, "You play bass. Not everybody can do that." I quickly replied, "Yeah, I'm proof of that." And there it is: good timing is everything, whether you're playing music, cracking jokes, or selling a house.

Bad timing is to be found in my neighborhood this week. I must start off that I live in a nice neighborhood. We have good neighbors (which is why we're looking to build onto our house instead of moving to a larger one), it's quiet, and it's really close to the river. That being said, we've had law enforcement around the neighborhood on more than one occasion since we moved in just over four years ago. The guy who used to live across the street from us was dispossessed from his house and kept coming back, spray painting the house, leaving notes on the property, and at one point cutting the power to the heat pump on the house while the property was under contract to the current owner. We eventually were able to work with the police and have the guy arrested and we haven't seen him since. A couple of weeks ago an escaped jail convict was arrested at a house around the corner from us. I've no idea if the owners were charged with aiding and abetting.

Last Monday evening we were returning from dining out and saw a number of local police and sheriff's cars in front of a house in the neighborhood. As we passed I noticed an unmarked car and a man wearing a dark vest with "GBI" enblazoned on back. Holy crap, I thought to myself. What the hell happened that required the GBI to be on scene? We found out a couple of days later in the local paper. The homeowner, a teacher at an alternative school in a neighboring county, was arrested on a single charge of sexual exploitation of children. I've seen the guy taking walks around the neighborhood; had I known what he allegedly was doing online, I may have introduced him to my front bumper.

Here's the bad timing part: this guy's arrested on Monday on a child pRon charge, on Thursday everyone in the neighborhood gets a postcard from a local realtor announcing that the house next door is up for sale and open house will be this Sunday. Bad enough that the housing market sucks for sellers these days, but having an accused pederast next door doesn't help your selling points. The open house postcard doesn't say as such, but you may want to leave the kids at home.