Here There and Everywhere

Expat wanderer

Chase Ends with Suspect Trying to Drown Police and Police Dog

I loved reading the papers in Kuwait. What criminals could be so incredibly STUPID, I would wonder. (Here is my all time favorite Kuwait story.)

This morning, AdventureMan asked “Have you read the paper? Some guy had a high speed chase, then he tried to drown the policeman AND the policeman’s dog!”

No, I hadn’t read it. It is almost to stupid to be believed. What I do love is that the idiot is named in the Pensacola News Journal story and, of course, that his mother says he couldn’t have done it, LOL.

Chase Ends With Officer Fighting To Save His Life

Gulf Breeze Police Department Sgt. Stef Neff knows things can go bad in just a few seconds in his line of work.

That’s what happened in Gulf Breeze early Saturday morning when a traffic stop ended with Neff fighting for his life with a suspect in Hoffman Bayou.

“There is no lonelier feeling than that,” said Neff, a 15-year veteran who survived the fight without serious injuries. “I didn’t have any way to call anybody else. It was me and him.”

The suspect — Kyle Estes, 21, of Navarre — was eventually captured but it took more than an hour as he struggled in the water with two other officers and a police dog.

Estes remains in Santa Rosa County Jail today under $111,000 bond. He is facing a long list of charges related to Saturday’s fracas:

• Fleeing and eluding law enforcement officers.
• Obstruction of police.
• Aggravated battery.
• Resisting an officer.
• Driving while license is suspended or revoked.
• Hit and run.
• DUI with property damage.

The suspect’s mother hasn’t talked to him since the early morning battle, but she insists he is not violent by nature.

“It was totally out of character for Kyle to get violent like that,” Michelle Estes said today. “It was a very desperate and extreme attempt to get away from the police. I just think he didn’t want to get in trouble.”

The incident began when Gulf Breeze Police Officer Greg Baker tried to stop Estes at about 2 a.m. after seeing him speeding south on the Pensacola Bay bridge at about 95 mph, Neff said.

Baker followed Estes to Chanteclaire Circle, where Estes lost control of his vehicle and hit a cement wall, a mailbox and a tree, Neff said.

Estes jumped out the vehicle and ran. Neff and Gulf Breeze police officer Daylyn Wilson went to help Baker.

As Neff drove on Chanteclaire Circle, Estes ran by. Neff said he jumped out his vehicle, ran between some houses and pursued Estes to Hoffman Bayou.

Estes fell into the bayou from a rock embankment. Neff said Estes pulled him into the water.

“He tried to push me under the water,” Neff said. “He tried to drown me.”

Neff had no way to tell anyone where he was because his radio was disabled after being dunked in the water.

The Pensacola Police Department and Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office dispatched officers to help look for Neff.

Neff said he hit Estes in the head a few times with his flashlight as the two struggled in the water. He said Estes let him go after he hit him and started to swim across the bayou toward Laura Lane.

As Neff was coming out of the water, Wilson arrived. Neff told Wilson to head toward Laura Lane.

At first, Estes couldn’t be found after he swam away.

“He kind of hunkered down in some saw grass,” Neff said. “He just tried to wait us out.”

When Pensacola Police Officer Shawn Thompson made it to the area, he let his dog, Bandit, off his leash to search for Estes.

The dog found Estes hiding in the saw grass. Estes grabbed Bandit.

“Then he tried to drown the dog,” Neff said. “He was pulling the dog out into the bayou, holding him under the water.”

Thompson and Wilson jumped in to save Bandit. Estes started to swim away after taking some hits to the head with a flashlight, Neff said.

It wasn’t long before Estes was spotted under a pier. Neff and Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Judd White went into water and pulled Estes onto the pier.

None of the officers involved in the incident suffered serious injuries.

Estes was taken to Gulf Breeze Hospital, where he was treated for his injuries, and transported to jail.

Bandit was taken to a veterinarian.

“I think he’s doing fine now,” Pensacola Police Chief Chip Simmons said.

This story illustrates why police and fire crews and teachers and emergency room personnel are, to me, everyday heroes. Every day, they never know what might be out there to bite them.

September 28, 2010 Posted by | Adventure, Bureaucracy, Community, Crime, Humor, Law and Order, Living Conditions, Pensacola, Social Issues, Work Related Issues | Leave a comment

7 Million Pounds

Many thanks to my Kuwaiti friend for sending this; if this is true, it is hilarious, and a wonderful story of the ingenuity of the human spirit:

Outside England ‘s Bristol Zoo there is a parking lot for 150 cars and 8 buses. For 25 years, its parking fees were managed by a very pleasant attendant. The fees were for cars (£1.40), for buses (about £7.00)..

