On the morning of the day after Christmas, at some time between 4:45 and 5 a.m., J’s dad left for work. He saw a white Chevy truck with a male driver and a passenger of unknown gender slowly driving up and down the street in the South of Conant neighborhood. J’s dad followed the truck for about 30 minutes as it went north on Clark Avenue and into the neighborhood between Wardlow Road and Conant Street. But, finally, he had to go to work. The end.

That’s just one of the countless tales of life in your neighborhood that you’ll find on the social media NextDoor site. We imagine there are neighborhoods with lots of intrigue and crime; ours is not one of those, as you might’ve guessed from the Mysterious Case of the White Chevy Truck.

Here’s a posting titled, “Kids Throwing Rocks in the Street.”

“It is worrisome,” writes a worried Ms. H. from Carson Park, “that a dad on my street is KNOWINGLY having two small children ‘playing/throwing rocks’ in the middle of the street with a red cone to warn drivers. I watched them for 7-8 minutes and when I called to them to get out of the street, the dad tells me it is OK, he is watching them.”

And one that will make your hair stand on edge, from K.S.: “This morning at 5:45, someone knocked at my front door. Didn’t answer it, so don’t know gender, race, etc. All I know is after the second knock, then my dog started barking, they left.”

If you haven’t been on NextDoor, you have been missing out on what’s going on in your part of town, which is basically what’s going on in your neighbors’ heads. It’s the most entertaining stuff in cyberspace now. It’s not all paranoia and dizzying anticlimax, though. It’s a discussion of the most important issues of your immediate area. In our case, there are two massive issues right now:

1. The Land Use Element, which most NextDoorers are adamantly against to the point where there’s a sprawling anti-us thread in which we are fairly eviscerated for having outlived our usefulness on the planet (our published opinion is at loggerheads with the NextDoor posters).

2. Green bollards along Studebaker Road that are meant to protect bicyclists but have done nothing but raise the ire of 5th District residents who have fired up a petition to have them removed. We’re not sure what they hate most, the bollards or the color of them The reasons petitioners give for their demand that the bollards be removed includes the charges that they’re “visually unappealing” which is a subjective call (green is our favorite color; we refer to them as “soothing bollards”) and “property values.” Doesn’t say whether bollards help or hurt the values, but homes saddled with the dismal view of the things have gone up, according to Redfin, by $40,000-$60,000 since they were installed in November 2016.

So, most of us in the neighborhood make a fairly good living. We tend to own our houses, have OK cars, enjoy good schools, have plenty to eat. And, perhaps most enjoyably of all, we’ll never run out of things to complain about.