I hate to think of what my husband would do if someone let our dog out to die--it would probably involve copious amounts of alcohol and a hole in the yard--but it would not include harming any human, poster or no poster. They should man up. If the owner is making POSTERS, he isn't shooting anyone.

Accidents happen. Dogs get disoriented and frightened, and run off to find their owners. My furkid has certainly done his share of running around the neighborhood, and we are just plain lucky he hasn't been killed.

For waxing, I recommend European Wax Center: http://www.waxcenter.com/NJ-Jersey-City

The wax is hard, so they don't use paper or muslim. They let it dry and pull it off. It pulls out only the hair and not the skin, so it doesn't hurt like the bejesus. I love it.

Ask for Anne.

I'm a swimmer, and I didn't know it was there. I will certainly take advantage of the Sunday hours. Thanks.

I'm from the Pacific Northwest. I didn't even notice your little 5.8 mini-tremor.

Change your shorts, girls.

At last, some bad news from somewhere beside my 'hood.

One night I saw an armed young man being chased by about six police officers at Exchange Place. They apprehended the young man safely, and this was a bunch of middle-aged guys on foot chasing a twentysomethings.

If things got rough out there, I'm sure the boys in blue would come figure it out.

Until then, I am going to walk right past on my way to the Light Rail.

Now that is some poetic justice.

ADT home security setup comes with a CO detector that calls the fire department automatically if high levels are detected.

I pay $52/month for ADT, which gives me burglary, fire, and CO protection.

They'd be really disappointed at my place. I don't even have a TV!

I recommend taking this argument to Twitter.

When I found out that the government monitors Twitter, I signed up and began tweeting hate sound bites to all of the wankers like Eric Cantor who participated in this melodrama.

That's me, doing my patriotic duty @GOP LEADER.

Pookie, why do you need to yell?

We are lucky to have so much free time at work that we can sit around and worry about something that is *utterly beyond our control.*

That's a few blocks down from where I live, carless in New Jersey. Walmart. BJ's. Costco.

I just hope they put in a fern bar, because that is going to be one hot afternoon for the jclady.

Postal service is very odd on the west side of JC. I have to trudge down to the main station on Bergen to pick up my packages (not available at the West Side station), and frequently see people whose things are lost in the mail. I had an important piece of mail floating around for about two weeks. It's a good thing I didn't need that check immediately, or I would have been screwed.

Other services are odd as well. Verizon wireless cuts out. I ride the Light Rail, and I get *no* bars going in and out of the Martin Luther King station. It seems racist to me.

I can't get internet to work at my home. Maybe if I ordered a whole bundle including television, I might get something, but all I want is internet. No go. I have to walk around and sometimes wait for my smart phone to get some bars, or go to the internet cafe on West Side.

Cutting services is not good. They are spotty as it is.

This is why I opposed the death of free television. Now we have to pay $50 a month to be marketed to--if you can get a signal. I oppose the death of the postal service as well. It is getting harder and harder to be low income in this country and still maintain a reasonable standard of living.

Postal service is in the Constitution. You can't just kill it. Or shouldn't.

This is not funny.

Years ago when I lived in Houston, someone threw a chunk of cement off the overpass into a woman's car, killing her instantly. I will never forget the story. It was her first day of a new job, and she had a husband and teenaged daughter.

From a second- or third-story height, a significant block of wood could kill a pedestrian with the right blow.

The situation needs to be remedied before something like that happens.

I love going to Target. It's an expedition into the wilds.

I walk 20 minutes to take the Light Rail, ride to Newport for 25, then another 10 to Target, and back. In the summer sun, it invariably calls for a drink at Dorrian's. And don't forget: I am carrying everything I bought.

Having a big box store in my 'hood would mean I couldn't drink in the afternoon, because all the bars around my place are too man-heavy. I can't go in without feeling like a piece of meat.

The bank wants that property. It's as simple as that.

During a period of unemployment, I fell behind on my mortgage, on a tiny condo on the West Side that is now underwater. There are two places for sale on my block for investment level pricing, and nothing has moved in three years.

The bank wouldn't touch my place!

My husband owns a home in Portland that has quite a bit of equity, and when Bank of America misplaced a payment, they were foaming at the mouth to take the property. He had to go around and around to prove he'd made the payment.

I'm underwater in Lincoln Park, and I don't see nobody crying for me, Argentina. It's going to be five years at least before I could even break even on a sale.

Fortunately, Jersey is one of the states where foreclosure is handled by the courts. My attorney says it takes an average of three years until the sheriff shows up at your door.

They should hire a lawyer. There are also government programs for people in foreclosure.

Here is an article on the subject:

http://www.njfuture.org/2011/05/13/li ... pport-tod-in-jersey-city/

Links on the route are dead, based on my preliminary search.

Yes, it will have to pass nearby.

On the bright side, property values will rise.

More than anything, I think it has to do with culture shock.

I grew up in barrio in Houston in the 1970s, and we had these little "Mom and Pop" stores to shop at. We used to walk a couple of blocks, get our groceries, or go to the bodega across the street owned by the Valdez family. Chapa's Pharmacy was on the corner. It was all nearby, convenient, and keyed to the local community.

