Crime in Buchanan

We may be experiencing the beginning of a geriatric crime wave in our little village.  The prime suspects are 70+ year old Nick and the old woman I live with.  First some background.

Our neighbour Keith is very deaf.  He has some spectacular hearing aids that he wears on an apparently random schedule.  I’m never sure whether I need to shout or whether a normal conversation is possible.  My confusion is compounded by his standard deaf person tendency to pretend he understands even when he hasn’t the faintest bloody clue what you just said. 

Yesterday we tore out his deck, the step that the deck had been covering and a substantial portion of the concrete slab surrounding the step. 

The little loader handled the deck remarkably well.  We didn’t put so much as a scratch on the house.  We don’t have any pictures of breaking up the slab but it was a bit of an adventure.  I didn’t think we had any hope without sawing it first but I managed to get a bucket tooth wedged under a corner, pried it up and had Keith stick a log under the corner.  After that it got easier and eventually I got the entire 15 foot wide slab coming up but it has a lot of steel in it so it refused to break clean.  I ended up folding over a 10 foot section on itself but that necessitated a change of plans that left Keith scrambling to clear a place for me to push the folded slab onto.  When I finally pushed it over it fell with a mighty crash but the steel held and we ended up with his slab folded in half.  We’ll eventually cut the steel with a grinder but that’s not the point of the story.

Somewhere during that mad scramble to clear a path for the falling slab Keith lost one of his hearing aids.  That put him in a frenzy this morning which culminated in him locking himself out of his house.  He realized he was locked out when he returned home to get the hat he had forgotten in his rush to leave for Yorkton.  I’m not sure why he was going to Yorkton.  The first we knew about his distress was when he rang the doorbell just as I was about to start a conference call this morning.  After a short visit he left for Yorkton, I went on my call and SWMBO launched her crime spree. 

Evidently Marilyn went out to wander around Keith’s yard in search of his missing hearing aid and Nick stopped to visit.  Nick is kind of the unofficial supervisor of everything that happens around town.  I’m not quite sure how that conversation morphed into the two of them breaking into Keith’s house but that’s apparently exactly what happened.  They used our ladder and Nick, who is surprisingly spry for any age, let alone 72, squirmed through the bathroom window.  Once they had the house open Marilyn called Keith to confess to their crime.  Only in Buchanan would a pair of geriatric criminals confess to the crime before the victim was aware he had been victimized.