The Slice: He was one cool cat over the weekend

Last Friday, a neighbor who was heading out of town and leaving a teenager home alone for the weekend asked my wife and I to loosely monitor the situation.

Now our neighbor trusts the kid and had no reason to anticipate misbehavior. But, hey, you never know.

So, of course, we said that we would keep an eye out, knowing that this wouldn’t require much vigilance. (We trust the kid, too.)

As it happens, our low-key surveillance didn’t yield much information. We never even saw the youth.

We did encounter this neighbor’s cat a couple of times …

Last Friday, a neighbor who was heading out of town and leaving a teenager home alone for the weekend asked my wife and I to loosely monitor the situation.

Now our neighbor trusts the kid and had no reason to anticipate misbehavior. But, hey, you never know.

So, of course, we said that we would keep an eye out, knowing that this wouldn’t require much vigilance. (We trust the kid, too.)

As it happens, our low-key surveillance didn’t yield much information. We never even saw the youth.

We did encounter this neighbor’s cat a couple of times. And on each occasion, we asked the feline if she had anything to report about what was going on over at her house.

“Anyone being bad?” we asked.

The cat, perhaps mindful of who fills up the food bowl next door, refused to testify.

In any event, the weekend passed quietly. But that leads us to …

Today’s Slice question: If you had been in our shoes, at what point would you have felt the need to intervene – either by calling the mother on her cellphone or by going over to the neighbor’s and saying “Hey, what’s going on here?”

A) First appearance of a beer keg. B) Emergency vehicles with flashing lights parked in front of the house. C) It appears that you are seeing Spokane’s version of the fundraising “party” in the 1983 Tom Cruise movie “Risky Business.”

D) The music volume is rattling glassware in your cupboards. E) “Was that a gunshot?” F) Topless teens dancing on the lawn.

G) You hear some microphone-holding youth doing a sound check say “The New York Thruway is closed, man!” H) It sounds like the club scene from the 1998 Warren Beatty movie “Bulworth.” I) A helicopter hovering above your block shines a spotlight down on the neighbor’s house and someone on a loudspeaker orders “Mario” to come out with his hands up.

J) Cars parked on the front lawn. (Applicable only to Spokane area neighborhoods where that is not standard.) K) Naked people on the neighbor’s roof. L) A bleary eyed youth rings your doorbell and asks if he has the right address for the Love In/Ultimate Fighting festival. M) Your pets are stoned as a result of the billowing clouds of pot smoke coming in through your open windows.

Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Rank this area’s fests.