5/18/05b

1:00 p.m. Well, so much for the "kid late for school" theory. Nothing has moved at that house for hours.

On the plus side, I was able to pay my bills and surf the web looking through death indexes for some guy whose family is trying to track him down. We call it a "skip trace" in the PI business. A lot of people hire us to find friends, family, old sweethearts... Gotta be careful, though. We don't want to do a skip trace on some woman whose stalker boyfriend is after her. Gotta ask a lot of questions and turn down clients if there is even a hint of doubt about their intentions.

1:50 p.m. I pick up the half gallon of milk that I bought yesterday and accidentally left in the car overnight. Hmmm. I twist off the lid and sniff. Hate to let it go to waste. I take a drink. Eh. Not so bad. Just a little chunky is all. Won't even notice with a candy bar.

4:30 p.m. So, it's taken me two and a half hours to drive home in Chicago traffic. Which hasn't been so bad with the laptop. Some might say it's dangerous to write blog entries while driving, but I say not necessarily. The trick is for the cars around me to be cognizent of my preoccupation. I find that if I swerve into their lane a few times they seem to perk up and pay more attention so I don't have to.

Tomorrow I am going to try a new pretext. I got the idea from one of the investigators at my training. He said he steals bibles from hotel rooms and uses them to get info from Subjects. He pretends to be giving bibles away on behalf of the Gideons. I'll let you know how it goes.