Then, one day, after 25 solid years of never missing a day of work, he just didn’t show up; so the zoo management called the city council and asked it to send them another parking agent.

The council did some research and replied that the parking lot was the zoo’s own responsibility. The zoo advised the council that the attendant was a city employee. The city council responded that the lot attendant had never been on the city payroll.

Meanwhile, sitting in his villa somewhere on the coast of Spain or France or Italy is a man who’d apparently had a ticket machine installed completely on his own and then had simply begun to show up every day, commencing to collect and keep the parking fees, estimated at about £560 per day — for 25 years.

Assuming 7 days a week, this amounts to just over £7 million pounds……. and no one even knows his name.

September 19, 2010 Posted by | Adventure, Entrepreneur, Financial Issues, Humor | 4 Comments

Idaho License

I don’t know why, these licenses just crack me up:

September 3, 2010 Posted by | ExPat Life, Humor, Marketing | 4 Comments

Seattle Library Flash Mob

“I knew you’d like a Seattle one, if you haven’t seen it already,” my friend wrote to me. I totally do. Seattle ROCKS! What a great study break, and what a cool library to allow the Seattle Theatre Group to stage it there. 🙂

July 15, 2010 Posted by | Adventure, Customer Service, Entertainment, Humor | 4 Comments

All Those Sinners

As I do my readings this morning, I come once again to Psalm 26:

Psalm 26

Of David.
1 Vindicate me, O Lord,
for I have walked in my integrity,
and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.
2 Prove me, O Lord, and try me;
test my heart and mind.
3 For your steadfast love is before my eyes,
and I walk in faithfulness to you.*

4 I do not sit with the worthless,
nor do I consort with hypocrites;
5 I hate the company of evildoers,
and will not sit with the wicked.

(You can read the rest of it by clicking here)


(Hironymous Bosch: Last Judgememt)

It always makes me smile.

We had a priest who we loved; he would tell us about going to church with his mother, and after the service Mama would say “I hope all those sinners were listening!”

Two points. The first is that who do you hang around with if not with sinners and hypocrites? And if you can find even one, will he or she want to hang around with me? I am both a hypocrite and a sinner; I try not to be, but I slip. Often.

Second, for my western readers, did you know that the Psalms of David are also part of Islamic scripture? That Jesus (Isa) is revered as a prophet and a holy man, along with John the Baptist (YahYa) and that there is an entire chapter in the Qu’ran called Mariam, which talks about the birth of Jesus? We all have a lot more in common, more in common than we have differences.

July 13, 2010 Posted by | Humor, Spiritual, Values | 3 Comments

News and Roosters

“How’d you sleep?” I cheerily greeted my sister, Sparkle, newly arrived from Paris to our small farming village in Germany.

“That #*%@ing ROOSTER!” she exclaimed. “He started crowing around 3:00 a.m. and never stopped! You must have heard him! He was right under our window!”

No. No, there was no rooster under our windows. The nearest rooster was up in the next farm, maybe 100 yards away. But I kind of remembered when we first moved in, I think I remember we heard him. We no longer heard him. You just get used to it, I guess.

What brings this to mind is that KUOW in Seattle has a program today on the Seattle City Council vote – they are about to vote to increase the number of chickens allowed by ‘urban farmers’ but to prohibit the roosters.

You can hear the discussion for yourself by going to KUOW. There are some hilarious comments, one by a man who said “Sure, ban roosters, right after you ban boom boxes, and teenagers, and heavy trucks, and garbage pickups. There are a lot worse sounds in the city than roosters!” (I may have paraphrased that quote, I was laughing too hard to write it all down.)

AdventureMan and I love National Public Radio. We support our local NPR station, WUWF in Pensacola, which I listen to while I am driving, but when I am working on a project, I still stream KUOW, which I started doing while I was living in the Gulf. I love the huge variety of opinions and subjects, and I appreciate that there is more news in the world than what they show on TV, after all, on TV they can only show what they have film footage of. There are books to be discussed, and movies, and music, and social situations in Khandahar and Botswana and Sri Lanka and boy soldiers in Liberia . . . things I haven’t a clue about unless I listen to my national public radio station. I read the paper daily. I watch the news once a day – but it doesn’t meet the depth of coverage of NPR.