I moved away years ago, got college-educated and upwardly mobile, and haven't seen the likes of that for decades. Even my old 'hood in Houston has large stores now.

When I moved to West Side, it was like stepping back in time to my childhood. I shop at the local grocery store and the local bodegas, because I can walk, and I don't have to take the Light Rail to the PathMark off Jersey, an ordeal at best. All of the shops are local and cater to the distinct needs to THIS community. There isn't even a Starbucks (Hallelujah!)--there is a Ghanaian coffee shop.

But it is a different culture to shop here. It is more old-timey, more old-country, more working-class. I don't mind it. Raw ingredients make up the same food, and if I want something sheeshy, I can stop by Whole Foods in the City on my way home. But it's a cultural excursion into a past I thought was dead.

I know that if WalMart goes in down 440, in what I consider walking distance, I will head on over there, not for the prices, which will actually end up being higher, but because I am used to homogenized American culture when I shop. It is not part of the Phillipines.

For my own cultural health and the health of the community, I hope they don't put a WalMart there anytime soon. I like my West Side just as it is. I know the area will eventually change, but am not sure being captive to the corporate world is an improvement.

I live nearby, and the area on Mallory at Claremont is fairly safe. That condominium is very middle-class. Too pricey for me, but nice, and right by the Light Rail. It is ridiculous to think that you would have to drive a block and park in the park and ride! Middle-class people live there. The bad guys don't go down there--it's too clean. The walk down Mallory to Lincoln Park is reasonable up until about 10 p.m.

If you are middle-class, you are probably fine. The crime in the area, I regret to say, is class- and race-based. The brunt of it falls on teenaged African-American males. I am a middle-aged Hispanic/white woman, middle class, and walk from the light rail station to my home near Lincoln Park night and day, and have never been bothered except by beggars.

Listen to crime reports, and by all means pay attention to everything GrovePath posts in laud of my 'hood (being ironic here), but also examine who the perps/victims are, and ask yourself, am I one of them?

If you have experience living in an urban setting and are not afraid of the "vibe," go ahead and buy. I had a renter who was a nervous Nellie and moved out after a year because it was simply too urban for him. The people in my condo are all white professional types, but not afraid, and no one has had any trouble.

I don't have a car. I take the trains everywhere. Saves a lot of money. And I am immune from the terrible rent increases in the City.

Oh, no. Here we go again with the dumped animals thread. They were dumping cats in Lincoln Park a while back.

The corruption of JC alternately amuses and annoys me. Or is it incompetence?

I pity the ducks, let that be understood, just as I pity the cats.

And the government is the biggest employer in this state.

I live off Mallory, a parallel street a block down from West Side. While I shop on West Side during the day, I avoid it at night, because it just "feels" bad. Tell your friends to avoid West Side and walk down Mallory, which is a lot safer. Police cars patrol Mallory all the time, and most of the people out are family types, except in the immediate vicinity of the bars. The Light Rail has a bridge across West Side. They can avoid danger that way.

I did a year of pre-med. The hard sciences have an average grade of 75 in a course that is properly pitched. The distribution follows a classic bell curve. An 80% fail rate is a sign that the school failed, not the students.

I can't tell you what it cost me to get a 3.2 GPA in pre-med, but I am talking 14-hour days of classes and study, and there were still days I wondered if this time I wasn't going to just flunk.

From the looks of it, the people who passed that test should be heading for med school, not a career in nursing (but they didn't take the right prereqs).

I wish Lincoln Park had the luxury of worrying about stolen flowers, but I chose to own rather than rent. (What was I thinking?) Ironically, all of our flowers are intact.

Nevertheless, I applaud your efforts to catch the thief. Small things like landscaping make a big difference in crime and the overall social health of a neighborhood. It speaks of your civic-mindedness.

NO #OOPS#ING WAY!

My Light Rail stop is at Exchange Place, and the best way to tell people how to get to the Light Rail is to say "Look for the guy with the bayonet in his back."

The Katyn monument stays.

Hey, in a hundred years people are going to wonder what all this 9-11 stuff was about anyway. Just a few thousand people died. Why bother?

I live near Lincoln Park, and would love to see a mass trapping of some of the lost and abandoned humans. Just go in and shake a box of McDonald's french fries. They'll be sure to come for that.

If only I had a pistol every time I saw some guy pissing on my street . . .

Goddamn! I was there twenty minutes later!

Why would anyone DRIVE in Manhattan? I came to NYC relieved to be free of the burden of the automobile.

I walk from the West Side Ave Light Rail down Mallory to my home in Lincoln Park, and while there is a lot of violent crime around, I seem to do so warily but with impunity.

The truth is, I am a middle-aged professional class white woman. I walk straight home and don't mess with anyone, and no one messes with me. Most of the people in the neighborhood are hard-working minorities who want me to patronize their stores, pay taxes, and keep the peace. Those of us who are "the good guys" look out for one another, and the violent young kids don't bother us.

Most of the "gang" activity is teenaged men (and sometimes women) attacking each other.

If you act like an aware and responsible citizen, you will probably be fine.

A very significant new development:

http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/20 ... il_oks_100acre_devel.html