I arrived home yesterday afternoon to find that I couldn’t really arrive home — the police had set up a perimeter that happened to include my house.

From a mile or so away I could see a police helicopter circling. That’s not at all unusual in LA so I really didn’t even notice. What I did notice was when I got to two blocks away the police had blocked off the major street right at the smaller one leading to my house. I used a sneaky shortcut down an even smaller street to get around them and got to the intersection my house is at — but could go no further.

There are three streets that intersect at my house in a “K” configuration with my and my neighbor’s houses right in the crook of the K; the police had cut off entry (and exit) to the top right leg by blocking off the vertical leg right at the intersection. They were apparently searching for an armed robbery suspect and he was somewhere in the neighborhood. The end result was that I could get to within 25 yards of my house — in fact I ended up sitting on the curb right across the street — but I couldn’t actually get to it. Turns out Beth and Zoe were in a similar predicament, cut off from home on the other side of the roadblock.

About 15 minutes later they tightened their cordon up a bit, which allowed Beth and I to get home. Home sweet home — or was it? Now we had to deal with a helicopter circling overhead, police cars roaring back and forth, looky-loos — both on foot and in cars — streaming by out front, the dogs going bananas over all of it, Zoe was getting scared… So we did the only sensible thing: we went out to dinner.

Things were just winding down when we got home. The police had caught their guy half a block away and were slowly pulling out. The helicopter kept circling for a little while, police cars kept roaring by for a little while, looky-loos kept wandering around for a little while … but after another little while everything was back to normal.

Well, almost everything. We were left with a souvenir: a 5-inch strip of police tape was left tied to a tree out front, a remnant of the roadblock that had kept me out in the first place. I’m thinking we should frame it.

Or … maybe not.