I think chickens are pretty cool. They are also pretty stupid, but I am all for a chicken or two, fresh eggs, etc. When I needed fresh eggs in Germany, I just walked up the hill and bought them from the chicken lady. When I asked my landlady about recycling, she just laughed, and we walked our food leftovers, peelings, coffee grounds, etc up the hill and threw them over the fence for the chickens. I don’t even mind roosters. Sorry, Sparkle!

July 7, 2010 Posted by | Adventure, Community, Cross Cultural, Environment, ExPat Life, Food, Germany, Health Issues, Humor, Law and Order, Living Conditions, Local Lore, News, Seattle | 2 Comments

Home Improvement: Spackle and Paint

When you paint those walls (or have them painted) save a small container of your paint in an airtight container. When you are putting things on the walls – yeh, you can measure all you want, but sometimes that wire on the back of the mirror or heavy painting is just a little longer than it should be. It happens to everyone, even the pros.

When I was an Army wife, our houses had to pass inspection before we moved on. I was GOOD. I learned how to mix a little spackle and paint, and use a toothpick to seal the holes.

Once the hold is sealed, use a paper towel or kleenex or toothbrush (in a pinch your clean finger) to make the surface a little rougher, otherwise the spackled area stands out because it is smoother than the surrounding area. Using a toothpick works best for filling in small holes, if you have a larger area, use a popsicle stick or small spatula. Having a little paint of the original wall color mixed in to the spackle makes the fill invisible. 🙂

(Whenever I use spackle, I think of my sister Sparkle, who calls oatmeal ‘spackle’, LOL!)

July 7, 2010 Posted by | ExPat Life, Experiment, Home Improvements, Humor, Living Conditions, Random Musings, Renovations | 4 Comments

True Blood Season Three

First, if you have never watched True Blood, go to the library and check out Season 1 and Season 2, or buy them, or download them – whatever it takes, watch every episode so you will get where this show is coming from (grammatical: from where this show is coming).

We don’t watch this show to learn about Louisiana. We watch this show because the writers are truly gifted, and sometimes in the midst of yet another totally over-the-top situation, there is a line tossed off that is hysterically funny.

As the vampires discussed ethics last night, the Queen of the Vampires said “isn’t moral anarchy kind of the point?”

LLOOOLLL! When we first met the vampires in Season 1, they were mostly a nasty bunch, no morals, living in viperous “nests” and preying on humans. Little by little we have begun to know a few as ‘people’ and discovered they are not all bad. Vampire Queen reminds us that long-lived vampires live by a different code, and that the problems arise when mingling with humankind.

Don’t expect any of this to make sense. Just grab that speeding train, get aboard and hang on for a wild ride. 🙂

As they warn – nudity, sexual content, adult language – none of this is for children. This is definitely grown-ups only.

Warning: As raucous and raunchy as True Blood gets, it has a thick underlying morality. It may not be my morality or yours, but it is exploring some interesting and pertinent issues.

June 15, 2010 Posted by | Adventure, Cultural, Entertainment, Humor, Local Lore, Mating Behavior | 9 Comments

Truth in Packaging?

I am always skeptical of the products I call “hope in a bottle” (to my great amusement, there is actually a great product line which is now called Hope In A Bottle) but people will buy anything in hopes that it will keep their skin looking young and fresh.

When you live in heat, and when you do water aerobics, you need more. I was looking for something light I could put on often, something for day, and something for night. This is above and beyond the magic elixirs I put on my face that show “amazing, visible results in 7 Days!!!!” although seven days later I wonder what my face might have looked like if I hadn’t been using Product X . . .

So I bought some hope in a bottle to use days and nights, and yes, partly I will admit I bought the beautiful packaging. It is beautiful, isn’t it?

And it wasn’t that hard to open, which is a bonus. But wait! What is this inside? I paid for a lot of AIR!

The next package was the same – beautiful packaging; a lot of air . . .

Maybe, in its own way, it is more true than fiction. After all, when we are buying vanity, when we invest in the hope of beautiful skin, a lot of it is illusion and air, isn’t it?

June 15, 2010 Posted by | Aging, Beauty, Cross Cultural, Customer Service, Experiment, Financial Issues, Humor, Marketing, Shopping | 5 Comments

OOops! Ops!

The silence tipped him off.

He had just finished referring to his study as “The Command Center.”

The silence continued, then I broke it, quietly asking “and just whom would you be commanding?”

“Ummm. . . err . . . Ops Center! Operations Center!” he corrected himself.

We both laughed.

We’ve been married 37 years. 🙂

June 6, 2010 Posted by | Adventure, Aging, Biography, Civility, Communication, Cultural, Family Issues, Humor, Marriage, Relationships | 9 Comments